vicarious travel

Airplane taking off

Our daughter had to be at the airport before 6 a.m. for a flight. She’s going to Bozeman MT with fellow mom/mother in law Jennifer for a girls weekend together. I’m happy for them. And I’m living vicariously through them.

I’m not incapable of long distance travel. But between meds and medical appliances the actual taking of a trip can be more onerous than the enjoyment thereof. So, we have consciously limited how much/little we travel for the past couple years and that may be the case for the longterm future.

If you have lived your life with a little bit of gusto, by the time you get to our age it mightn’t be too much of a loss to start not doing some things. I’ve traveled more than I wanted in my life. While I do love travel, I never wanted to be away from Peggy as much as life has asked — but the side result is that there are a lot of places that I have been. So hearing that Katy was going to Bozeman was for me kind of like a return to a place I remember. Oh, sure, things have changed there in the years since I last set foot there. And I didn’t visit all that many times: a few pleasure trip motel nights, a few truck deliveries, several restaurants, a bad snowstorm or two. Still,

Bozeman in Winter

Memories are wonderful things. In my life I’ve never spent a lot of time reflecting on my childhood, or things I’ve done, but as I get older I admit to finding myself remembering a lot more about places I’ve been. Maybe just because I feel unwilling to make those same journeys again. I’m quite content to visit via the pages of memory rather than going there.

Kathryn has become good friends with her daughter’s husband’s mother. She and Jennifer share a lot and they are both gregarious. Truth be told I don’t know whose genes Katy received because neither Peg nor I are anywhere near as sociable as she is. But we are happy for her, and perhaps one of our only regrets in life is that she didn’t get to enjoy a sibling or two because at this time in life she seems to have missed that part of her growing up. It makes me sad but circumstances were such that it didn’t happen and we have to be content about that. However, the fact that she’s getting along so well with the in-laws (as well as a good complement of friends here at home) give us great happiness.

We don’t expect momentary updates — though she’s one to post her selfies like so many others. But I’m sure after she returns we’ll be regaled with tales of all the fun things they did. She loves telling stories; and we love listening to them. She IS enthusiastic!

The trip will only last a few days. Saturday she’ll be back home and happy to see her hubby. A little break is good. While she’s out there, we’re at the trailer soaking in the forest. Life is good right now.

let the kids do it

Is it hard for you to let others do things for you? It is for me. Has been all my life. There have been times when people helping out have brought me to tears. I never like it, and it’s happening more and more. But that’s life.

The view from our porch after the spring raking has been done! Not much green yet but then we can’t grow a lot of grass with the little light we get through the forest canopy.

I’ve talked about the park model trailer we have at a property near Wisconsin Dells. WE (the whole family) have a pair of routines that we do every year. Because the property is only usable 6 months out of the year we have a formal Winterizing, and a formal DE-winterizing procedure to follow so there’s no damage to plumbing, etc., during the winter.

It’s a thing I always looked forwards to. One of the FIRSTs of the year. And one of the last-of-summer LASTs of the year. A way of rejoicing in the cycles of life. And in the past it’s something that I’ve personally taken great delight in. Opening up for the year and closing for the year. And now I’ve had to turn that job over to our daughter and SIL. I miss it.

Last weekend was the weekend to “Open.” The young’uns have been looking forward to it for months already. It’s Katy’s special place to get away from the hustle of her work-a-day life and Mike’s place where gravity seems heavier and our usually OCD SIL can let go of things and just chill without getting antsy or feeling guilty.

They got the job done and sent us photos. But there are a couple nights where the temps may drop below freezing and I think Peg & I are going to hop in the car and spend a couple nights out there just because we can, and even though we need to be back in town on Thursday.

This letting go is a thing to be dealt with. In my younger days I was aware of older people struggling with it. Now I’m coming to terms with it myself. I’m beginning to understand. I’m. not there yet. Aging is a process and “coming to terms” is a process. No one ever really masters life, I don’t think. We all face eventualities we hadn’t considered; that frighten us, that concern us, that we have a hard time accepting. But life moves on and we have no choice about acceptance — we must. We can make ourselves and others miserable by resisting. Or we can surrender. And I think surrender is becoming a bigger and bigger part of life. So says a fiercely independent cuss of an old geezer. But surrender is the only way forward.

days don’t get much nicer

Yesterday was a keeper!

Because our move is in a week, the grands wanted to see where we were moving, and to help with a bit of cleanup at the new place, so we got to play show-and-tell, and had a bunch of help to make the job easier for us. All for the price of a dozen donuts! 🙂

Our grandkids were down from Minneapolis for an early anniversary celebration, their 7th year married. They brought the great-grands, of course. Their intention was a getaway weekend (or at least one night) without the young’uns — who stayed with Mike and Katy, who of coursed loved spending time with their grandkids.

The “deal” about our move is a bit odd, and one I’m engaged in not without a few qualms. But, hey, the stars seem to have aligned and we threw caution to the wind. Our SIL Mike has for 10 or 12 years been working with a family who have had numerous rental properties around town. They are up in years (like us) and are selling off their properties and finalizing moving to one of the great snowbird states. This property — of all the ones that Mike saw — was in the best shape and still bore a lot of mid-century modern touches — which he loves. It’s a duplex, a little more than 1 mile from where Katy and he live. And over the years he had said to the current owners, “when you’re ready to sell I want to buy it.” Peg and I had no idea how seriously the current owner had ever taken Mikes comments but he seemed quite sure a deal could be worked out. A few days/weeks later they had agreed a price and a sort of plan to finalize the deal when they were ready to move south again.

On the other side of the coin was the fact that our existing lease expires in 24 days (longer than that when we started talking) and the current owners were returning to Milwaukee to spend the summer here and didn’t intend to finalize any sale until they were ready to head South again. What to do? What to do?

I floated the idea that because we spend much of the summer out at our trailer near Wisconsin Dells that maybe we could terminate our lease here, put belongings into storage for 6 months and move into the new property whenever the deal was finalized. Mike was ahead of me, sort of. He suggested that seeing as the house is a duplex, we might be able to talk the current owners into renting us the upstairs until the deal closes and then we move downstairs to the ground floor. That proved to be a scaleable idea and the ball got rolling.

Except… the upstairs had been rented as a furnished unit and we have an apartment full of furniture. And the owners are 1000+ miles away and won’t be back prior to our needing to take possession. Mike, being the jack of all trades and an astute business guy talked them into letting us move all their belongings into the dry basement so we could have the full apartment. Which sounded fine except for the fact that we are hiring help to move our stuff from the current apartment just because we aren’t able to do a complete move by ourselves — so what do we do with an apartment full of furniture that has to be taken down two flights of stairs.

Enter the Grandkid and Hubby. On our “tour” through the new place showing the young’uns our new digs we also corralled them into helping Katy, Mike, Peg and myself drag furniture out of the apartment, down the stairs and into the basement. Whew! What a job, but a much smaller job with lots of hands and willing backs! I’m a bit sore today, and I realize just how much we really need to hire help to do the move-in — but we are almost ready for the. big day.

After lunch, the Grands hopped on AMTRAK to Chicago where they spend the rest of the weekend. The Great-Grands spend the weekend with Katy & Mike. We had lunch with all of them as well as with Mike’s parents who are about in as bad shape as Peggy and I — so a grand time was had by all.

It all makes you glad that families can work. We’re fortunate to have good relations all around (well, fortune and some hard work at times). And we have a lot to be thankful for.

I’m having a hard time visualizing what life is going to be like there. It turns out that our new place is 1.8 miles from the house I was born in. We moved away and when we moved back the place we moved into was about 1.5 miles from where our new place will be — so even though Peg & I have been all over the place and have moved 9 times so far (not counting 7 years RV’ing) I’m likely to end up close to where I started!

Where I was born, the house my dad built

The new place is three bedrooms — so we will have a bit more space. The rooms a bit larger, which will seem like paradise. And of course the price will be a bit higher. But doable. The layout is a bit different to what I would have “chosen” but life is all about compromise and change — so I’m up for the challenge. We’ll know if it’s a good fit later this year — after we have finalized the sale and moved in downstairs and settled in with all our bits and bobs – some of which will stay in storage until the end of the summer.

In the meantime, our place near the Dells should be open about the 15th of this month so we will be shuttling back and forth ever couple weeks for night or two in the apartment whilst we enjoy the sound of birds, and the occasional sighting of deer and fox from our summer getaway porch. It’s going to be a “different” summer, but it has the potential to be a great year compared to the past few pandemic years. Let’s hope for the best.

what makes me laugh

Daily writing prompt

What makes you laugh?

View all responses

life!
pure & simple.

my wife & I have been married these 55+ years and we embrace the momentary silly. We are both serious people by nature and aren’t inclined to drunkenness or rowdy behavior, instead we look for the absurd around us as opportunities to smile, laugh and guffaw till our faces hurt. There’s enough bad dialogue on TV. Asinine advertising makes me laugh at whomever would buy their products. Cultural faux pas and pretentious behavior gets a snigger just to relieve the awkwardness.

I mean really, for all the serious problems in the world if you don’t laugh in the face of unrelenting cruelty and meaningless hardship life would easily become unlivable. Perhaps that’s partly why there’s a rise in suicide.

I guess I spent my life looking for anything to break the tension. With great grandkids around we need to do our best for them.

Magic happens all the time

About a month ago we were at the hospital getting an MRI and MRA done on Peg’s brain. It was a followup to a repair to a minor stroke she had a little over a year ago. The good news is that all is well. No changes. And the even better news is that the stroke itself was relatively mild with only slight ongoing consequences.

The reason I say that “magic” happens all the time is that our doctor was able to send a teeny tiny stainless steel web into the right place in her brain to “fix” an aneurysm and hopefully prevent any further problems caused by the aneurysm.

Twenty or even thirty years ago I started admitting that there’s LOT of stuff going on now that I simply don’t understand. How computers operate for example. Back in the 80’s I won an Apple Computer because at the press release of the movie 2001: a Space Odyssey I happened to have a card taped to the bottom of my theater seat and I won the door prize. l didn’t understand what computers did then — in the days of floppy disks and 4k chip speeds — you had to program databases by hand using dBase, and nothing happened quickly by today’s standards but it did happen quickly by 1980’s standard.s.

AT the time I just started saying that anything I didn’t understand was magic. And that has been a fall back position for me, and I appreciate the ability, sometimes, just to step back and be amazed. I’m not a great collaborator, or team player. All my life I’ve been a loner and I’m fine with that. I accept that I don’t understand the mindset of having a small part in a very large undertaking. I was been self-employed for probably 2/3 to 3/4 of my career and I liked it that way. The advantages of many people each with their own specialty and skills working to accomplish an exceedingly complex project is simply not something I wanted to be part of. A lot of other people did and I was glad to have them do what made them happy — and I did likewise.

I find, however, that being able to accept the “magic” in this world has been a good thing for me. It has made me appreciate a great many things that otherwise I would have struggled to understand. Understanding, you see is the thing that moves me forward — that inspires me — that thrills me. I love learning, but this world has gotten so complex that no one can ever really grasp more than an infinitesimal speck of what’s out there. It’s the way it should be — and this is the only way I can deal with it.

But, being amazed, opens the prospect for a great many new insights. When you realize that you don’t understand a thing you begin to accept that there are other ways; ways you yourself would never have considered that work quite nicely.

I have to say that accepting the magic in the universe has helped me a lot when it comes to understanding my belief on God, and what he/she is doing in the universe. When I was younger I had a pretty complete view of the universe; the older I get the more I realize that then I knew nothing, and now I know less than a speck of something — but that the things I thought had to be certain ways don’t have to be anything like I originally thought. That has released me and captured me at the same time. I no longer have to have an answer. But I can also look about and realize that even the wildest answer I might have could easily not be anywhere near comprehensive enough to solve a real problem.

Christian faith is magic, and one day soon I want to share some thoughts about the nature of faith, but for now I just want to share that there is so much more going on around us than we can even perceive. Just like looking at a computer and wondering how it does it’s job, we look at the images from the Hubbell or the Web telescopes and realize that our wildest imaginings about the size of the universe and it’s complexity don’t even scratch the surface. I find it makes me want to be less judgmental and more willing to accept un-thought possibilities. The same creator who made more than 100,000 species of cockroach has a much broader idea of what diversity is, of what creativity is, of what it means to have “enough”. And to me, that’s just magic.

Vacations with Adult Children

I like to travel. Peggy likes to travel. Our daughter Kathryn likes to travel. Our Son-in-Law Michael, not so much. The idea of a road-trip is NOT something Mike gets excited about; though he has periodically given in to his wife.

A couple months ago Katy asked us if we were interested in a trip together. Ostensibly it was to “help” her aging parents, but we all knew she was just itching for an excuse to use some PTO time.

Travel has been problematic these past three years. Not just because of COVID. Our mutual changing health situation has resulted in revising our view of travel; not always in favor of more travel. And now that we have returned home I have to admit that even our downward revision of how much activity is good, is overly optimistic. Still we had a great trip.

Our original plan had been driving south to St Louis for a visit to MoBot.

Missouri Botanical Gardens | Joe McCauley painting

It’s a place we’ve visited before and it’s always great to mix flowers with world class BBQ, pizza or a trip to the Old Spaghetti Factory. Unfortunately we ended up grudgingly accepting that it would be WAY to hot for two of the three of us.

A change of plans was needed and Katy has never been to Mackinaw Island. So North it was. We did not plan on smoke from Canadian fires, but in the end all worked out just fine.

I admit to being a “cheap” traveler. I rarely opt for the better hotels. Well, I NEVER opt for them. We rarely spend much time in hotel rooms, and to be honest we’ve never had enough money to AFFORD posh accommodations. We travel modestly and probably spend more money on dining which we all enjoy even more than having plush towels and larger rooms.

This trip, though, we splashed out on a lake view, a top floor, and a few more creature comforts. I’m glad we did because even with those concessions and a slowed down touring schedule it still took me three days home before my body was anywhere close to pain-free.

it’s a 7 hour drive from home to Mackinaw City. Much of that was spent in the rain, but switching drivers (which is still hard for me, I love to drive) made it easier. Still, Katy needs to contribute and I was happy for help.

Our first day in Mackinaw was forecast with poor air quality; it was the same day that Chicago had the worst air in the world. We were better but not great. With poor visibility we opted to drive to Sault Ste. Marie..

Shipping Museum at the Soo Locks

We had a leisure day, wandered around INSIDE a retires coal/steel freighter and enjoyed an absolutely top notch seafood lunch.

I can’t say it was an easy day, my feet didn’t think so but it was wonderful. Check out The Lockview resto if you’re there.

Our hopes that the next day would provide better weather we’re rewarded. The Sun shown bright the skies were clear and we rambled over the Island till our feet gave out; literally.

The next day we returned home, happy, tired, sore, and content. I know not every family is still close when the “kids” have passed their own 50th birthday. I count it a blessing that we are fortunate that way. It’s about mutual respect and giving everyone a chance to contribute in their own way, not is the way someone else thinks they should. we have a good time traveling together and Michael is spared the aging of sitting still in a car for hours and trudging around on his injured foot, which isn’t fun. I understand completely.

I have no idea where next we will wander. Perhaps we’ll make it to St Louis another time. Here’s hoping.

The Crazy Thing About Babies

It’s funny about the way we simplify what we experience to fit our little minds.

The act of reading to a child appears so simple. It’s easy to assume that what is happening is just as simple as the act appears. But so much more is happening than we give at first perceive. Looking beyond the obvious takes us into a veritable hidden world of meaning, within meaning, within meaning.

Children may not have the language skills to articulate the different levels on which they learn. Children may not have the brain development to even realize what they are learning or on what level — but the process of learning, of acquisition, evaluation, and synthesis is going on all the time. They are sponges.

As we age we continue to do things on multiple levels. Perhaps it is just the politicians who think life is as simple as it appears. Or poorly prepared professionals who have reputations to preserve and don’t want new ideas to disturb the status quo. Or selfish parents who had children because they just wanted kids — with no regard to how to raise them to be functional human beings and an asset to society. There are a lot of reasons why we look at a child being read to and think it’s a simple action with simple results. But we fool ourselves and ignore a world of growth for the child and for ourselves.

Advanced Life Planning

I have been trying to plan a trip. Yeah, “advanced life planning” isn’t about END of life, but rather about the quirks of making plans as you age, because it’s not the same as it was a few years ago.

Our daughter needs a getaway. A couple months ago she told us she was going to have a week’s vacation and if we were all three at our summer place would mom & I want to do a getaway for a couple nights?

I know how to interpret “daughter-speak” and I jumped on the cause.

Peg & I have wanted to visit Missouri Botanic Gardens for over a year and without thinking I suggested we do that. It’s under 400 miles for either home or our trailer so it’s an easy day’s drive.

A view from MOBOT – Missouri Botanical Gardens

“Without thinking” is the keyword here. You know how they talk about muscle memory— well I think there’s a mental comparison — memory memory. Which is to say our brain remembers what we USED to be able to do, not what we are able currently.

A full year in Texas taught us that we cannot handle heat. So why am I considering a trip to St. Louis in a month that sees regular 90 degree days? I struggled with that for quite a few days before finally giving up and restarting my thought process.

In the end my better self came to its senses and we changed our destination. In a few days we’ll be heading for Mackinaw Island instead; drop 20 degrees off the forecast and we’re happy as a pig in mud.

Katy has never been. We have and it’s unlike us to go ANYWHERE during high season but we’ll make an exception.

This re-adjusting of my way of thinking is really difficult. I find myself struggling over it time and time again. As soon as I think I’ve got it right I find myself in another situation that sets the whole process off again. Which in itself is annoying. I used to be a quick thinker; now I find I rehash what “should “ have been done and dusted.

Don’t get old. It’s a pain.