I have been out-of-pocket for the last two weeks or so…but for a really good reason. On Monday, January 10th, I drove from Omaha to Morgantown, West Virginia to pack up Tim. Didn’t we just move him there, you ask? Yes! In early August! But Tim got an offer he couldn’t turn down…a PAID spot in the strength and conditioning coaching staff at Stanford University. So we packed up his stuff and loaded my car and his and then started back to Omaha. I had a zoom meeting with my sarcoma specialist at the Mayo Clinic early in the morning we left. I did the meeting from my hotel room and invited Tim to join me and meet my doctor. He showed Tim the CT scans from September and compared them to the scans at the end of Dec. None of my children have met my doctors since I was diagnosed, so I was happy to have him meet my Mayo Clinic doctor and get a rundown of my health. After that zoom meeting was done (in which he told me to just continue with what I was doing), I closed up my laptop and we hit the road towards Omaha. There was a big snowstorm hanging over our heads….Lily’s school had already been cancelled for the next day, so we pressed on and drove the whole way in one day. It was a long day, as we were caravanning versus traveling in the same car. We were home for two days and then left with Lily and Rich joining us and headed to California. We did make some stops along the way to and from California. However, I can say that I went through 13 states (most of them twice), was in the car about 80 hours, drove about 6000 miles, and spent time in 4 different time zones in the last 15 days. I have tons of photos, but for now I will enter separate blog posts along our family trip with the photos I took with my phone. I am still catching up with my life and have a few projects I am working on, so I don’t know when I will get through processing all my good camera photos. I will post some of those later. For now, here is a photo of Tim as we left West Virginia (I am still upset I am going to have to change his ringtone on my phone from “Country Roads” by John Denver to some California song) and then a photo of him on the Stanford University Campus. He has 3 full days under his belt and is getting a lot of good work experience already. It was hard to leave him in a state that he knew no one….but I have done that three times now in the last 18 months. Let’s hope he is here for awhile and enjoys his work and makes some good friends. It is wicked expensive to live there….gas was over $5 a gallon and Tim is renting a bedroom in a large house for $1000/month….and that is a 15 minute drive from work. Good thing he has mastered the “living like a poor student” act!
Messina Musings 