Destination Paradise

Saying goodbye to Daddy's airplane at Incheon airport/Seoul So yeah. It's been awhile. No, the title isn't referring to a new baby, as thankfully our lives are quite full with the two we already had as of my last posting. But in the nine months since I last updated this blog, I guess we've had a lot of eventful moments anyway. Most notably, we said goodbye to Korea. Korea was a gracious host. Certainly not without its challenges (goodness, were there challenges). But it was the one country that offered us visas, a job, a place to live, our son's first school, our daughter's birthplace, and for two years, a home. We made lifelong friends. We gained new food addictions. We discovered just how much we could accomplish all alone, half a world away from our friends and families, with no one to depend on but each other. And we learned just how much we really needed each other. Lucas and his friends take a final stroll through Seoul's historic center ...

It's a good thing we took all those nice photos of the city on Sunday, because right now it looks completely different. Monterrey got slammed with a surprise windstorm on Tuesday. No rain, hail, or precipitation. Just 75 mph winds and so much dust that the city's air-pollution detectors hit 10 times the danger level before they finally clogged and shut down. The city maintains its claim that there was no indication this was about to happen, so people like me and Carlos just went about our normal lives (or "Spring Break") until it became clear we were in the middle of some near-apocalypse. The power got knocked out to nearly the entire city around 10 am. Then the cell towers went down, too. Carlos and I decided to go to the local shopping center (it's like a half-mile away and approximately 10 weeks old) to pick up some essential groceries. That's when we realized it was probably not the smartest move, as the outer perimeter of the mall had already susta...