Anyone who writes for either or both pure fun or a living will tell you that writing ebbs and flows. Sometimes, you're ON and sometimes you're OFF. We've been much better so far in Year 2013 than we were in Year 2012. The whole thing with my Mom's Estate simply flipped the OFF switch and it took forever to get ON again.
We're definitely not in that pickle this year and whatever seems like a writer's block today is more like a speedbump compared to last year this time.
Perhaps it's because we have changed our focus in recent days. It all started when Gary and we were standing around the campfire, maybe on Saturday. We got to talking about all the stuff we have to do to get ready to head north and I complained I have ba-zillions of things to do and Gary said, "Like what?" Well, I stammered and stuttered and I honestly couldn't rattle off all the things.
But the next morning we arose and began the semi-annual "List-O-Mania" drill and, POOF, before you could say "Jack Rabbit," we had a list as long as our arm with more items yet to be added. We have categories, subcategories and sub-sub categories. When we get into List-O-Mania, it's whole hog.
Suddenly then we once again became transformed into a Worker Bee dutifully droning between hum-drum tasks and chores. It's the price we pay for being migratory creatures. As you all well know, we simply can't wake up one day and morph ourselves into Mary Poppins and skip happily north (or south) with nary a care in our Merry Little World.
The spreadsheet is now becoming a rainbow of colors. Green marks a completed task; yellow is something that underway and needs to be completed ASAP; blue is pending and, well, you get the picture.
So that's certainly taken away from writing here.
Meanwhile, it's time for yet another Road Trip. The clock is ticking down on our Arizona Spring Bucket List--there's one Biggie left--the road trip to Young, Arizona. we really want to do that trip. We've been talking about it for more years than either of us remember. Heck, who knows? We might have started talking about doing that trip when we got together over 25 years ago. Our desire to do that trip goes way back. NOW is the time to do it and we hope to leave Friday and come back Saturday or Sunday.
Meanwhile, we dropped a cool $843.91 into the Snappy, the white Nissan, for a long laundry list of repairs necessary to continue taking such road trips. Why invest so much money in a 19-year-old vehicle with 246,000 miles on it? Good question. The short answer is that the used truck market is totally out of whack. You can't buy anything decent for much less than $4000-$5000. Something truly decent will set you back upwards of $10,000. It's phenomenal what used trucks are selling for and it's all a factor of the astronomical prices for new trucks. You can easily drop $30-$50,000 in a nice shiny new truck.
So putting $900 into an old truck makes a lot of sense in this day and age and now it is ready for both an Arizona road trip AND the typical drive back north. If we are lucky, we will get another 50,000 miles out of the truck over the next 3-5 years and all will be well.
Now perhaps you can see why we entitled this blog post "Rambling Man." We've been rambling all over the place in our so-called scribbling here. Let's end this blog post with a real nice photo from Susun's Sunday Hike on the Hiline Trail. Virginia took this fine foto of Rosa, Maria-Elena, Peggy and Susun with the State Stamp rock in the background. Many Cheers! jp
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