So.

Virginia Tech.

I, like everyone, have been reading the articles and watching the news and taking it all in. I don’t really have anything to add that hasn’t already been said a thousand times in a hundred different ways. It’s difficult, damn near impossible, for me to wrap my head around it. It actually makes my brain hurt.

Yesterday evening, Emily asked me what we’d do if the shootings had happened at UVM and not at Virginia Tech. Would we still go? And the answer, of course, is yes. The answer is yes because there was never anything intrinsically dangerous about Virginia Tech. There was nothing that made a tragedy of this magnitude somehow statistically more probably in Blacksburg as opposed to Burlington or any other college town in the country.

The simple sad fact is that there was no meaning behind yesterday. There was no ‘why’. And thus yesterday could have happened anywhere. It will happen somewhere again.

It’s up to us to grieve and then re-shoulder our lives and get on with things. We can’t predict where disaster will strike and to pretend otherwise leads to us paralyzed by fear, hiding in our closets.

As scary as it is, the only thing we can do is move forward.

Here’s a question someone just asked me: “I just don’t know what to do when I get some of these crazy requests. Am I allowed to say no to people if their request is impossible?”

YES!

I cannot stress this enough. A big part of the problem in my day-to-day involves people who believe that anything is possible if they make the same request in various ways. (sometimes using foceful voices, sometimes trying to butter you up, sometimes name dropping). Well, guess what? Some requests are impossible. Sometimes no is the only answer.

Man, I’m really quite bad at posting on a regular schedule. How am I ever going to become the widely-read internet celebrity of my dreams if no one ever knows when I’ll be posting the latest drivel?

Maybe after we move to Vermont and have no friends I’ll have nothing to preoccupy me and I’ll spend all my time writing entries for the ol’ Nerd Hut.

That’s right, I said after we move to Vermont.

The decision’s been made.

We are moving to Vermont.

We. Are moving. To Vermont.

It’s terribly exciting and terribly scary and ohmygodhowarewegoingtoprepareandsellthehousebyaugust????

But, mostly, it’s pretty damn cool.