Big news since I last wrote: after ten good years in Emporia, we sold our house and are moving to Omaha, to be closer to Jessie's family. Jessie has a new job, and I'll continue to do the same work from home. But probably the most interesting part of the story is that our house sold in just two hours! I want to emphasize that we are very grateful to the buyer and hold her in the highest respect, and if she's reading this, we hope she understands that we were just surprised by her enthusiasm for the property.

Back in April of 2014, while looking for a cause of my periodic fatigue (which turned out to be gluten intolerance), I got diagnosed with Chronic Lymphocytic Leukemia (CLL). It's a form of cancer usually found in elderly people (though I was 37), and being chronic it's usually something you die with, not of.

There are a variety of reasons why we've fallen mostly silent on this blog...

• The software got harder for us to use, and I didn't stay on top of updating it.
• Most of our friends are on Facebook, so we got in the habit of just posting stuff there.
• We got even busier -- Jessie with grad school, me with medical issues.

Fortunately there's light at the end of all three tunnels, so we hope to re-emerge soon!

In June of 2008 we attended a friend's wedding in Las Vegas. See an album of our photos from the trip.

Yesterday, due to a miscommunication, my parents came to visit a week before we expected them.  They were only passing through for a few hours, so it wasn't a big deal, but it reminded us of a time a few years ago that makes a much better story...

I got an email a few days ago informing me that I'm in the top 5% of users of a service called Pocket -- I've used their free service to read more words on more Web pages than 95% of their users.  This is a totally unpaid and unasked-for endorsement, but chances are you haven't even heard of this service, so let me introduce you to why I use it so much:

At my college reunion last weekend, one of my friends (Hi, Nathaniel!) lamented that Jessie and I don't blog here anymore.  I told him that's because we've been spending our time posting on other sites... Facebook certainly, and Jessie has a couple of Twitter accounts for work, but also our two businesses each have their own sites.  Here is what you can expect to see on our various sites...

Saturday, July 14

On Saturday morning we paid our respects to the farmers' market in Forsyth Park before hitting the Interstate to Atlanta.  Our first stop in Atlanta was the Contemporary Art Center, which was in a surprisingly rough-looking neighborhood -- we were pretty certain our GPS had led us astray!  It doesn't help that the museum building looks kind of like a warehouse that burned up in a fire, but we had to assume that was intentional.  The exhibit featured several artists who were aiming to stretch our comfort zones.  There was a mostly-nude lady dancing erotically with a dead salmon, for example.  And there was "Hennessee Youngman's" thought-provoking (satirical) video on "How to be a Successful Black Artist."

Monday, July 9

On the first day of the conference, we rode the ferry together over to the convention center and had an overpriced breakfast in the conference hotel; then I rode back to our hotel on the Savannah side of the river.  Jessie attended an all-day workshop on image-based narrative inquiry, while I gave my successor at Prairie Star District UUA an orientation to her new tools and responsibilities.  I also drove out to a grocery co-op on the far side of Forsyth Park to pick up some food for future breakfasts and moved the car to a cheaper lot for the week.

When Jessie returned to the hotel, we went for a swim and had dinner at Vinnie Van Go-Go's before attending the conference's opening reception.