"I want to be thoroughly used up when I die, for the harder I work, the more I live.  Life is no brief candle for me.  It is a sort of splendid torch which I have got hold of for a moment, and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations."~ George Bernard Shaw

This past weekend, I had the pleasure of traveling to Riga, Latvia as the guest of the United States Embassy. I went on behalf of the WNBA in order to participate in a breast health awareness event. This is an important league-wide initiative of the WNBA and we wanted to impart it’s importance by showing our support.

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The first day was a full day. I started my morning waking up at 4:30am and the sun was beaming. The sun hadn't set until 10:30p the night before, so I was under the impression the sun didn't set at all because I fell asleep before it did. Imagine my confusion with the time of day, I was already jet-lagged from a ten hour time difference along with a hectic travel schedule. I was rerouted due to a four hour delay in my first flight to Washington Dulles. Instead I flew from LAX to San Francisco to Frankfurt to Riga. Luckily I was able to snag an exit seat on each flight. I was delayed, however, several hours in Frankfurt due to missing the flight to Riga because of the original rerouting. It wasn't so bad though because the Frankfurt airport provides lounge chairs for fatigued passengers and those with long layovers. It's a major layover spot for people traveling in Europe. I read my book, Cross by James Patterson. I felt like such an old fogy with my real live paperback because everyone I saw had either a kindle, iPad or some other gadgetry to help them accomplish what I was doing the old-fashioned way. I have an iPad, and I read several books on it, yet this was one of the books in my archives that Rock, my fiancé had read, that I didn't get a chance to read yet, and I didn't want to waste money buying the electronic version of a book I already owned. I used to be a die-hard James Patterson fan, but I have been sidetracked with discovering other suspense/thriller authors as of late. I'm happy I found my way back home though. I missed his protagonist, Alex Cross, a black psychologist who works for the FBI and is a widowed single father. In the movie rendition of his book Along Came a Spider, Morgan Freeman was cast in the role. I thought it was fitting.