General notices, indeed!

Heading back to Glens Falls today, after dropping the kids off in Lake George with their grandparents. It's been a groovy week all around, which I'll attempt to recap when I have a few spare hours to type everything up; in the meantime, the kidlings are hunkered down with a Sailor Moon DVD, which marks the first calm moment of the morning.

Unrelatedly, last night I had my first-ever Blogathon-related nightmare (unprepared, starting an hour late, no sponsors, no help), which is probably my brain's way of telling me I need to get it in gear. So, a reminder! Starting at 9 a.m. on July 31, I will be blogging for 24 hours straight to raise money for the MS Society, in honor of my mother Susan. My goal this year is $500; thanks to the awesome idiomagic, my pledge total stands at $50. Just as in 2008 (the last time I participated), I will be operating in an all-list format, which means I need as many list ideas as I can get.

If you wish to make a pledge to benefit multiple sclerosis research (or have a list idea or two), please comment either to this post or to the original announcement post here. Thank you in advance!

A winding path is a path nevertheless

I've arrived back in New York from my week in Worcester with the no-longer-so-wee ones, and while I still need to write my recap, I think I'm going to save it for Monday, when people might actually read it. Right now, though, I'm mindful of the fact that I'm weeks away from moving to the Boston area, a shadow fo a dream that I've carried for so long that it seems like it's always been here, as long as my sight and my breathing.

But looking through old entries tonight, I got a reminder that the dream only goes back so far: May 1, 2005.

This entry is the official write-up of the event. It was as fantastic a party as it sounds, to be sure (I couldn't stop grinning as I reread the comments), but if I want to trace the moment when I first put voice to the longing to move there, I have to go back to the post just before, and then to mgrasso's reply (one of many, many people I'd met for the first time that weekend), and then my reply in return to him. This came after a long drive home that under the influence of uncontained bliss; I don't think we'd even made it as far as Newton before asking, "All right, how do we go about moving here?"

But it's that entry that sums it up for me: "We don't live and think and feel and act like the rest of the world. What's wrong with the rest of the world?" It's been such an odd, sometimes complicated, sometimes joyful, sometimes painful path for all of us, and there is much I've regretted along the way, and much I regret even now as I settle my affairs and prepare to take the next giant step. But I can't ever deny that it's all been pointing East, toward that place that swiped a fragment of my heart over five years ago and never had the courtesy to let go.

To everyone who has been on this journey with me, in any way, shape or form, thank you.I wouldn't trade it if I could.