Hello Summer 2013 - I just remembered I had a blog!

It's no joke that this is indeed "The very rarely posted and never read thoughts of Doug Hansel..." Do you believe me now? It appears that my last entry was December 2009?! The boys are 7 going on 8 and flying to France in 3 days to spend the summer with their grandparents. What an amazing opportunity. They of course have no idea. It's just what you do, go to visit your grandparents, what could be more normal right? Of course we as parents have a nice broad range of emotions ranging from "OMG we're putting our kids on a plane by themselves to Europe" and "Wow, they're going to be bi-lingual in no time with an experience like this" and "Yeah, we have our freedom again, let's be spontaneous!!" to "wow, we miss them and they haven't even left yet." To be clear, Veronique and I are really enjoying being parents, and couldn't be more proud of our boys. We've made a big decision this year too, since we will be moving them out of Montessori school and into public school this fall for the 3rd grade. They are genuinely excited by the prospect and newness of it and we can't help but me amazed at their spirit of adventure. In other news, I'm getting a new John Deere garden tractor this Friday, so it should be fun to mow the lawn a couple times before the novelty wears off and it becomes a chore again. Oh, and I got a snow-blower attachment for it too, so it will be fun to have that capability again this winter (the last one broke) so that I can do a nice clean job versus the mess that the plow guy makes, again up until the point that it becomes a chore. I'm sure there's a lesson in there... how to keep things fresh? Why should mowing the lawn one day be fun and not the next? It's all about perspective and awareness I guess? Has anybody seen my nirvana? Probably trapped under the cushions of the couch again. Ok, so, this is getting boring. I might as well talk about the grass growing next right? I didn't have a real reason to write, other than to prove I can still access my blog account (which took a few moments!) So, let's see if this lights up my corner of cyberspace for a nanosecond. Publish!