Just a few more pictures from the eastern adventure. Here's the world's cutest mad scientist, Dr Frankenpampers.
No woman can resist the manly splendor of a well-fitting cumberbund.
I'll never reaize my childhood dream of becoming a kangaroo and bounding through the outback with only a pouch-full of possessions, but these toddler containment devices are a close approximation. Bounding in sand is a bit trickier than I'd hoped, though.
Two strange things from Kentucky.

This past month of travel has been a strange enchilada; the melted cheese of good company mingled with the chili peppers of stress. (always striving for the world's dumbest analogy, that's my mission) Tiff continues to amaze me with her ability to keep on truckin' as far as cancer goes and Stella has earned the travel toddler of the year award for her unending enthusiasm for new places. (Every time we pull the van up to somebody's house, she shouts "home!".) I think that over the past 4 weeks we've seen everyone we know east of the Mississippi and I'm ready to ship all of them to Oregon. I'm still not remotely ready to move back to Kentucky, the land of the chunky, cigarette-smoking, street-sloths (I like to think of them as a cross between monkeys and tugboats) and the backward politicians they vote for. For the record, if I didn't love Kentucky so much, I wouldn't be so fed up with way it's been treated, but I'm awfully tired of seeing the place ruined by a combination of apathy and greed.

Atlanta: Thank god we don't have health insurance. Being uninsured, we were able to use the free market to select the surgeon we wanted instead of being locked into a "provider network". This lead us to Dr. Bill Barber in Atlanta, and I can't say enough good things about him. His combination of compassion and skill makes him the rarest sort of doctor these days and his abilities likely saved Tiffany from needing radiation treatments. I'm a lot happier to pay his bill than I am to pay an insurance payment. (Blue Cross canceled Tiffany's insurance application just for having had a mammogram, even before the results came back). When we called from Oregon to schedule the surgery, the southern drawl and easy friendliness of the office staff warmed our hearts and our entire experience with the Piedmont hospital was that of compassion and concern. We were also thankful for Tiffany's parents' lake-house as a place to recover. It felt like a much better space to get well than in a hospital I am very glad to have married into such a caring family. We had planned this month-long trip before we ever suspected that Tiff had cancer, but it sure turned out to be a great time for it.

Florida: Phase two of recovery was some active re-creation at the beach with the family Sewalls. Florida is always a strange mix of tourons and natural beauty but when it wants to be pretty, it sure can. The emerald waters and sun-bleached sands soothed my soul. Stella enjoyed the surf and did her best impression of a sandpiper, charging in and out of the surf and shrieking at the waves. Good mojo to the Sewalls family: Travis and Andra for feeding us, Harper for reminding me how much fun sandcastles are, and Conley for the best advice I've ever gotten on dancing- "Just spell you name with your feet!". Cheers to Tiff for having a mastectomy and heading to the beach to hang out in a bikini for a week. Someday I hope to deserve the wife and friends I've got, but I'm not wearing a Speedo, even if I do get cancer.

Alabama: I know two awesome people from Alabama. That's about all I can say for the place.
Kentucky: We spent most of our time at Gainesway farm, a magical place inhabited by the King of Trees. Gainesway is a 1600 acre horse farm that has become an arboretum under the guiding hand of my good friend Ryan. There's no place like it. Ryan and I were both married there (not to each other, thankfully. Neither of us looks good in a dress) and when I think of Kentucky I think of the rolling pastures and verdant splendor of Gainesway farm. The week was largely spent planning an Alice in Wonderland themed party with our friends from Lexington. Seeing all the people we've missed in Lexington was a cold beer for my soul's afternoon of lawn-mowing.

Alabama is the first place I've been that makes Kentucky look progressive. The culture here seems to be fully comprised of faith, fishing, and barbeque. Downtown Montgomery is a bombed-out and boarded-up place awash in grammatically flawed historical markers. (Who knew that the father of American gynecology was from Alabama?) The former shopfronts are victorian brickwork, grated over, and broken-windowed, with several failed layers of revitalization. Just down the street from Martin Luther King's church, at the site of a business formerly known as "Right On! inc.", a mural of Moses' decent from Mount Sinai has been rendered with several distinctly southern touches; Moses looks like he could bench-press the ark of the covenant and there's a star-spangled eagle, similarly buff, muscularly flapping above the wayward tribes of Israel while they worship the golden calf, Baal. (I assume that's who the banana-colored Holstein is supposed to be, anyway.) Intermingled with the mural is another hand-painted depiction of the "mote-in-the-eye" parable. In the Alabama version, a young black man appears to be putting in his contacts while several white folks stumble around with what appear to be 2x4s sticking out of their faces. Further ornamenting the collage is a hand-painted pizza advertisement with a hydrocephalic black child salivating at a piece of pizza. Based on the amount of spittle involved, it is quite possible that the child is rabid and that the pizza, Moses, and the banana-cow are all encephalitic hallucinations.
I want to state, for the record, that we had no intention of coming to Alabama, and if not for frozen biscuits, we would have never been here. When we were leaving the beach-house in Florida we were trying to clean out the fridge and realized that we had a twenty-count bag of frozen biscuits to deal with. To my recollection, I have never intentionally used a kitchen to produce a biscuit, but seeing no viable alternative, we made the whole bag and by the time we packed the van we were down to a ten-count bag of warm baked biscuits and two 5-count biscuit bellies. We accidentally drifted into Alabama while chasing some beachy sunsets. We ended up in Montgomery and upon our arrival we learned that this weekend is the opening expo game for the local baseball team, the Montgomery Biscuits. Clearly we had buttered the biscuit of fate with our accidental breakfast. Oddly enough, there was also a breast cancer awareness event planned for the weekend in Montgomery and, although we are already more aware of breast cancer than we'd like to be, seeing a 3 story baroque fountain spew pink-dyed water out it's horns and mer-critter's mouths was kind of inspiring. Trying to stay in the "pink" spirit of things, we had some chopped pork sandwiches before we hit the road and we are now off to explore the cultural riches of Birmingham.

my camera cord is lost in the sandy beach detritus of the van like a forgotten pharaoh and we're in alabama where the wi-fi is less than robust so this post is gonna be more like a post-card. as you can see from the picture, stella has had her first spring break mishap and spent a bit of time in toddler lock-down. something involving an open container of juice in the stroller. tiff is very proud that her daughter is following in her footsteps, no matter how erratic.
we've been at the beach in florida for a week and are headed back to kentucky for some more fun with friends and family.