Tuesday, June 23, 2009

A slice of Heaven on Earth OR: Just What the Doctor Ordered



I dreamed of this place while in Kuwait. It's my favorite coffeeshop, Riverside Coffee, located on the banks of the Pelican River in downtown PR. Saturday morning, this was the best place on earth to be. From 9-10 am, wonderful, melodic Scottish-Danish folk tunes were skillfully crooned by Sir Rod from Europe. He is a delightful, wise, fun man who made this year's IFF even more fun. From 10-11:30, across the street, the upbeat, jazz sounds of the Red River Dixieland Band could be heard wafting throughout downtown PR. It was a Dewey Berquist Grade A Day* and life couldn't have been better.

For the past week, we've enjoyed reaquainting ourselves with our "home" town, seeing people, catching up, finding out what we missed, and just finding out what being away meant. It's been a good week and even though the locals and vacationers are not pleased with all the rain, we think it's great.

Back in Kuwait,in about January, I had a conversation with DRBFF about what it would be like to return home. He gave me good advice and it seems much of it is coming true. "Just be happy to pick up where everyone's life is and don't try to fill in too many details". He was right.

Today I gave a presentation for the local Rotary, a great service club where I used to be a member before our departure. They listened attentively, asked good questions and seems to stay awake. David came along and filled in the stuff that I left out (he's so much smarter than me on certain items). It was fun, it was nice to have people interested but I think that we may have oversaturated them.

I remember have several "Aha" moments in Kuwait thinking "there's no way I will ever be able to explain this back home". It took me about 6 hours to try and put together a powerpoint a 25 minute presentation. And I'm sure I left out some of the good stuff.

The biggest joy without question has been talking with friends without having it be on skype or via email. We are lucky here to be have such wonderful people in our lives who are willing to pick us up and carry on with our friendship. Our Friends in Kuwait are wonderful and they are doing a great job of keeping up going, but as Dorothy says
"There's no Place Like Home"

Sound Effect: Deep sigh of contentment

NOTE:*Dewey Berquist: Explaination from a blog called "Rocks Off". Edited for my PG audience and my sister in Alaska who is too much of a lady to want to read swearing.

As someone who hasn't regularly watched any local news in years, being a fan of a meteorologist seems downright silly. Growing up in North Dakota on WDAY and WDAZ I was blessed by an honest-to-goodness "weatherman", Dewey Bergquist. He was a weatherman because that's what they were called back then and if memory serves me correctly, Dewey wasn't a certified meteorologist anyway. Dewey was odd and goofy. He gave the next day's weather a letter grade, accompanied by a wacky cartoon. Once at a keg party across the hall in the dorm, those suitemates and a few other of us turned off the music so that we could watch Dewey's weather segment. There was an outcry about the music until we yelled: "@#$% you! We gotta watch Dewey!" This resulted in another handful of guys yelling "!@#$ yeah!" and joining us with beers around the TV set. Dewey Bergquist, now there's a weatherman to fall in love with

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