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On the Saturday after WE05 concluded, I took the ferry over to Manly Beach with Doug, Kelly, and Erik. It just so happened that the Manly International Jazz Festival was being held that weekend, and with weather so beautiful and clear, it was impossible to resist heading over. Once we got there, I kept snickering to myself at all the localized signs; I simply could not resist repeating them in a deep, booming voice: “MANLY T-Shirts! MANLY Boatshed! MANLY Frozen Custard! MANLY Ocean Foods! C’mon, try some! It’s MANLY!”

As a result, I got curious about the origin of the name, so I asked a couple of locals. According to them, the beach got its name because the aborigines who lived there were very manly, and enough so that the invaders gave the cove that name. This, to me, sounded like the kind of jokey answer you give foreigners to find out how gullible they are, but if that’s the case, then it’s a joke they tell to each other as well.

The first act we caught was a Dixieland quartet that was filling time between stage acts. I thought they were pretty good, especially considering they were all playing to a single microphone. Then we saw Peter Ind from the UK, as well as some of his supporting players, The Ozboppers. At least two of which were from America, but never mind that now. Mr. Ind was really very good, but I took one look at him, turned to Kelly, and said, “Ladies and gentlemen—Gandalf on the bass.”

Seriously, that’s what it looked like. I guess he would need a new gig after Sauron’s defeat.

Wandering onward, we stumbled across a small side-street stage where this absolutely incredible singer was belting out some jazz standards. I was transfixed. I mean, not only did she have this whole “hot librarian” look going, but her voice was simply unbelievable. I can’t even properly characterize it, but my best attempt is the smoky expressiveness of Billie Holiday combined with the range of Ella Fitzgerald and the nimbleness of Anita O’Day.

It turned out we were listening to Elana Stone, who continued to transfix me and everyone around her through a few more numbers. Afterward, I bought a CD (”In The Garden of Wild Things”, which she signed for me) and tried not to be too much of a gushing fanboy. If Ms. Stone doesn’t become a major star, it will be a crime, although a part of me thinks that she was born several decades too late. Had she been singing in the 1930s and 1940s, she would have been a sensation; her name would be up with those I mentioned previously. I have this fear that her voice won’t have as big an audience as it should in the 21st Century. At the same time, I very much hope that fear is misplaced.

The ferry ride back to Sydney was illuminated by a perfect (if cloudless) sunset and a dusky gloaming sky behind the Sydney Harbour Bridge, and marred by a terribly assembled Elvis impersonator and his even scruffier companion singing a number of Western ballads rather gratingly off-key, and twice nearly brained me with their guitar’s tuning pegs. Even without the contrast with Ms. Stone, they would have been bad; so soon after hearing her, they were just short of abominable. I’d have said something, except they appeared to be rather soused, and I try not to tangle with pickled Elvis impersonators unless there’s life and limb at stake. It’s just one of my little guidelines in life.

Fortunately, the remainder of the evening was redeemed by a fine dinner overlooking Darling Harbour with assorted speakers and conference staff, great conversation about web design work and Australia going late into the night, and a leisurely walk back to the hotel with a friend.

Overall, a lovely day.

A partial braindump from WWW2005. I’ll get to the professional stuff in another post.

• A staggering majority of the personal vehicles on the streets in the Chiba and Tokyo areas are black, white, and varying shades of gray. Even dark blue is a rare sighting, and forest green seemed to be Right Out. There were, however, the occasional splashes of color, like red sports cars and yellow Beetles. Were those the rebels of Japanese society? I don’t know. I just know that any time I turned to look at the cars, it was a very monochromatic affair.

• On a related note, I did see three Hummers—all in very dark colors, by the way—and two of them had those thin tires that the street kids love so much. Because, after all, nothing screams “please lower my gas mileage” quite so much as a Hummer.

  (I wish I were rich enough to buy a Hummer and have it completely painted with a “My Little Pony” theme, complete with stuffed ponies on the dashboard and an all-pink shaggy carpet interior. That would be totally bumpin’.)

• The Japanese are really, really serious about their fresh seafood.

• Tim Bray says I’ve been one of his heroes for the longest time. Whoa. Tim Bray said that. I mean, Tim’s long been one of my heroes. Mutual heroism? Whatever. I remember hanging around him like a fanboi at WWW7 while he talked to someone else about stuff I’m not smart enough to understand. When I finally got a chance to introduce myself, he had to leave as he was already running late. Despite my feeling like a rube for imposing on him when he was clearly intensely busy, I still walked away from it thinking, I got to shake Tim Bray’s hand.

  Before you start to project too much creepiness into this little scenario, be assured that I did not (then or ever) resolve to leave my shaking hand unwashed.

• I did manage to get into Tokyo on Sunday, tagging along with Rohit Khare and his wife to meet up with their friend John in the Ueno area. We had lunch at an unagi place, and after they all left I took a river ferry toward the bay. A thunderstorm rolled through the city as we sailed, shrouding the buildings and the radio tower where Mothra cocooned. After disembarking at a transfer point, I watched a rainbow form over the river, with the far edge of the Rainbow Bridge as a backdrop.

  Later the same evening, making my way back toward my hotel, I was standing in a JR Shinbashi station looking for the Yamanote line to Nippori, where I would catch the Skyliner to Narita Airport. Frowning, I peered at various maps as I searched for some sort of indication that I was even in the right station. As I leaned in close to one, a voice to my right said, “Oh, hey, Eric”.

  My head snapped around and I found that I was standing next to Richard Ishida of the W3C, who I’d met just a few days before, and who was studying the map trying to find the line that would get him to Keio University. When I told him what I was looking for, he pointed me toward the right line.

  I still believe that the universe is an essentially random place, but it’s days like that when I completely understand why many people believe that there are no coincidences, that everything happens in a time and a place for a reason, when I come closest to knowing why they believe in angels.

• On the flight back to the United States, there was a dim glow on the horizon that I thought might be the Aurora Borealis. The last time I saw the lights, I was seven or eight and my parents woke me up at three in the morning so I could see them. The memory is dim with so many years gone and the sleep that filled my eyes that night, but what I do remember has always stayed with me.

  The glow turned out to be the ‘top’ edge of the terminator, something I have never seen before. I wonder what of it I will remember, thirty years from now.

Since my father moved to live an hour north of Orlando this past spring, and Kat’s parents moved to the West Palm Beach area in the fall, we headed south for the holidays. Our flight down left two days before Christmas, so that turned into a bit of an adventure. My fellow Americans might remember what it was like two days before Christmas. The top news story of the day was, in fact, the bad weather and how it was messing up everyone’s travel plans.

For years, I’d shaken my head and chuckled ruefully at all those poor suckers who were trying, against all reason, to fly at the busiest time of the year, which was in the dead of winter to boot. Now I was one of those poor suckers, and my family as well.

When we got up that morning, things looked pretty bad, but the Continental web site said our flight was on time. I didn’t figure that would hold true, but thought it a hopeful sign that we’d depart fairly close to on time. Just before we were to leave, the site updated the flight status to say it was being delayed an hour. We decided to head for the airport anyway. Once there, we checked the boards and talked to someone who said that, yes, our flight was probably going to be delayed an hour or so. We got through security and down to our gate… and that’s when things started to go south, and not in a good way.

What we found out was that Hopkins had in fact been closed to flight operations all morning, and so all the planes that were supposed to be there were in other cities. Our plane was still in Newark, for example, and still ground-stopped. So in order for our flight to happen, the flight from Newark had to happen; that way we’d have a plane for our flight to Orlando. Thus, the absolute soonest our flight could leave was two hours after it was allowed to take off from Newark.

And when would that happen? Nobody could say.

So we found a play area with some other kids and let Carolyn run around. Every so often, we’d check back in with our gate to see what was up. No change; our plane was still in Newark. The projected departure time for our flight kept being pushed back, hour by hour. A 1:30pm departure become 2:35pm, then 3:35pm, then 4:30pm. And it was still only 1:00 in the afternoon.

Somewhere around 2:15pm, just as I was about to go check on the flight again, Kat wondered aloud if anyone had gotten out yet, and if maybe they could switch us to an earlier Orlando flight. So I asked about our plane (still in Newark) and asked if they could switch us to an earlier flight.

“The only flight before yours was a 9:00am flight”, he said.

“Right. And has that flight actually left yet?”

“Um, good question!” He started tapping on his keyboard. No, it hadn’t, and they actually had a plane on the ground, and there were seats available. But I’d need to go talk to them at their gate, half the concourse away.

So I told Kat where to meet me and headed to gate 21, wondering how on Earth they could still have any seats on the flight. When I got there, I made my way to the counter and asked if we could be transferred over. The man behind the counter told me there were seats available, and he’d get us moved over, no problem. This guy was a little slow with the computer, and needed some help figuring out how to put in a baggage-transfer order to get our bags from our original plane to the new one. I don’t know if he was new or what, but I was starting to become concerned that we’d arrive with nothing but our carry-ons… and believe me, when you take a 12-day trip with a 13-month old, you have a lot of checked baggage.

He apprised me that they’d try to get the bags transferred but there was no guarantee, and if any got missed we’d have to wait (or come back) to get our bags from our original flight. As he worked to assign us seats, I mentioned that we’d been on First Class standby on our other flight, and if he could put us on standby for the new flight, that would be great. I felt kind of stupid saying it (and said so); I mean, we were probably going to get to Orlando on this flight before our original plane even took off. And I should still be worried about where I sat on the plane? But to my surprise, he handed me first class tickets just as the boarding process started.

So there we were, sitting in first class and really feeling incredibly lucky. At that point, I figured that if half our checked bags and the car seat showed up in Orlando with us, we’d be in clover. We pushed back from the gate just past 3:40pm, less than an hour after borading had begun, so I figured it was a pretty good bet our bags were on the original plane, not the new one. For us, this was a three-hour delay from our 12:30pm flight—but the plane we were now flying had originally been scheduled to leave at 9:00am.

As the 737 taxied toward the runway, I couldn’t see it. The whole airfield looked like it was an unbroken field of snow, including the tarmac over which the plane was (bumpily) rolling. As we continued to cross the airfield laterally, I wasn’t seeing any exposed concrete. I started to wonder if we were planning simply to drive to Orlando when I saw it: our takeoff strip. Except it wasn’t a strip. It was a stretched-out series of barely-there irregular patches of pavement largely encased in snow and ice. And we were turning toward it.

“Takeoff’s going to be a bit bumpy,” I said to Kat. We held hands and our daughter, and said “I love you” to each other, as the plane accelerated down the runway.

(Which sounds all dramatic and fear-of-death-like, but actually it’s just a ritual Kat and I developed over years of traveling together. At some point we looked at each other just as the engines fired up for takeoff, and said “I love you” in unison. It was a moment of affection that we decided to continue, at both takeoff and landing.)

The run-up to liftoff was definitely jarring, one of the roughest I’ve ever experienced, and I entertained some half-serious concerns that the plane wouldn’t reach V2 and would slide off the end of the runway, as happens every few winters or so. Once the wheels lifted, though, the flight was smooth and uneventful. We got to Orlando in the usual amount of time, and—here’s the part that still blows me away—all of our bags had been transferred. Every single one. We were able to load up the car and get to my father’s house in time for dinner, only a few hours later than scheduled.

So while Continental definitely started the day on our wrong side, what with the complete lack of information about the true nature of our flight’s delay prior to our getting to the gate, they definitely made up for it by day’s end.

For Thanksgiving, we visited Kat’s parents in the West Palm Beach area, where they retired earlier this year. When we left Cleveland on Thanksgiving morning, it was snowing—the first snowfall of the season for us. It was clear that it would build up a dusting, and then melt within a day. Where we were headed, it was in the seventies. A part of me wished I could have stayed with the snow.

But off we went, and had a wonderful dinner with Kat’s parents and brother Neil. After dinner, Uncle Neil taught Carolyn how to work the stacking-ring toy we brought along, and his efforts paid off in spades. She’s been pulling rings off of the toy and putting them back on ever since, although she still hasn’t quite worked out that whole “largest-to-smallest” thing. It’s pretty amazing to see how fast she went from not understanding to clumsy attempts to get it right to being an old pro.

Best of all, there was a prize embedded in the center of our trip: we drove up to Disney World to spend the night at the Contemporary Resort and take Carolyn to the Magic Kingdom for the first time. We had dinner at the Liberty Tree Tavern, an establishment whose name strongly and incongruously reminded me of Thomas Jefferson’s dark aphorism. After dinner we watched the Christmas parade go past. Well, actually, Kat and I watched it; Carolyn slept soundly through the whole thing, thus proving my assertion that when she’s fallen into a deep sleep, you can march a brass band past her at full volume and not wake her up. The parade marched two of them past her. Snores galore.

The next day, we had breakfast at Chef Mickey’s, rode a few rides, saw the new “Philharmagic!” show (highly recommended), and then headed back to West Palm Beach with my father and his wife, who had met us that morning.

There were two things I observed at Disney that completely astonished me.

The first was that all the children, the same media-savvy world-weary jaded children we keep hearing about in the media, totally buy into the ‘magic’ of Disney. They relate to the costumed cast members as if they were the real thing; when “Mickey” comes by the table to dance a little jig and pat the kids on the head, they don’t see quote marks. It really is Mickey, as far as they’re concerned, and even if they know on some level that there’s someone inside a costume, they gladly ignore that knowledge and go along for the ride.

The second thing was that Carolyn, against all my expectations, totally got that the costumed characters were in some way special. I expected her, even at nearly a year old, to regard the characters as slightly strange people, and not significantly more interesting than anyone else. Not so. At first, she was a little hesitant, but with each new character she got more and more excited about them. You can see in the pictures just how comfortable she became: she’d only learned to give kisses the week before, and by the end of dinner gave Chip (or Dale) a kiss.

At breakfast the second day, she spotted Chef Goofy standing alone near the entrance to the restaurant. She immediately let go of my hand and toddled toward him. He sat down, and she went right into his arms for a big hug, then sat down next to him and looked up into his face. As I took pictures, I heard several people behind me saying things to the effect of it being darned near the most adorable thing they’d ever seen. A woman sidled up next to me and said she hoped I’d gotten it all on video. I hadn’t, but that’s okay. The pictures I did take tell the story well enough.

I don’t know what it is about Disney; maybe they put something in the water. But it really does create a kind of magic.

All too soon, it was time to head back home. Like any good parent, we want our child to be as safe as possible, so I was greatly heartened to see her taking the time to look over the important safety information printed on the card found in the seat pocket in front of her.

Hey, Japan, I’m headed your way and looking for gigs!

I’ve received official confirmation that I’ll be presenting a half-day tutorial at the Fourteenth International World Wide Web Conference, otherwise known as WWW2005, and also delivering a keynote and participating in a panel at the W4A Workshop at the same conference. WWW2005 will be held in Chiba, Japan, running from 10 - 14 May 2005. There will be more details on the Complex Spiral Events page in the next week or so.

So here’s the deal: I’m already committed to travel to Japan, so this is a rare opportunity for any companies, organizations, or other groups that would like to hire me for training, speaking, or other consulting. My usual fees include reasonable travel expenses such as hotel room and airfare, and as you might imagine, a plane flight from the eastern United States to Japan is just a tad expensive. (Try somewhere around $1,250 for economy class and $7,500 for business class.) However, since I’m going to be there anyway, I’ll waive the airfare expense for any consulting engagements. That’s a pretty notable savings no matter what airfare class I’ll be flying.

Here’s the flip side: I will need to book my flights before the end of January, in order to make sure I can get good flight arrangements. That means I’ll need to have settled any agreements to consult (in whatever capacity) by that time. So if you’re in Japan or know people who are there and interested in standards, spread the word! This is the first time I’ll ever have been to Japan, and I may not be back again for quite some time. Any assistance in making the trip more productive will be greatly appreciated.

If you have a suggestion on where I could search for leads, feel free to leave a comment or e-mail me. If you have a business proposal or wish to seriously discuss how we might work together, please contact me via the inquiry address at Complex Spiral. Domo arigato!

Yesterday I returned from a whirlwind four days in San Francisco. The primary reason for the trip was to conduct training for folks at the California Digital Library, but of course all kinds of other things happened. Here’s the brain dump.

• I can’t believe what great friends we have. At a Sunday afternoon party at the gotomedia pad, we were joined by college friends from Oregon, others who live a four-hour drive from San Francisco, and another from Cleveland. You read that right: one of our local friends flew out to the Bay Area to be at the party. Well, that and to take a vacation in California, but still! And that doesn’t even count the WaSP folks who also attended, like Simon, Porter, and Molly, who came from Kansas, Washington DC, and Arizona respectively.

  It was at the same party that I finally met Porter’s wife, so I can now stop referring to her as “Porter’s imaginary spouse.”

• If there’s one thing I envy about San Francisco, it’s the BART system. You can get darned near anywhere, and it makes commuting from the city over to Oakland a snap. This is particularly true when your hotel is on a stop, and so is the place you’re headed. Despite this, I still got turned around in downtown Oakland and was very nearly late for the second day of training. The only reason I was able to find the place at all was that we’d walked over to the training facility the day before, so I was able to identify and use landmarks to reconstruct our path, and thus find the labs.

• It turns out the BART ticket machines run on Windows. I found this out by the usual method, of course.

• In a conversation about the presidential campaign and Ohio being considered a key battleground state because of its employment situation and political complexity, one of my hosts opined, “The Bay Area pretty much spans the political spectrum from liberal to extremely liberal.”

• At the WaSP and Friends after-dinner party on Tuesday, Tantek publicly announced his departure from Microsoft. He refused to say where he was going next, although we’ve since learned that he’s headed to Technorati. By Wednesday evening, I’d actually come to that conclusion without having seen the post, but of course I didn’t manage to post until now, so I look like a poser instead of eerily prescient… although if you’d take the word of a VP at Macromedia, he could attest to my prediction.

  Like others, in a way I’m sorry to see Microsoft losing such a passionate, intelligent, and committed standards advocate. We could speculate all day as to whether or not there’s even room for people like him, but one could assume the same about AOL, and they funded a whole standards team for a few years. In any case, Tantek firmly believes this is the right thing for him to do and seems happy with the life change it represents, so I can’t be anything but happy for him. I can’t wait to see what he does at Technorati (and really hope the service stabilizes in the near future).

• I spent a goodly portion of Tuesday evening talking, at various stages, with Rebecca Blood about the Web, adoption, growing up in the Midwest, and more. On my flight home Thursday, I was delighted to discover a mini-profile of her in a Time article titled “Meet Joe Blog.” It’s kind of a weird feeling to open a national magazine and read about someone you’d talked to just two days before.

• Not only did Metagrrrl spend some time with my laptop at the party, so did Min Jung Kim. Geez, this thing gets more action than I ever did.

• At one point during the party, someone was copying a movie to his or her laptop. I observed this activity for a few moments, then turned to Jonas Luster (who managed to get a picture of me drinking some MS kool-aid) and said, “You know, in Soviet America, the movies rip YOU!”

  Okay, maybe you had to be there.

A brief sampling of vignettes from this week’s trip to Iowa City:

• I got my picture taken with a bunch of people who’d driven from Wisconsin to be at the Web Camp. As the picture was being taken, I felt like we were all bunched together to a degree that would have made a modest person blush. The photo makes it look like the people on my side of the group were fearful of catching contagious diseases from each other. Weird.

• While walking around downtown Iowa City with some folks from the conference, we passed a Mexican restaurant called “Gringo’s”. A block away, we passed an ice cream parlor called “Whitey’s”.

  Do I even have to tell you that I’m not making this up?

• Tuesday night we had dinner at an Italian place, and when the hostess asked me if I’d like some freshly grated cheese on my entreé, I said I would. “Just tell me when,” she said as she started.

  There was a short pause as she grated away. “More?” she inquired.

  “You bet,” I replied. “Did you ever see the TV commercial with the huge pile of—”

  “Oh, yes,” she said with authority, still grating. “At my last job, that’s all anybody ever said to me.”

  “I think that’s enough,” I told her. “And thanks for so thoroughly shooting down my lame, unoriginal attempt at a stupid joke.”

• Iowa City, and for that matter the Cedar Rapids airport, are dotted with “Herkeys”, which are four-foot statues of the local sports mascot that have been ‘enhanced’ by various artists. The statue outside the Museum of Natural History, for example, was covered in fur and titled “Bigfoot Herkey”, while the one in the airport sports a business suit, travel bag, and cell phone. What I found interesting is that none of the Herkeys I saw had been structurally modified, either by addition or subtraction, but were simply decorated in some fashion. I wonder if that was a participation constraint, or if perhaps the mascot is so revered that nobody even considered performing artistic surgery.

• Just past the Museum of Natural History I glanced up at the roof of a building to see the American flag at half-mast. I actually had to think about it for a second before I made the connection, but I thought I’d check. “That’s to honor Reagan, I assume,” I said to Mark Hale, the conference organizer. “How long are flags going to be lowered for him?”

  “I heard thirty days,” he said. “Although I think ten of those might be in memory of the Democratic Party.”

The previous week’s silence was caused by a trip to visit my father at his new digs in Florida. His house is really nice, but the weather was not. Every single day was really, really hot, and humid to boot. As an official pasty white northern boy, I had a lot of trouble handling it. Dad’s house is of course air conditioned, but that just made going outside all the worse. I had to wait until late in the afternoon before I could even go out on his lanai (screened-in patio).

Said lanai was frequently visited by earwigs, Florida’s answer to the silverfish. Have I mentioned how much I loathe both forms of insect? I mean, I’m no fan of insects generally, but silverfish and those hairy-centipede-like things we get in Ohio are particularly horrifying. Earwigs are not much better, in my book. What’s worse, they had a tendency to get into the house. I was in the middle of feeding Carolyn breakfast one morning and looked down to see a sizeable earwig on my leg, having just stepped from my sock to my bare flesh, waving its feelers about as if trying to decide where it should attack. In what I feel was an impressive display of parental fortitude, I managed to refrain from screaming like a panicked little girl. Instead, I knocked the bug off my leg and then stomped on it five or six times, just to make a point. Carolyn was fascinated enough by the new game I appeared to be playing that she didn’t complain about the interruption to her breakfast.

Of course, since Dad lives about an hour from Disney World, we took Carolyn on her first trip. We went to EPCOT. Why there? A few reasons:

1. They were having their annual flower exposition, so the grounds were even more beautiful than usual.
2. We figured the crowds would be a lot thinner there than at the Magic Kingdom, an assumption that seemed to be correct.
3. Carolyn’s too young to really appreciate differences between the parks. We decided to save trips to the Magic Kingdom until she’s old enough to appreciate it more fully.
4. EPCOT is my favorite of the parks at Disney World, especially the international section.

Because we’ll be back to visit Dad with some regularity, we were able to take a more relaxed attitude toward our day at EPCOT. We’ve done the endurance-test sprint from park to park, packing in as much as possible. This was a leisurely stroll through the parts of the park that most interested us. We didn’t get to everything. That was okay. Because, as I mentioned, it was really damned hot. Despite consuming lots of water at meals and while walking around, I think I managed to dehydrate. That was a problem in China too, and now that I think about it, the weather was very similar. We pretty much all felt like Carolyn did in ths picture.

We actually got her to drink from the bottle, too, and without choking. All right, keep your smart comments to yourselves.

One of the most fascinating things about the entire day was watching Carolyn react to everything around her. To her, everything is of equal interest, and the most routine things can be as entrancing as a once-in-a-lifetime event. (Not that this is the only time she’ll ever go to Disney—not by a long shot.) After lunch at the Japanese pavilion, Dad decided to take his granddaughter to see the taiko drummers performing outside. He held her up to see them better, and she immediately locked her gaze onto a three-year-old girl sitting on the ground about ten feet away. Carolyn studied this girl as if she held the secret to life itself. A few minutes later, a small tree came in for the same treatment.

I’ve heard it said that through a baby’s eyes, you can see the world anew. It sounds wonderful, deep, meaningful. It sounds like a homily for the ages. In practice, it’s simply that you get to watch someone with no preconceptions about the world react to everything around her, but that alone is exhilirating and amusing, mystifying and fascinating. I could spend all day watching her watch the world. When she’s trying to figure something out, the look of pure, unadulterated concentration is so intense it makes me want to laugh with joy. I can’t explain why. It just does.

Later on that same afternoon, Carolyn discovered that in addition to fine books, O’Reilly also produces a great chew toy—I mean hat.

That was shortly before lapsing into a late-afternoon nap. Kat and I took advantage of the nap to park her with Grandpa and wander through the Moroccan pavilion, which is one of my favorites. The architecture, rambling byways, and artistry of the pavilion are all top-notch, as you would expect: the Moroccan king sent his personal artists to create the frescoes and other aspects of the pavilion when it was constructed. The covered bazaar area at the heart of the pavilion is almost like a hidden treasure, cool and generally uncrowded.

After a fine dinner at Les Chefs de France, we headed out of the park. I snapped a final picture of the Spaceship Earth globe just a few minutes before the evening’s show began.

Carolyn slept practically the whole way back to Dad’s place. She’d been an amazingly good girl the whole day, considering the heat and level of activity. I can’t believe how lucky Kat and I are to have such a wonderful daughter.