The News

Being on the road for 4+ weeks, Kathy and I have really lost track of what the heck's going on in the world. We haven't been reading the newspaper or watching much TV, and we've been listening entirely to music radio stations, CDs, and our Ipod in the car, so we're pretty much blissfully unaware of anything that's happened in the world in the past four weeks aside from:

1. As informed by our waitress in Toronto when Kathy tried to order a spinach omelet, there seems to have been some sort of e coli scare with Californian spinach.
2. Some congressman named Foley sent some very inappropriate emails to 15 and 16 year old boys and he's in deep doo-doo.
3. Anna Nicole Smith's kid died somehow.

That was pretty much it, until yesterday. Yesterday, we drove from King of Prussia to Amish Country and spent the day hanging around towns with great names like "Intercourse", "Bird-in-Hand", and "Paradise". We gawked at Amish people wearing their cool hats and bonnets -- the men with their long beards riding their non-motorized scooters and the women riding in horse-drawn buggies. We took our own private horse-drawn buggy tour with a guy who grew up Amish and learned what it's like to live in an Amish household with all their weird rules. It was awesome.

Then at the end of our buggy tour we found out from our driver that just that morning, some assh-le truck driver had walked into an Amish schoolhouse just a couple miles from where we were and shot and killed a bunch of Amish schoolgirls. Having just passed by a similar one-room schoolhouse with all the kids' scooters parked in front, the news hit us a little closer to home than it would have otherwise, and since then we've been scouring the Internet looking for news updates about the conditions of the kids and the motives of the truck driver.

The weird thing is that if our driver hadn't said anything, we really wouldn't have known that anything out of the ordinary had happened. Everybody was going on with their work as they normally do. I'm not sure if that was because the Amish don't typically have phones in their house and hadn't heard the news yet, or if it was some sort of indicator of the privacy of Amish culture, but we didn't see the public displays of anguish that you might expect if this had happened in a "conventional" school.

Anyway, our best wishes go out to all the families. Of course I say that even though the Amish don't have computers or Internet and wouldn't have any way of reading this blog to receive those wishes. Oh well, whatever. Best wishes, anyway.