Circling the Globe

At the moment, Alissa is in Australia and Benjamin is in Israel and my mother and Michael and Anna and Gordon are in Hawaii and in two days Stephen heads off to Germany.  This is not the first time we have been spread all over the globe, but it is a remarkably wide and even sprinkling.

Alissa just sent a message while standing at a desk with an ancient computer, waiting for a car rental company to get its act together.  She and David are heading into the Kakadu National Forest for a week of touring.

Mom and Michael and Anna and Gordon have been in Hawaii for over a week, doing what we do in Hawaii: eating out, eating in, swimming, hiking, seeing aunts and uncles, eating out, eating in... A long time ago, my mother and I used to laugh a lot at the idea that we should make ourselves some T-shirts for visiting relatives: "Don't Feed Me...I'm Too Fat!"

I talked to Benjamin today. He is in the thick of his end of semester work: his first final exam is this week and he has projects underway.  He feels pressured about the grades since they matter a lot -- he needs to find a professor who will sponsor him, let him work in a lab, and his grades are the only ticket.  He will do what he can.

And in a few days, Stephen will head off to Berlin to be with his girlfriend.  If not for this relationship, he would be here for two more weeks since school doesn't start in Austria until July.  And then he would be able to focus on farming, finally, since his last paper is done for the semester.  But no, he may never be able to focus on farming.  Being a grad student and maintaining a long distance relationship leaves almost no space for paying attention to farm priorities.  It is not what I was imagining, but we are getting by with random bursts of Stephen work.

The miles Jon and I are accumulating each week, just bopping between the two farms, would probably get us to the Canadian border.  Not right now, but it's an entertaining idea.