Friday, February 23...Listen to the Music

   My working title of this year's journal is In Search of Open Roads and Starry Skies, although the daily title will change.  I'm reacquainting myself with the various quirks of the blogging process.  There are things it won't let me do and then it makes changes that I didn't want...all dealing with design style.  It sort of drives me nuts but in order to not spend too much time fighting with it, I'm going to have to overlook those things.  I wish me luck with that. 😏 
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   Even though we knew last year when we arrived home from our 2017 winter getaway that we’d be snowbirding it back out to Arizona for a month or so in early 2018, it all snuck up on me rather quickly.  First off, there was the departure date debate:  I thought we were aiming for the beginning of March but Kim thought February 23 was better. That’s a difference of 5 days…not much in the big scheme of things but yet it felt significant when I looked around at the work I had to do before we left.

   So when I realized Kim was serious about leaving on Feb. 23, I had to mentally shift gears.  It mostly involved my sewing…the items I had committed to get done before we left date now had to be done sooner…new callers had to be told I wouldn’t be available for alterations until mid-April…plus I still had two late Christmas gifts to finish.  So I changed my schedule and work habits…gifts were finished and mailed; then dresses and sleeves were shortened, zippers were replaced, and pants were hemmed…and all were returned.  Only then could I turn my attention to making sure I was going to return to a picked up clean house.  Along the way I ran through the list of things to do over and over in my head…three days ago I started writing the lists down and leaving them everywhere.  Post-It notes are my friend. J  The last couple of days didn’t have a lot of down time with each of us finishing up last minute chores…and before we pulled out of the driveway today we played the “Did you remember to… Game”.  When everything was loaded, I took our picture and we were on our way.

   And about 10 minutes after we left the house, I realized something which caused some anxiety and led to ask if we could pull over in the next decent sized parking lot.  Kim listened to the reason for my request, then obligingly pulled over in Ellsworth so I could get into the trailer and check my saddlebags.  It had just occurred to me that although I felt it was safe to assume that my goggles, jacket, gloves, etc. were in the bags because that’s where I thought I had left them at the end of last year’s riding, I realized I hadn’t actually checked to make sure.  Aghhh!!  Please stop…Must see with my own eyes….must see…must see... 

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   Last year it became a game to me to find a song title to use as the title of each day’s entry.  I didn’t necessarily care about the lyrics being relevant, just the title that went along with something I had done, seen or thought about that day.  Some were easy while others required a bit of research; when I told Kim what I was doing, he was a great help.  Between the two of us, we have a large musical library stored in our heads…and what we don’t know, Google does. J  So we’re playing the song title game again this year.