After getting our house nicely staged and hoping to attract a buyer or two, we headed up to Anchorage to visit the family and attend my 20th high school reunion. It had been many years since I’d been in Alaska right on the solstice, and the super-long days take on an interesting new dimension when you think about having to get kids to sleep through them.

We hit the key restaurants (Moose’s Tooth, Snow City, Snow Goose) and Dad and I took a day trip to Seward so I could get the lay of the land for Mt. Marathon next month (as an aside, there’s bad timing, and then there’s getting into a very exclusive, long sought after race, a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, the week you’re moving across the country. From California to Connecticut–and the race is in Alaska. But what are you going to do? I watched my dad run the race on the Fourth of July for twenty years, and I couldn’t pass up the lottery-bestowed opportunity to run it with him).

We enjoyed watching Lucy get more and more mobile in the vast open spaces of the house, and on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, Aimee and I joined some close friends and classmates I hadn’t seen in years at events around the city. It was a lot of fun, just about what I expected, with some familiar faces I was really glad to see, a few folks I didn’t know but was interested to talk to, and some people I didn’t know then and still don’t.