Chain Lightning

I played a game growing up called Chain Lightning. I loved its hundreds of miniature dominoes that could be set up in self-designed courses by using a cardboard template in different patterns - spirals, concurrent rows, zig-zags, building over a bridge. After you had gotten everything just right (and tried to hold your frustration if anyone hit the table and ruined hours of work), you could send a tiny marble down a shoot while you waited with baited breath for it to start the domino effect. Sometimes planning feels like that - so many hours of setting things up and once that final piece falls into place...click! Chain lighting!

A lot of details fell into place for us in the last 4 days; a lot of things we were hoping for are actually coming together! We're not free to talk about all of them just yet but here are a few fun dominoes (obviously of varying importance) that we can share...

• In about 3 weeks we'll drive back to the Midwest for time with family and to commute back and forth between Jason's family's place in MN and Grand Forks, ND where he'll be wrapping up and (hopefully) defending his Thesis. We were trying to decide how to work the 3 hour commute between ND and MN in a way that would be most resource effective. After a bit of research Jason found a hotel only a mile from campus that allows us to stay 3 nights in a row with Peluche and only pay for one night at $65! So that's 3 nights of an air-conditioned room with breakfast for just $22 per night! And we can be in Grand Forks on a few Friday afternoons and Saturday mornings so we can get in some ultimate frisbee and soccer games too! We're so thankful and looking forward to some team sports which is something we greatly miss.
• We built a small garden box for a part of our backyard where the earth is so packed with gravel that nothing but weeds (and not even them in parts) can grow. We were hoping for some free dirt to get it started soon...Craigslist saved the day and someone who had been doing some garden work posted that they had a big pile of clean free fill dirt just 3 miles from our house! This morning we were able to transplant iris and chrysanthemum that really needed to go in the ground.
• Jason needed some statistics help with his Thesis and my parents decided last-minute to come through this past weekend. My Dad's a statistician, so in just a few hours Jason got just the help he needed to move forward with another chunk of his Thesis and his 3rd draft is back with his committee today! (Thanks Dad - you're a great teacher!)
• I have been working on summarizing written survey reports so that we can interpret them into what we call "executive summaries" in ASL. With a breakthrough realization on one aspect of the project (significantly cutting down the time investment) and 2 talented friends committing to help with just the parts I most need help with, I think it's a project that can actually get done by the end of August!
• We needed to set up meetings with key (and very busy and often traveling) people in Dallas and had a relatively small time-frame to make it happen. We were hoping for Aug 8-9 and, lo and behold, all 3 of the people that we need to meet with (to make sure all the information we've gathered in the last 5 years will be kept safe and accessible for generations to come) will be there during those days and we should be able to get a huge archiving task done even earlier than expected!

The pieces of life don't always set up perfectly - and there are too often bumps on the table we seem to be working on that send things haywire - but it's good to be content when things are going well (even if we know it's good to be content when they're not, too). I remember learning to set breaks in the chain of dominoes with Chain Lighting so that when the bumps on the table inevitably happened...only small pieces of the course would be knocked down instead of the whole thing. The last dominoes to be put in were the ones that linked the individual chains together into one huge chain.

As we work with lots of life's details it feels like that - we've learned to make white space so if one thing gets bumped, the whole plan doesn't topple down. We're holding on to those last special dominoes that will connect the individual chains together with great anticipation! For now, though, we're enjoying the feeling of nothing being bumped in the current design we're holding in our mind's eye. As for tomorrow...we'll just have to wait and see.