On His Way

What's worse than waking up to a grumpy cat?  

                                                           Waking up to a grumpy cat with no husband.

This is the riddle I came up with first thing this morning.  I didn't stump Rick for a second.  

We have been planning for this day for several months.  I tried to capture some of his departing moments with a few photos.

We are laughing because taking photos of ourselves, by ourselves is difficult.  This is the second take,  the first one was, well, worse.

Rick is officially on the road. 

  About two years ago he quit his day job as a mechanical engineer to become a full time storyteller.  He had some success locally touring libraries in the summers, but winters were slow.  This last winter was slower-- which gave him some good time to connect with a couple of agents.  He signed a contract with an agent to do a tour of grade schools all over the US for eight months, the entire school year.  He calls it the Wall-Mart of children's entertainment: high volume, low cost.  So he is not making the big bucks, but it's not bad.   It's also a great opportunity to get going on his 10,000 hours (Malcolm Gladwell) and get himself out there. 

  So this is excellent.  Super excellent for Rick's career.  What will be interesting is how this affects our relationship.  That makes it sound like our marriage is on the chopping block.  It's not.  Rick and I got married just over a year ago.  I always knew that he was working on developing his career. As timing would have it, about 5 months ago I got my self a job, 40 hours in an office downtown.  This means unless I quit, I am not going with him.  Eventually my job could offer some flexibility and I could work remotely (more on that later).  For now, its time to ramp up the self care, as I like to say, and hope that our "face time" will finally work on our iphones.  

  He will be passing through Portland in about 3 weeks anyway.