And we’re home. After a whirlwind fifteen months on the world’s largest, most populated continent, we find ourselves at last stationary, comfortable, and unemployed back in the good ‘ol USA. Arriving in Detroit after twenty hours in flight, it seemed unreal that we were finally back. We would not have to find and haggle with a taxi driver. We would not have to worry about where to sleep and if there would be a toilet available. We could, at long last, understand every word we heard. I just about kissed the ground at Newark under the giant, American-sized American flag outside Customs and Border Patrol, right next to the fresh portrait of some guy we heard got elected while we were gone.

The only thing to worry about now was scheduling meals for all the comfort foods we’d been dearly missing. As much as we love and missed our family and friends, so many of our homecoming fantasies centered on the renewed availability of fresh, clean, American cuisine. We had a timeline all planned out and immediately got to checking things off on Thanksgiving the next day. Mmmm. Home for the holidays.

As we cool things down from constant traveling and ramp things up on the job trail, we’re taking this time to reflect and reconnect with friends. We’re really glad to have met up with many of you already. Ann Arbor keeps calling us back, so we have been taking any excuse to get down there. The annual Friars concert brought us in to give Nick and Julie a proper, sorely belated cheers on their 21st birthdays. And Katie’s family helped us make sure Zingerman’s sandwiches still taste as marvelous as they are expensive. South campus is almost completely unrecognizable from our tenure; the last time we were in the Big House was over two years ago, so seeing its transformation from modest steel to massive brick was striking.

But mostly we’ve spent a lot of time at home, alternately relaxing and stressing over the uncertainty of our future. For so long we worked off an itinerary—or at least a flight schedule—that the open-endedness now facing us feels a little foreign. But wherever it takes us next, we’re excited to begin the next chapter of Our Blue Life.

Also, you may have noticed the website is a little revamped. (I apologize if there are any glitches; it looks best in Firefox.) There are a few improvements, like nice, high-quality photos that you can now comment on individually and an ostensibly better overall look and feel. I started the design from scratch back in Korea, and we’re re-launching the site now to coincide with one journey just completed and another just begun.