The hardest sort of week

Good week, work-wise. Covered lotsa ground, met lotsa cool people, talked about lotsa cool stuff.

But hard on the homefront.

We are at the end of our tether on this apartment. Fortunately, closing is within days. We'll break for a family vacation before moving in, so our countdown is really to the wheels-up moment of spring break.

But still, these past few months have been about as stressful as it gets, family-wise, between move, apartment, building, book coming out, starting with Enterra, and all that travel.

Seven flights, five nights this week. Hit Newark and JFK and LaGuardia all within 24 hours at one stretch: Sunday night to Orlando, Raytheon speech Monday, Monday night to NYC, Tuesday taping with Japanese public TV, Tuesday night to Oak Ridge TN, Wednesday meeting with the lab, Wednesday night to JFK, Thursday all-day with senior players from a Northrup Grumman division, Thursday night home. Friday mostly about repurcussions from Dad being gone all week.

Somewhere in that mess, I write up my column for next Sunday's Knoxville News Sentinel. By all descriptions from Tennessee, that is being very well received, with syndication a possibility. This week's piece came to me in an instant while watching a brief. I title it, "I Miss Lady Liberty." It is a purposeful attempt to demonstrate more conversational, more direct-to-reader tone. We shall see how it goes down, but I really like the piece a lot.

Cool part about Northrup Grumman event on Thursday, besides finally meeting Andy Krepinevich and Bob Work, two guys whose work I respect, is being right next to building where LEM built back in the 1960s, as in Lunar Excursion Module. You know the cool episode in "From the Earth to the Moon," the one about the contractors who built the LEM? Well, I got to see the building Tom Kelly bounced all those balls against all those years. Seriously cool, as that's my favorite episode in the entire series, other than the Apollo 8 one.

Trying to relax this weekend with kids. Some work to do, but mostly bookkeeping. Working with eldest son on science project ("Which filters protect comic book pages best from sun damage?"). Painting faces at kids' school this Sunday. Trying to finish this weird virus haunting me all last week.

Waiting for the sun.