Moving on up

Up to Mississippi that is. As soon as Christmas passed the packing began in earnest. The POD was delivered right on time the day after Christmas and we started loading up. It's gone very well so far and now we're down to just having to pack up the kitchen cabinets and one bathroom.

Here's the POD on the drivway in front of the house. It was really cool watching them deliver it. I had visions of them having to tilt it to get it off the truck onto the ground and didn't see how I was going to keep the furniture from sliding around. The way they do it is really cool but hard to explain. The truck carries a sort of skeleton vehicle that sort of surrounds the pod and supports is at four points from below so that it goes up and down nice and evenly. It looks to be adjustable every which way, somebody did some real creative thinking with that one.

Here is the partially loaded POD sometime early yesterday I think, maybe the day before. It's all kind of mushed together. It is MUCH fuller now. I thought we would not be filling it but we will be getting it quite full. It's a very good thing that I took as much as I did one pick-up truck load at a time for the last year and a half when I went to visit. If I'd taken any less stuff we'd have had a problem.

The packing should be finished by tomorrow night and Wednesday they will come pick the POD up. We leave here on Saturday and will drive straight through. Connie and Caylith (the cat) will be in the toyota and I'll take the pick up. She is not looking forward to driving for 14 hours but she'll do fine. It's a one shot deal for her. I've done it on average every 4 -6 weeks for a year and a half or more.

We need to be up there on Sunday because... hold onto your hats...

THE DOLPHINS MADE THE PLAYOFFS!!!!!

That was supposed to be the dolphin's teal green :) I can't believe that they went from 1 and 15 last year to 11-5 and in the playoffs this year! I can wear my dolphins stuff out in public now and not face (deserved) ridicule. I may be moving out of Florida but I will remain a Dolphins Fan!

I'll also be glad to get to a place that isn't HOT all the time. We had record heat for Christmas. It was like 83 or so here. That is just WRONG! I don't expect a white Christmas but is it too much to ask to be able to wear long pants and a long sleeved shirt? No problem with that in Northern Mississippi that time of year!

Ok time to get back to work... I hope everybody had a wonderful Christmas...take care ya'll.

Completed Projects

A while back I posted some pictures of a couple of projects that I started, intending them to be Christmas gifts. Well I actually finished them! I thought I'd post a picture or two as proof and to let you see how things turned out. I'm not posting pictures of all the ornaments, the one I'm including is representative.

I'll probably do more of them during the year to prepare for next Christmas because they were a lot of fun. The bookhouse I will probably not do another of until Connie starts teaching, she has already told me she wants one or more for her classroom. The bookhouse turned out pretty good but it was a LOT bigger than I thought it would be, why I don't know. It did have to be big enough to hold books after all.

I don't even want to THINK about how much it cost to ship to Pennsylvania to my sister in law. I guess I need to remember to think SMALL for the things that need to be shipped.

Plodding Along

It's been a while since I posted an entry. In part I've been busy. In part I did not have anything that I deemed remotely interesting to write about. I've been reading journals and, as usual, not commenting. When I do that it's usually because I didn't feel I had anything to add to what had already been said. That is also a part of why I have not written. I didn't feel I had much, if anything of much value to add to anything going on in this community or any other.

Did anybody really want to read about the state of poker and casinos in general? Probably not anybody I haven't emailed and gripped about it to. Does anybody really care how many boxes I've packed in preparing to 'officially' move to MS in a month? Only Connie and she knows, she has to walk around them. I didn't have the energy or motivation to try to write a worthy Thanksgiving entry. It was actually a good Thanksgiving as holidays go but nothing astounding to share it seems to me, not compared to what I read anyway.

On the other hand I do like to write and it's time to do so. I look back on these journals from time to time to see what was happening so in part, in large part really, I'm writing for myself. Maybe we all are, or maybe it's just me.

I've got this feeling like I'm living in an almost schizophrenic world. If I don't watch too much news and look only around my immediate little world then my journey through life seems to be going very well. I'm pretty happy. Connie is pretty happy. Lee is doing pretty well. All well and good.

Unfortunately there is this kind of feeling as I walk along the path of life's journey that I'm walking on what has become an increasingly narrow ledge. There are no saftey rails, most of them have rusted and fallen away thanks to things totally beyond my control. It's a long way down and I am not comfortable with heights. Couple that with the fact that on the other side of the narrow path is a huge cliff with boulders poised to fall at any minute and either sweep away any remaining feeling of safety or possibly sweep me into the abyss. Sounds like a dark and forbidding picture huh? Actually it's very much a mixed picture in my mind. I can also see bright blue skys and lush green pastures that await if I can dodge the obstacles in front of me. In a sense that is always the way it is on any journey but in this case I feel like there is little I can do to control the outcome of the journey right now. It's that lack of control (and I am NOT a control freak by any stretch of the imagination I don't think...am I?) that has me feeling sort of antsy. We've planned, we've worked, we've done all the right things and yet it could be all for naught...or it could be wonderful...and there is not a thing we can do now but wait and see what happens. That is a tough situation. I know I share it with many, if not most, people right now although most would think my way of looking it it a bit weird.

But having written that do you now see why I have not written? Talking about it does NOT help. What helps is staying very busy doing things that I can see producing tangible if not vitally important results, building things, creating, cleaning, improving things in my immediate life while trying not to take too much time looking at a big picture that is increasingly bleak and which is increasingly nothing that any amount of planning or work on my part can do anything about.

I'll be back in less time this time...maybe writing about some of the small things that are making me feel good will not only help me but help somebody else. They don't matter in the overall scheme of things but they make me happy and more and more it seems to be important to take any happiness where you can find it and be grateful while trying to avoid thing things that you cannot change that make you unhappy. I know it's a philosophy sure to be condemned by many in this community and the world in general. Sometimes its a good thing to have a small audience, fewer people to tell me I'm nuts (dont' waste your breath...I'm know I'm nuts....I like it that way).

And that's the way it is....

Look around you...find one thing that can make you smile and then....SMILE...and have a great day ya'll!