Home at last....

Apologies to friends who have read this already (via email).

All is well here in Smallwisconsonville. We've been here a week now. It's been hot (highs in the 90s). We bought a window unit A.C. for the bedroom. The hot temps should break Wednesday.

We are still wading through boxes. The downstairs is just about set up.

The people here are absurdly nice. One neighbor (an old lady!) mowed my lawn and gave me a Weber charcoal grill. Another neighbor gave me a contractor-grade cordless drill. Another neighbor brought us flowers to welcome us to the neighborhood. Another neighbor brought us a pizza from Papa Murphy's "We Make, You Bake" Pizzas.

Tuesday, we went to Culver's Butter Burgers & Frozen Custard for a fundraiser for music and arts programs in the local schools. Bridget met some important people in the local arts scene and already has the inside track on a great job (assistant band director).

Last evening, we went to the town square (an eight minute walk or so) and sat in lawn chairs with hundreds of other townsfolk and listened to a polka band play. They have different concerts every Thursday evening during the summer. The Boy Scouts handed out little American flags, the local elementary school had a bake sale, the senior citizen council sold cold beverages and pizza by the slice, and there was an ice cream truck. In short, it seemed like a Norman Rockwell painting. I did not even know that there were towns like this any more....

Life is good.

Here's a picture of me and my lovely wife in Ronda, Spain, with the famed Puente Nuevo behind us. We hiked down into that gorge three times, the views there were so beautiful! In For Whom the Bell Tolls, Hemingway says that priests who supported the fascists were thrown off of the bridge into the gorge by angry townsfolk.

Home again... for the moment

Just a brief note to say that we are home from our wanderings about the Iberian Peninsula. The conference was great. My paper went well. Our post-conference travels were wonderful. I even saw a bullfight (which, as a Hemingway scholar, I sort of felt was a responsibility to do once). More later.