My family (or as you could guess, my wife) seems to give me the best gifts. While not much can top a little SCUBA diving with the whale sharks at the Georgia Aquarium (my birthday present this year, but I actually did the dive this past weekend), for Father’s Day this year my family (read: wife) gave me the super-cool T-Mobile Wing that I have been able to track my life with while on the road, which is a lot of the time. Just ask my boss what “a lot of time” is defined as.

The problem with the Wing, and every other cool portable computing/phone/PDA combination is that the keypads aren’t exactly designed for doing a lot of typing on, so my reply e-mails pretty much consist of “Okay, will get back to you when I get to a real computer”. The Wing has definitely allowed me to stay on top of things and if anything, I at least know where I am supposed to be on a minute-by-minute basis, but it’s no substitute for a decent-sized monitor and a keyboard, which I would have if I hadn’t blown up ANOTHER Panasonic Toughbook (yes, that is number four).

So when people say to me, “Hey, where the hell have you been?” it’s more along the lines of, “Why aren’t you answering me with something other than two sentences?” Well, between my dad’s retirement (for which I wrote a blog that was lost forever on the dead Toughbook) and my brother’s wedding, and my wife opening her new store, and other business and personal trips, I have been doing the best I can do, which isn’t much of an excuse. Typing a blog on a dead Toughbook doesn’t work well, but as you can imagine, posting a blog on the Wing (literally) isn’t much easier.

In fact, I sat in the waiting area of the Philly airport at one point (has anyone other than me noticed that the Philly airport has been continuously under construction since the ‘70’s?) and tried to type out a blog, but the replacement rate for words quickly outran my patience. So here I am, finally back to work (real work, like at my full-time job) with a few minutes to type, and letting you all know I am still alive. I have a lot of exciting things in my short-term future like a return to the NFA to complete my final session of the Executive Fire Officer program, a SUSAR Board meeting, seeing Springsteen in Jacksonville one night and Charleston the next, and all three kids starting school (but each in a different school) but otherwise, it’s pretty uneventful. At some point I hope to write something more substantial than this but it’s like writing thank you letters - a thank you e-mail is not acceptable practice, but the e-mail is probably better than nothing at all (which makes one more list of things I need to get done).

I hope to reconnect with you all again here soon, especially as I start my efforts toward writing a book, because I’d like to get your feedback on some issues, but otherwise, there’s not much going on. Hope you all have been having a great summer as well.