11-21-2010 Snowy Weekend at Rocky Point

The snow has come for real to Rocky Point, with enough on the road yesterday that Mo had to plow.  She fires up the tractor for the road leading to the house (aptly named Easy Street), and I get out the shovel and do the big driveway by hand.  We have a snow blower as well, but I only get that out when the stuff is really deep, at least a foot or two.  Yesterday it was just 2 inches, and this morning another 2 inches. I think an hour of shoveling up and down that driveway qualifies for at least half of my ten thousand steps a day, (which I haven’t actually done in a very long time). Difference between our snow and Rick’s snow is that ours probably won’t melt.  If you have a dog, or know a dog, or just want to laugh from joy, drop over to Rick’s page and check out his video of Rylie running around in the snow.  Abby doesn’t get quite so excited, although I do have some videos of her doing similar silly stuff in water, warm! water that is.

When I moved back to Rocky Point last year, I packed up a lot of boxes of stuff, even after a year of thinning and selling and giving away stuff, I still have stuff to deal with.  Mo has a small shed out back, and in that shed are some chests and boxes, including a great drawer full of travel brochures and memorabilia.  I went out there yesterday to find something and came upon an old travel journal.  Mo and I have traveled together since mid 2003, and it was great to find all those old handwritten stories tucked away with places, dates, all the details that we forget as the years continue.  Sometimes we go to the blog to try to remember a trip, or a date, and it is a bit frustrating to find that what we are trying to remember is pre-blog. 

I decided it would be a good idea to go back in time and add those old trips and photos here.  I was a little bit concerned that the posts would show up all over the place as recent, but I checked a few blog rolls and it seems that as long as I remember to put the right publish date, blog followers won’t be bombarded with ancient history.  It’s fun to go through the stories and photos and get it all down in proper blog format.  I find I enjoy my own memories more with the illustrations accompanying the text, so it’s a great little trip down memory lane.  Mo thought is would be nice to have everything in one place as well.  I didn’t start blogging our travels until we were on our cross country trip back to Florida, and we started that trip in the baby MoHo and bought the current one on our return trip, but that story is here.  The prior stories are coming along.  I know that I don’t often crawl back in blog archives to see someone’s history.  So much is going on right in the present it’s often hard to keep up!

This week I get to remember that I really am retired.  I don’t have to work at all!  The weekend has been great, with shoveling, hauling another load of crackling dry juniper to the porch for the fire, cooking, cleaning, and some good knitting and tv watching as well.  We had three Grey’s Anatomy shows stacked up on the DVR so that was great fun, not having to wait a whole week for the outcome, just fast forward.  Today I am continuing with the cleaning projects, and have all my Cooks Illustrated magazines out on the counter looking for some new recipes for Thanksgiving. I know better than to mess with family classics, but I can at least experiment with an extra here and there. Half my children will be here with spouses and kids, the other half are in other parts of the country.  I am really looking forward to a big dinner, to the cooking and camaraderie, to family time.  The four years I was in California were hard for me, my family couldn’t manage the distance to travel to me, and I haven’t hosted the holiday at my home since 2003, when I still lived in Klamath Falls. Family and food and fun.  Mo’s brothers are up north, and her sister is in Colorado, so they don’t often manage to get everyone together for Thanksgiving.  So Mo will be here as well, patiently tolerating and even enjoying my family and all it’s craziness.