The Goodrums

The past couple weeks have been fairly insane for me. In 18 days, I traveled over 8500 miles, to four cities across the U.S. and probably logged 200 hours for work.

I did a whirlwind trip to New Orleans to attend an oral argument in a federal appeals court. I spent less than 36 hours in New Orleans and worked for probably 24 of those 36 hours (we've been in a bit of crisis mode at work).

Three days later, I left home for a week in D.C. I got to stay with Michael's parents, which is such a blessing. It's so nice to be "at home" during a week of traveling - eating yummy home cooked meals, spending time with people you love, getting hugs :) and sleeping in a place where you feel completely safe and secure. It has been such a blessing to me to have them there in D.C. (although we do miss having them closer too).

Two days after returning from D.C., I packed my bags and headed to Houston for a week of meetings. I got to experience a real (non southern) plane de-icing for the first time upon leaving for this trip. It's somewhat bizarre that it took this long to experience this, but it's never actually been snowing when I left Denver via plane.

The morning I left for Houston it was snowing fairly significantly. After leaving the gate, we sat out on the tarmac for probably 30 minutes while they worked on de-icing the plane. First they sprayed it with a solution that turned the plane bright green. Then they put on a pink layer. I have no idea what the chemicals were but we had an interesting color plane by the time we left.

The week in Houston was bizarrely calmer and lower-keyed than usual. I did some very unusual things for work - including de-heading 50 pounds of jumbo shrimp (thankfully, with help from colleagues). We also played a hilarious fun round of Catch Phrase, complete with an unrecognizable rendition of Riverdance, sabo-bo-bo-bo (aka Light Saber) and many more great memories (for the good of the order, peach is a different color than salmon ...and plastic shrimp look darn good on top of a birthday cheesecake). I'm glad that in spite of the stress and demands of work, I have made some really great friends there.

All in all, I was quite ready to be home again after the whirlwind adventures of January. The year is off to a busy start. I can't believe it's February in essentially one more day!