I’ll break from the normal format and give you a little play-by-play of yesterday.

I got home at 4:00 a.m. this morning. What a day, it was incredible. Patience has been the theme of the last two days for me, and God’s ways have seemed a little much. It was certainly an “extreme day” (eh, Randy?).

Night skiing started at 4 p.m. and we left from our house at 11:30 when it was estimated that it maybe would only take 3 hours to get to the ski place. Plenty of time, of course. But I didn’t get out on the slopes until nearly 5, almost 5.5 hours after we left. This was due to bad roads, confusion concerning parking and waiting in regards to renting equipment.

So we had our 5 hours on the slopes until about 10. Some fun stuff, I caught some air (just a little), skiied fairly swiftly, fell sprawling a few times, had a good time.

At the point, the night was just like a newborn though, a premature one at that. Really, like baby that was born months early.

First of all, we lost Dave because of a gross miscommunication.

Here was the deal, normally you think the more the merrier. But I’ve come to the conclusion that unless you have major organization, go skiing in a small group. We had 16.

So Dave was searching for the two guys that rode up with him while they had been whisked away to the Annex parking lot with some of the others. Most of us rendezvoused at the Annex, but no Dave. Finally, maybe 45 minutes later he showed up, the lone passenger on a big ‘ol shuttle bus. So I think we finally left at a little after 11.

At this point, the night was like a newborn.

We strike off, a caravan of four cars, and promptly get separated into two sub-caravans of two cars each. Thankfully, I was in the forward sub-caravan and was following someone who knew the way home. But soon we discovered that the back sub-caravan had taken a wrong turn and was headed toward Idaho.

Problem was, Kevin was in my rig, but his keys (which he needed to get home) were in the Beth’s car, which was in the lost sub-caravan. Additionally, Randy--my brother--was also in the lost sub-caravan. So we couldn’t just go home and let them find their way by themselves. We were going to have to meet them where we initially met and launched this ill-fated tour.

So we decided to stop and eat because we were so far ahead of the lost sub-caravan.

We must have waited 20 minutes to be seated, and then another 20 or 25 before our orders were taken. Though located in a small town, this Denny’s was hopping at 1 a.m., and the restaurant was sorely understaffed. We were in the restaurant for close to two hours, and we didn’t linger at all.

In the meantime, the lost sub-caravan discovered that as we waited in the restaurant they had driven much closer to home that we were, and so, to avoid having to sit and wait for us, they decided to stop and eat themselves.

Again, because of gross miscommunication, they lingered at their restaurant. So we arrived home at our meeting place and had to wait for 25 minutes for the lost sub-caravan to arrive.

All that equals many memories made.

Then today we were going to exchange our cell phones for some flip-phones for a nice price, but due to complications we have to wait until next week.

Enough of that.

I was looking back over some old e-mails that I had written and I was struck by something I wrote back in June of 2002.

“I don't think I've ever truly been torn about what to do for an extended period of time in my life.”

How things change. I can now say that I’ve truly been torn about what to do for an extended period of time in my life. The decision to not go (splitting infinitives is permissible, i.e. “to boldly go where no man has gone before”) to SMBI was probably the most excruciating of my life.