Karolinka In & Around Bulgaria

I’m back from a whirlwind weekend. It’s 7am and I should probably be gearing up for the long week in front of me but the thing is I don’t always do what I should. What I decidedly shouldn’t do is spill coffee down the front of my dress after it’s taken me 10 minutes to pick out. Only problem is that I don’t really have much control over these things. Luckily it only took me two minutes to pick out my next outfit this morning. It’s less cute but it’s clothing and some days that what counts.

Anyhow back to the whirlwind!

First things first, Happy-Late-Father’s-Day, dAd!

I didn’t get a chance to call my dAd yesterday because I didn’t get home form my weekend adventure in the mountains until late. If I had made it home earlier this is what I would have said: Dad, I love you and thanks for everything. (He would have, of course, heard dAd but it’s weird to say “little-d”, “big-A,” “little d” I love you over skype.)

Everything would have clearly included:

• giving me my first baseball glove,
• teaching me how to make the best oatmeal waffles ever,
• helping with my collections of 1989 Fleer baseball cards, my stamp collection and my sticker collection,
• taking me camping and shopping (yeah, read that one over again. My dAd likes to shop way more than my MoM.),
• convincing me to build birdhouses to sell
• and generally inspiring me to try new things and not to take the easy way out.

Mostly my dAd leads by example. Well aside from the sticker collection but in my defense when you’re five-years old collecting stickers follows pretty naturally after you’ve already been collecting stamps and baseball cards.

Even today my dAd continues to inspire me (and I guess now that I am an adult the inspiration thing works both ways).

A great example of this is when my dAd decided that it was high time to start his own blog last year. Mind you he doesn’t have facebook, he doesn’t tweet, he still has a cellphone from the early 2000′s and I am pretty sure he has never-ever sent a text message. Anyhow, he tells me: Carolyn, I’d like to start a blog. I said: okay. Here’s his blog today: Work, Play, Eat, Live Local. I think that he takes great photos and writes very well. Oh and he makes Walla Walla look like a million bucks. And, my MoM tells me that now he knows how to download all of his own photos to the computer. What a guy, what a guy.

Anyhow, I’ve never had another dad. So I don’t really have anything to compare to but I have friends with dads and I’ve read a lot of books with dads in them and I have to say, I got pretty lucky on the dad front. I am not sure how I got so lucky but I did get lucky.

So here’s to my dAd, Dave, who is celebrating his 30th year of being a father. I feel like he deserves more than a blog post–probably he deserves a trophy or something because really 30 years is nothing to sneeze at but all I can do right now is write this. Maybe next year. That will be the year he’s been a father longer than not and that’s an achievement that certainly merits celebrating.

Thanks again for everything dAd!!