Home Leave

Well, it wasn't officially home leave, but what's the difference between hobbling together a string of cross-country budget flights and some annual leave days?

Actually, a boat load.

But I'll tell you why I'm sitting in the Milwaukee airport at 11 PM when we started our first leg at 8 AM later.

For now: the joys of going home!  Max and I spent a week at home in Utah with our families and had a wonderful time.  We are, however, exhausted and decided that next time we will take a little mini vacation during our vacation to regroup :)

I have to say, one of the many highlights was watching my rock star little brother kick serious butt in his high school soccer game.  There are few things in life that give me more pride than my little brothers and my wee heart ranneth over.  I don't know how many games of his I'll get to see as he is going to play college soccer in Hawaii (even farther away from Morocco than Utah...lame) and this was a great game to be the last for a while.

Oh, that's right, the airport.  In my frugalness I patched together some vouchers and free plane tickets we had accumulated and the journey out to Utah went well (if very long) but the ride home has been a disaster. Our first flight was delayed by an hour because the co-pilot was a no show and after two layovers, Denver and Milwaukee respectively, a giant storm grounded all of the planes coming in or out of DC.  Curse you weather.  But we just heard over the loudspeaker that the flight has left the DC gate and should arrive in about two hours.  A 3.5 hour delay might seem awful after 12 hours of flying....but I've decided to take this opportunity to get our bodies on Morocco time.  I think we're going to set our watches forward in New York the next three days and see if we can't stave off some jet lag.

And I overheard a stirring defense of '-------redacted--------redacted-----who is actually a good dictator' on the airplane.  Max was sure I was going to flip around and tear into the yokel.

But I did not.

I am a diplomat.

(more on that later!)