Fast forward 10 years. I’m writing this on an iPad (not yet invented when I started Eli’s blog), sitting on a screened porch (not part of our house when I started Eli’s blog), and watching basketball playoffs (um, pretty much the same as 10 years ago). Eli turns 10 in September. But he won’t be spending his birthday in Madison...
Because the O’Connors are moving to Melbourne, Australia for about a year. A decade after Eli’s birth, why not another life-changing adventure? Both Shelby and I will be on sabbatical leave from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and working at the Doherty Institute. We will be living in two residential colleges: Trinity College and Queen’s College. This will enable Eli to go to North Melbourne Primary School and allow all of us to support the North Melbourne AFL team. We already have a team scarf and a WatchAFL subscription, so we are already getting prepared.
This week we bought our airline tickets which makes the trip American Airlines (JAL/Quantas [edit: Thanks eli for the correction])-official. Which is more important right now than being Facebook-official, since I deactivated Facebook as a form of meaningless protest. That means information about our adventures will be here, not there. How 2008. We will be leaving Madison in early August and “stopping by” Tokyo to give seminars and visit Japan on our way to Melbourne. Even though it is about ten and a half hours away by plane, it still seems like it is in the neighborhood. Clearly, my Asia and Oceania geography still needs some work.
