I’m Back

What do you mean you didn’t notice that I was gone? You mean to tell me that you don’t hang on my every word? You don’t sit there helplessly staring at the computer screen waiting for a Half-Fast post, completely unable to do anything productive until you’ve heard what I have to say? I am deeply offended.

As you may have guessed from the picture above, my family and I spent most of last week in South Dakota admiring mountain carvings and buying up as much of South Dakota’s supply of polished rocks as my children’s little hands could carry. I tried to talk them out of the polished rocks but they had their own money to spend and when you’re six years old bagfuls of polished rocks sound like a wise investment. I would have told you all that I was going to be gone but I really thought that I was going to find time to post while I was away. Honestly I did have the time to post but just didn’t feel like it, plus I’ve got a really good story to tell you that deserves my full attention and a half-fast post from a hotel room just wouldn’t do it justice. I’ll get to the story tomorrow but for now just know that we had a good trip. We visited Mount Rushmore (very impressive) and Crazy Horse (less impressive, at least for now) and did you know that they carve those mountains with dynamite? I cannot begin to tell you how disappointed I was to learn that those are not natural rock formations! We also spent a lot of time at our hotel pool, which the kids loved because it had a waterslide. I totally owned that waterslide. I was like the German luge team at the Olympics. I would get to the top and grab the handle bar above the slide entrance, then I would rock back and forth counting out “eins, zwei, drei” and then I would fling my body down the tube without a thought for my own personal safety. That’s how you have to do it if you want to be the best in the world. The key to riding a waterslide is reducing your friction on the slide so you have to arch up and ride down on your shoulder blades and heels. None of the other kids were achieving the dangerous kind of speeds that I was or creating even one tenth of splash at the bottom that I was. They just could not match my derring-do. Candis and I were both so happy that the hotel had a water slide, you know, for the kids.