Hell-Stinky

We dropped Daddy off at the airport today for a globetrotting adventure. Seriously, globetrotting. He is flying to Helsinki to attend a conference there on permafrost and cold climate things. From what I understand, it's where a bunch of Russian dudes and NASA dudes butt their hugely nerdified brains together and use completely jargified words like "thermokarst" and "carbon budget" and "regional climate model simulations".

It's also very chichi -- on their website it lets you know that attendance to this conference is "by invitation only, dahlink". No herneketto for you!

Daddy got into this because he and a collaborator are proposing some research to this group, who are so stoked as to pay all expenses to fly Daddy halfway across the world, and then house and feed him. Daddy's collaborator is a Russian researcher in his department, very top notch and very very Russian. I'm quite sure he smokes cartons of cigarettes a day. I helped Daddy edit their proposal, and occasionally where the Russian guy wrote there were missing subjects and articles and adjectives rearranged around such that you just had to stop and say his phrasing out loud, to make you feel as though you were holding a Kalashnikov in a James Bond movie.

We have talked to the boys since last week about how Daddy was flying in a plane across the ocean, to this place called Finland. "What are the people called in Finland?" Isaac once asked. "People who live in Finland are called Finns," I told him. This brought up another important topic, about where we live and what we are called as a people. For about a day, in great celebration of the internationally famous car race held in the state from whence we came, all three boys and I ran around yelling MAIR-KENS! and pumping our fists in the air. Meemaw guilted me into setting them straight, teaching them that we are actually UH-mair-kens. Isaac and Jacob, that is. Mike and I are a lost redneck cause.