Oh, wait. I'm the one who was gone.
In case you're not friends with me on the book of faces, we just got back from an awesome 10 day (or so, I wasn't counting and don't feel like doing so now) vacation. It feels like it was a lot longer than that because we accomplished a lot of things, and I'm so glad I took today off to regroup and do laundry and mentally prepare to go back to work tomorrow.
So what did we do? Well, the first two days and the last two days we drove for like 8-9 hours each day. Not our usual M.O., but it was necessary this time and I'll get to that in a bit. The first part of our trip was the NASCAR phase. We landed in Lexington, North Carolina, which was our home base for two days, the majority of one of which was spent touring the shops and a few museums of some of our favorite NASCAR teams. Talk about NASCAR fangirl geekage! It was so cool. We got to see and learn some NASCAR history, and see a few of the actual shops where they were working on the actual Cup cars. So freaking cool. Having basically been raised in a garage myself, it was surreal to see these begillion-dollar facilities and their WHITE shop floors and their techs with their clean working environments. My little puny human brain just couldn't make sense out of it. I thought they were working on CARS?!? Regardless, it was cool. Especially at RCR, where my favoritest drivers of all time once called home (Kevin Harvick, who later went to a different race team and is now retired, and Dale Earnhardt, who is now racing in heaven). It was even cooler because our tour guide was a former Pit Athlete (that's right, they're not Pit "Crew" anymore) and so he shared a lot of info with us that the average ordinary regular person wouldn't know. We had a great time and bought a lot of t-shirts and magnets and decals and took a ton of pics.
The next phase of our vacation was to drive a little farther south, to visit my hubby's sister and her husband in a little town about an hour and a half from there at their "new" place in North Carolina! I put "new" in quotes because they bought the place and retired there about ten years ago, and still have their house up in the cities where our niece lives, but we hadn't visited them in NC yet. So it was nice to FINALLY see it (they've been fixing it up) and mostly it was nice to just spend a few days with them. I feel like we didn't get nearly enough time together, and I hope we get to go back again soon!
The final phase was actually the whole reason for the trip, which was the Via de Cristo Annual Gathering in Charlotte, NC. That was Thursday-Sunday, and was our second year attending. And it was actually bittersweet because last year's trip to Vegas to attend the annual gathering was fraught with challenges: there was the one day we spent basically the whole day in the ER because the hubby wasn't feeling well and had just been diagnosed with sarcoidosis, but wasn't sure if the chest pain and trouble breathing he was having were related or not; and then on the day we were leaving, while we were sitting in the airport waiting to board our flight, my Mom called me to find out when I'd be home because my Dad wasn't doing very well. I basically went from the airport to the nursing home and spent the next 4 days there, then went home Thursday night (with my nephew and his fiancee so they could spend the night at our place), and went back to the nursing home Friday and that's the day my Dad died.
So! Lots of emotions going on as we basically repeated the same thing we were doing last year at this time when the worst week of my life began.
For the most part I've been okay. Had a few moments where it just hits me again, and I'm sure there are more to come. I'm not looking forward to the rest of the week. I'm trying not to think about it, but I still am, of course. One year. One fucking year already. I think I mentioned before that when it first happened, I wanted to put as much time between myself and that day as possible. And I still do. That was an awful day and I don't want it to be close by. I want it in the distant past, so the good memories can take over.
It's a beautiful thing when the good memories take over.
So! I took today off, like I said. I've actually accomplished a lot so far today. I got a little bit of yard work done, but it's really hot and humid out so I didn't get as much done as I would've liked. I'm also doing our vacation laundry, and I got half the garage swept and part of it cleaned up (it's amazing, we've only lived here three years but the junk that's accumulating in the garage already...I filled the dumpster up quickly with stuff that I'd just put to the side to deal with later. Because if I haven't fixed the yard art I inherited from my parents up in the last 3 years, I'm not going to do it now.) Dumpster is the wrong word, it's not one of those big dumpster thingies, it's the regular-sized household thing you put your trash bags in so the waste management company can pick it up once a week. Receptacle but that's not the word I'm looking for, either. Oh well.
I'm all inspired to landscape my yard now after seeing my SIL's yard in NC. I need to retire so I have time to do this stuff, lol. Both of my hubby's sisters have these beautifully landscaped yards, and I have plenty of space to plant stuff but I just...don't. I need to just start buying stuff and planting it and see what happens. I did plant 3 hydrangea bushes earlier this month, so, yay! We'll see how they go. And I bought like 5 bleeding heart roots to plant, too. The problem is, I overthink these things. Like, where should I put them? Does it really matter? Well, kinda, because if I put them in the wrong place, they'll get plowed over in the winter. Or eaten by deer. But I just need to do it anyways and figure out what works and what doesn't. The deer are gonna eat stuff no matter where I put it. My hostas have no leaves anymore, but they grow back every year anyway. More cats: we need more cats. HAHAHAHA
Alright, I suppose. We have Vespers rehearsal tonight and I'm debating over which classic car to take. Neither one have air conditioning (one has it but it doesn't work, and one doesn't have it at all) but I don't care because I need to drive a classic car tonight. I should check the weather and see if it's supposed to rain, because that will help me decide. Because one has wipers that work and one doesn't. Which reminds me, I should order the parts that the one needs to get the wipers to work.
Alrighty. Thanks for reading. God loves you and so do I!
Oh, I forgot to say that the reason we had to drive was so we could bring back moonshine from NC. ;)
No comments:
Post a Comment