After the Book

Ok true to form I'm already behind on the first day of my blog. That's because of my staycation in Salt Lake the week before the semester started (un-tenured professors operate on a thin time margin), and also because I spent most of yesterday pacing my friend Jason for part of the Wasatch 100 http://www.wasatch100.com/ and most of today sleeping. More on these things in a few days. For this first entry I want to go back to when I meant to start the blog (which I wanted to call After the Book, but it's taken). Sometime in mid-August I e-mailed the final version of my book to the press (ok the exact time was 5:21 a.m.) and then a couple hours later Jeanine and I (Jeanine = wife of just a bit over a year) drove to Jackson, Wyoming for one our best — and most needed weekends — ever. The State and the Stork (that's the book) has been looming over my life for more than a decade, and I don't think I've ever had a better beer than the first one that night when we rolled into the Snake River Brewery and met our great friends Sean and Gillian, who drove over from Montana.

We also knew it was going to be an epic weekend when the Snow King (I love any resort with a 1970s logo) upgraded us from 1 bedroom for the 4 of us (in keeping with the tradition that we were in the next bed when Sean and Gillian spent their first-ever night together in a hotel room) to a 3-bedroom condo (complete with original 1970s bathrooms). The next day we went on a fantastic hike to Solitude Lake in Grand Teton National Park

and then a trail running weekend broke out. Jeanine's training for her first half marathon this October (I also love running, which I'll be boring you about on this blog), and so we did a run in the park the next day and an unbelievable one at Cache Creek in town the day we left. We also celebrated our first anniversary (yes, Sean and Gillian had left by then) at the Snake River Grill (no relation to the brewery — something of a common name around these parts). When at the SRG, we prefer these: