Blogging from 34,000 Feet

After about nine months of radio silence on my blog, and a stream of requests from family and friends about whether I have called it quits as a blogger, I’ve decided that maybe it’s time for another post.

This marks my first time blogging — or being online, for that matter — on an airplane, thanks to Gogo. A combination of FlightAware, Google Maps, Zillow, and Yelp! inform me that I am currently 34,000 feet above 12 Hickory Lane, Algonquin, Illinois (a 3-bedroom, 2-bath single-family home valued at $166,000) and that there is a darling little steakhouse just 0.8 miles to the northwest (well, and six miles down). Wow, I am bored.

I’m currently in the middle of a 17-day trip from Shanghai, first to Michigan for five days over Labor Day to visit the family, and then to San Francisco to work for about a week and a half. I recently noticed that this is the first time I’ve visited home and felt that five days was too short. This is probably due to some combination of not having been home for more than a year and a half (I met the family in Hawai’i for Christmas last year rather than going to Michigan), truly glorious late-summer weather, an itinerary chock-full of activities, and a new member of the pack who seemed to add a dose of sanity to the proceedings.

Highlights included:

• Meeting my sister’s boyfriend for the first time. After five days of thorough investigation, the only thing I could find wrong with him was that he once attempted to wear a red shirt with an orange jacket, so I have tentatively granted approval for him to continue to date my sister.
• Eating my mom’s lasagna. My mother and I seem to have an unspoken agreement that there will be a constant supply of lasagna at hand throughout the duration of any trip home.
• Seeing the recently completed 450-square-foot addition to the house my parents have owned for 30 years, rendering the living room totally and wonderfully unrecognizable.
• Running in the Arb. Sure beats the treadmill in my apartment complex.
• Going to the Royal Oak Arts, Beats and Eats festival. Admittedly it is a bit of a stretch to call a street festival packed to the gills with shoulder-to-shoulder pedestrians, tacky art, and roving bands of gun-toting idiots a highlight, but on the bright side we didn’t stay long.
• Wandering around Franklin’s Art in the Village, which had much more breathing room, much better art, and presumably far fewer gun-toting wackos than aforementioned Arts, Beats, and Eats.
• Raspberry picking at Makielski Berry Farm on a clear, cool, gorgeous day.
• Making fettucini, ravioli, pesto, heirloom tomato salad, and raspberry buckle from scratch from ingredients we bought at Detroit’s Eastern Market, the berry farm, Alcamo’s, and about eight other places. Efficient, no; delicious, yes.
• Grilling steaks, asparagus, and peaches. It’s amazing how much better a $5.99/lb. American steak tastes than a $43/lb. one in Shanghai.

One hour and a few distractions later, I am now smack dab above the Genoa Municipal Airport in Genoa, Nebraska, a couple of hours shy of SFO and a few more hours shy of a quesadilla super suiza at El Farolito. Drool…