Tag Archives: als tdi

Ramble On

This month brought travel opportunities that I had to decline. ALS TDI’s Leadership Summit in Boston takes place tomorrow, and many of my friends flew in for the occasion. But it seemed like too much for us. Planes, an uncomfortable travel wheelchair, the breathing machine, hotel rooms. All too complicated.

Later this month, many of my friends and family will gather at Fitzgerald’s in Berwyn, IL for the second annual Speed4Sarah concert and fundraiser. It seems that I should be there for that, but it’s actually been years since we traveled for Thanksgiving. Rob is allergic to holiday travel, in addition to penicillin and bees.

I used to love traveling. When I was fresh out of college, I got a job working for a travel publishing company in the San Francisco Bay Area. I wrote back cover copy for books about far-flung locales like Cuba, Oaxaca, and Wisconsin. I wrote press releases and designed postcards to market our various travel series. I was the traveling publicist for the author Rick Steves, whose Italy guidebook was, and maybe still is, the best-selling travel book in the United States.

It was my job to drive Rick to events and interviews. We got along well. He was impressed by my parallel parking abilities, I was impressed by his uninhibited love of Rod Stewart (including one particularly memorable late-night air guitar performance as we hurtled through Pasadena) Read More>

Weekend of Awesome

Fall is a crazy time. Maybe that’s true for everyone, but for some reason this fall seems more chaotic than usual in our house. Or, if not exactly chaotic, then just busy. This past weekend started with the Friday publication of an essay I wrote for CNN. I was so excited, and spent the morning toggling back and forth between different sites, trying to determine if anyone was reading it. They were! At which point I had to question my decision to send CNN that one picture of myself in the ICU with very, very dirty hair.

I then spent the afternoon at a trampoline park with Scarlett and one of her friends. When they got bored of bouncing, they went outside into a grassy field, dumped dirt on each other, and then found some puddles to splash around in. I put my mud monster into the car about an hour later, and the evening was spent trying to find a child beneath the dank exterior of what looked more like one of those dogs with dreadlocks.

So when I say we’re “busy”, I don’t always mean busy in a cool way. Read More>