Update on Jack

Jack called home this morning to say that he's at the airbase and doing fine. You can read it in the comment from Mom K attached to the post below, but we'll reprint it here to make it easy.

Jack called this morning. He's finally at his camp. He used the satellite phone and the sound quality was much better than the last time he called us. He said the camp was very small, maybe a mile around the perimeter, and you could probably throw a stone all the way across it. They're in tents right now, but some Navy guys are building some more permanent shelters. He said they have a hot breakfast and dinner, but lunch is an MRE, which he said he doesn't mind. And they can have a nutrition bar any time they want. No TV, so a lot of the Marines have DVD players and buy DVDs at the PX. We might try to see if we can send Jack one soon. The only newspaper they have is Stars & Stripes. He'll be catching up on his phone calls soon, now that his calling card works.

She Did It!

Congratulations to Laura, who passed her boards and is now Nurse Laura Kelly, RN! The boards are computerized, and the number of questions varies. Laura and her friend Genevieve both got the minimum number of questions, and after going home and checking some of her answers, she was certain that they'd both failed. After a rough 24 hours, she found out that she is just as brilliant as we already knew she was. We're so excited. She's worked harder for those two little letters than just about anyone we know has worked for anything.

This morning, the largest manhunt in Georgia history came to an end when they caught Brian Nichols in Duluth, about half an hour's drive north of here. It turns out that he escaped the scene of the crime by taking MARTA, Atlanta's train system. It's a little scary to think that we could have easily been on the train with him and that he did, in fact, go right underneath our apartment while we were sitting here watching the story on the news. We were going to walk over to the overpass to watch them drive by with him this morning, but they stopped at the FBI headquarters so we went to lunch instead at Noodle. When we were walking back, we saw all of the news helicopters fly right by us, following the curve of the interstate. We knew right away that they must have been transporting Nichols. They were taking him to City Hall East, which is across the street from the Whole Foods where we were yesterday.

We spent the evening at the Karsons'-to-be house with Steve and Kelly's dad, Bob. We had some fantastic Thai food (fourth Asian meal in a row - Japanese for dinner Thursday, Thai for dinner Friday, Vietnamese for lunch today, and Thai for dinner today) and played a lot of ping-pong on their new table. Gabriel was so good all evening and got a lot of floor time, which he doesn't normally get. He watched Daddy play foosball and calmly sat in Daddy's lap all through dinner without fussing one bit. Kelly was at work and didn't get there until we were driving away, so we took the car out of gear and coasted backward down the street to go say hello and see her engagement ring. Steve did a great job with the design - it's really beautiful.

On Thursday, Paula Zahn Live on CNN will be at Camp Lejeune, so that should be an interesting show... even if they're about 3 weeks too late.