DATELINE: Hotel in McLean VA, 16 May 2006

Running my ass off, as usual. Weekend was a blur of getting rest of house in some sort of final order, finishing with ground zero, aka the kitchen. Then off to mother-in-law's for the holiday Sunday. Monday I got my office furniture in place and emptied the rest of the boxes, which puts me about 10 hours from having my business ground-zero up and running.

Problem is, the minute I achieve even just that breakthrough I'm on a plane to DC Monday night. This trip is multi-leg and has me speaking three times at a counter-drug symposium (USG heavy) in northern VA, at a developmental aid seminar being held at the Smithsonian, and finally "teaching" a module of Bill Clinton's quasi-course at his library/foundation in Little Rock. Sure, it'd be great to have a nice big fat corporate gig in there somewhere, but there's paying your bills and there's paying your dues too. And if you take the vision thing seriously, it's a balance between what the world owes you and what you owe the world.

Interspersed with all this gabbing is a raft of quickly arranged Enterra meetings with government officials, major firms like Accenture, and the usual recruitment-focused dinner. With that much going on, it's almost weird to go more than a couple of hours without a call from or to Steve DeAngelis, the only man I know whose schedule puts mine to shame.

Meanwhile, I'm counting the days left before I go into seclusion with my eldest son following a long-scheduled surgery he's having in June: so much to get done between here and then, and the days fill up rapidly.

I will confess, it gets hard to summon the energy to blog at times. Last night I chose to exercise at 10:15 (thank God for "Family Guy" on TBS), and that just about knocked me senseless with the tree pollen raging now (the first two weeks in May are my "dazed and confused" period--funny how that means different things when you're middle-aged).

But all this will pass. Kevin's surgery will slow things down a bit. Having the house all put together (we continue to work the outside because of the blasted regular downpours of rain) will slow things down a lot. Summer will slow stuff down (except for two overseas trips to Europe and Asia). And yes, Kevin and I will start golfing for real once he's recovered.

So I will work to blog when I can, balancing demands where I can, and telling myself throughout that I'm doing the best I can to serve a lot of different masters and goals at the same time.

Finished column for Knoxville News Sentinel this morning. Went with Baker byline because this one is more political. Subject won't be surprise to blog readers, since this is theme that I've been working for a while: the Bush post-presidency is already here. To me, the weird announcement of National Guard troops on the border with Mexico sealed that judgment. How's that for our next military intervention?