"No more for me, thanks," said Trigger. "I'm stuffed!"

I have enough adventure in my life now. Being a half-step slow in Contact Ballroom Dancing (at least that's life here in the Land of the Round Doorknobs feels to me on an everyday basis), I don't seek out or embrace the exotic or the out-of-the-ordinary. Home and dry at the end of another perfect day seems like achievement for me.

But it doesn't mean I don't know people who can, and do, live large. A score of years ago (I love that number, score-and thank you Abe for making its use memorable!) I was, in a fit of civic involvement (now treatable with injections of B12 and wood alcohol, I'm told), one of those Rose City residents on the Norwich Schools Building and Technology Committee appointed by the City Council in a process boycotted by the Board of Education to oversee the deployment of a technological infrastructure across the thirteen school houses in the Norwich Public School system (for eleven million dollars in bonding) and see to fruition the expansion at two of the elementary schools, Bishop and Huntington (another 11 million in bonds).

Those of us on the committee (with one exception, moms and dads of kids in the publuc schools) were, without realizing it, pawns in a shadow game and our treatment, all these years later still so angers me that there are folks from 'back then' that, when I see them now, I cross the street to avoid trying and failing to keep a civil tongue in my mouth (my guy says I have anger issues; he's very perceptive). However, perhaps because we were political punching bags, or we just all got along very well, many of us have stayed in touch and exchange notes and smiles, still, on a regular basis.

And one, Evert, is deceptive in that he appears to be a quiet, unassuming, capable bi-ped, successful businessman, husband and father, and he is all of those things. But there's a flinty gleam in his eye, a flash in his smile that gives you pause if only for a moment. Evert, as it happens, has a love of long-distances and later this week he'll be traveling to and through Alaska (wait for it) on his motorcycle, with four friends (and maybe some 'fly babes' He knows what they are, but I don't.)
Gotta tell ya, having spent thirteen months in Greenland, I have zero desire to visit Seward's Folly but admire his sense of 'what's beyond the next mountain' and really love the fact that I can experience some of it without ever leaving the Nutmeg State by checking out his blog. Dale and Roy said it first and best!
-bill kenny