I had every intention of writing a number of blogs over the Christmas break but I never really had much time to sit down and get my thoughts out.  These next few blogs may be even more random than normal because the trip home for the holidays gave me a lot to ponder and I will need to process my thoughts in blog form.   

Going home is always an exceptionally weird experience.  Last year for Christmas we went home and it was not that weird because we had only been gone for a couple months but this year when we went home we had been gone for a full year.  I spent a couple hours on one of the days that I was home and just drove around the old town and looked at things.  It was a fairly surreal/uncomfortable/awkward/unsettling experience.

It took me a while to figure out why driving around in a town that I had spent most of my life in was weird. At first I thought it was because things had changed, but then I realized that just the opposite that was true, things hadn’t changed and that is equally unsettling.  Being optimistic I tend to think that everything is in a constant state of getting better and because of this I tend to operate under the general assumption that the town that I left a year ago will somehow be better or at least improved.  So I go home with this subconscious expectation and for the most part everything is the same.  It is kind of weird. I thought that I found change weird, but in reality the weirdest thing is not having your expectations met.