A vacation week is a time you live your life in reverse.  Nobody looks foreward to Friday on a week you are off!!!
Consequently, nothing moves faster than a week you are off...or slower than the first week you are back. 
I love watching the Olympics on TV, every night I add another 15 minutes of viewing time.  I am afraid that at the end of the two weeks, I will not be getting any sleep at all.
A lot of the sports they play in the games are things that we used to do in the back yard as kids.  Badmitten, Archery, Air Gun Marksmanship) read, BB guns...so would it be reasonable to assume that in 30 years, olympic sports will include video games?
I really love the time I get off work, because it allows me to cook things that are really healthy and delicious.  This is not the self that I would have imagined becoming when I was 13.
This year, I am particularly proud of the fact that, with the help of some excellent insturction from Alyssa, Joe and Rocky. I was able to learn how to skate well enough to be playing hockey.  This IS the self I would have imagined myself becoming at an earlier age.

   Somebody asked me at the Forte on the 50, at YSU on Saturday night, what really matters and I didn't have an answer.  Probably because the setting took me off guard, I smiled and said that I couldn't come up with one answer.  The excellent fireworks display had me focused on something other than philosophy, but I think I do know what it is.  What's most important. For me, anyways,  It's people.  Other people, my friends, my casual accquaintances that will become our friends and people that I just find somehow interresting. 
    We spend a lot of time around here hating our towns, and I am just not sure why that is.  Somehow, they just seem to lack.  They don't seem clean enough, not insipring enough and full of corruption.  What they are full of, and that is so easy to miss, is interesting people.  I notice that so much at the University, probably because it was such an inspitation to me.  Most people around here want to leave.  That's why they're at University in the first place.  I remember that phase of my life so well.  It was the dream that drove me and pushed me out the door.  I love talking to people with dreams.  It is the process of learning who you are.  and by the way, it's not an easy thing to find out.  I think of it as a kind grinding, with a big belt sander.  Dreams drive you, then they seperate you from superficial things.
   The other thing I think is important is family.  I left because of dreams, but I came back because of family.  Sometimes happily, but occassionally reluctantly.  Family is a big magnet, and it has a positive and a negative polarity.  But I think that anyone that find themselves anywhere because of obligations understands big questions.  The ones that deal with sacrafice and circumstances.  It is a long view of life and anything that makes us less short sighted makes up better people.
   The luckiest of us pick up a shiny stone of something true along our journey.  The most fortunate shine it and polish it and it guides them along the path.  The truly blessed among us realize that  we are  just part of something larger and more wonderful than we can individually comprehend.  When we share our truth, when we share ourselves it both answers the big questions and makes them not matter at the same time