Club Med, Missouri

I basked in the warm air. I had no hat on, and my ears didn't hurt. There was an enclosed stall available in which to wait for the hotel shuttle, but I hovered outside of it, tapping keys on my cell phone and just taking gulps of air that didn't make my lungs ache. I felt very light, almost giddy.

I was in Kansas City. In mid-January. But compared to Wisconsin and Nebraska last weekend, and Boston these last few days, it was Cancun.

This will be a short blog, but it marks my return after a couple weeks of frantically finishing my last ever paper for the Kennedy School (unless you count my thesis) while also planning out the next couple months. Along the way, I learned the beauty of wind-resistant headbands.

I'm inspired to write here again by a number of factors, among them a review by a King-Drew Decathlete whose speech is on blogs. She checked mine out and said it was "like reading the footnotes for the Demidec Resources." Writing footnotes has always been one of my favorite parts of DemiDec, right up there with meeting teams and drinking chai. So I'm back to write more of them. Footnotes strung together into paragraphs. Centipede notes, I suppose.

Speaking of a very different kind of footnote, I finished my last paper--the one about how the Republican party could win California in 2008--not in a library, or even at Starbucks, but at a small motel in Jefferson, Wisconsin. It had a banner advertising "high speed Internet access"--so I stopped there on my drive from Waukesha to Whitewater.

By the time I got to the University of Whitewater, the competition had ended. But then, so had the penultimate chapter of my academic career. So I toured the campus with a smile on my face (and a jacket on my body) then went looking for the airport.

On the plane, I stretched out across three seats and slept--though I relocated after a flight attendant suggested I move up a few rows. "Why?" I asked. "Look out the window," she advised. I looked, and saw a very big jet engine. Scratch 28F from my preferred seating list on MD-80s.

Tonight I dined on a meat-and-cheese snack and a cup of hot chocolate.

In an upcoming entry, I'll write some thoughts on the inauguration. Even footnotes can sometimes be serious.