Birthday, other Updates

We finally have rain, the burn ban is lifted, waterfalls are going again and all is starting to right itself.
Matt and I spent an afternoon filling in a few nearby counties on his geocaching map and hitting 900 finds.

Around the house, we have been doing a few things to make it more cozy for winter.  

We have a new couch-first one in...18 years.
Bought a few rugs, spent an afternoon doing some weather proofing.  It's not perfect, but it's getting more cozy and that's the goal!

We had a total of 10 kids here for Ben's b-day.  Jake, Rho, Chan, Michael and Casey went to Pathfinder and the rest of the kids stayed here to play boardgames.

Growing up!

Murphy...*sigh*

Spent Monday with my father, today we are getting tires on Jake's ride, tomorrow is a hike with friends, Friday is lunch with some new ladies I have met.  I am really excited about it!  I am ready to start branching out and finding some friends who actually want to hang out instead of just SAY they do and never actually take me up on any offers.  WTF is up with that?  Just say you don't want to and let me stop wasting my time, yo.

Anyway, not mad, just can't figure why people need to draw things out the way they do.

Feeling hopeful-in spite of the Cheeto Elect and his dumbassery.

Richard Martin Trail North End

Today Matt and I headed out to walk the northern end of the Richard Martin Trail from Elkmont to the Tennessee state line, about 6 miles one way.

We did the southern 5 miles last spring.

We had barely gotten started down the trail when we saw this! 
There were at least a dozen scattered along the trail, it was very exciting.

These guys are not due to bloom until June.

The northern end of the trail is prettier, I think.  It winds around and goes down a long hill for a couple of miles (which is uphill on the way back and somehow steeper!)

 Other than 3 horses and a couple with a dog, we had the trail to ourselves all day!

The trail ends at the TN state line at Veto.

Matt took this one!  I thought we were doing 10 miles total, so I wanted a pic with the 10  mile marker.  When we got back to the van, we had done 12.1 miles.

 Looking waaaay back over the road toward Alabama off in the distance.

I got excited, thinking I had spotted the Easter Bunny off in the distance under that mower trailer!

*sigh*  No bunny.

We drove back out looking for a cheese place that was not open, so we kept driving to get to the next intersection and viola!  My grandparent's old house!  I have not seen it in 17 years, when they moved to Kentucky to live with my aunt.  It was SO much bigger when I was a child.  Needless to say, I chattered Matt's ear off on the way to Athens about everything Granddaddy and I used to do together.  : ) 

It was a great day, I really enjoyed our walk.  It took just over 4 hours due to us stopping and taking pictures and milling around at the bridges and the TN state line.  I was pleased with our pacing!

Tomorrow, Jake goes for his wisdom teeth to be removed.  I am a wreck! 

Monday

It's Matt's last day off until our trip in the spring!  We have spent the day hiding out from the blustery winds!  Jake has play practice this evening, so we will have to leave our nest soon enough. 

One of the things we have done today is finalize the route for the trip.  It went something like this:  Me: reading furiously for weeks (at least 15 guide books), making notes, looking up sites, sketching possible routes, coming up with a budget, checking room rates, calling people all over the US to talk about weather and making plans for what to pack, trying to decide where to eat and how far we can feasibly get in a day and still see at least the highlights of the area we will be in without missing anything really good, like a ghost town, hot springs or an ice cream shop.  Hey, artisan ice cream is making a comeback and there are three Mother Earth News suggested shops on our route.  Denver, Kansas and Memphis!

Matt: 'e-mail me that route so I can plot geocaches along it'.  He's been muttering and tweaking for hours now.

Yes, that's his contribution.  I am so excited I could probably explode, so excited that I am super-hyped up and I sobbed my way through 'Slipping Through My Fingers' when Chan and I watched Mamma Mia today.  Okay, I cry every time I hear it, but today I boo-hooed.  *sigh*  The older she gets, the more I can relate.  Waaaaa 

Anyway, I am an emotional heap, I am exhausted by the trip already, it's an entity.  Today alone I watched a documentary with the kids about Yellowstone (which scared us all!) and then we watched a slide show featuring Zion and Bryce and the Tetons, I bought 16 eco-friendly batteries and 2 chargers and I called to set up an appointment to get Jake's wisdom teeth pulled (needs to be done by April) and wrote up the play rehearsal calendar through the play at the end of next month.  I also walked my 3.66 miles while watching Mamma Mia and sobbing.  LOL  Then, I had a bath and read half of Kenneth Oppel's new book about Victor Frankenstein.  Brilliant stuff, the book.  The bath was lovely as well.



Then I lined up a couple more stops, one in Salida, CO to swim in the hot springs fed pool, as Matt will fly home before we get to Thermopolis and Yellowstone to swim there.  I am hoping to parcel out the rest of the work into little chunks and it will be mentally better for me.  hahaha!

It's time now to get to play practice.  On this, the first day of a new play season, it's hard to imagine how very very quickly it will be Show Week, it just seems like lots of running back and forth and handing over checks, but sooner than we realize, it will be the last performance and over.  It's so odd when a play ends, it just stops and there's nothing after.  It seems that final solid week of rehearsals and performances and that frenzy boils up and over and disappears.  There's no cool down period.  The dads manhandle the stage extensions into the basement, props get gathered up, the floor is swept, the chairs lined up and an hour after the last curtain call, the theater looks like nothing ever happened.

But, before the end, the start, which is today.  I am so thrilled the kids are not only heading off down the yellow brick road again, but with many of their friends in tow!  Emily and Zachary, Britney, Keilee, Austin and Griffin will all be there, too!  What a wonderful adventure!

Thursday!

On Thursday, we headed out to have an adventure.  Matt wanted to geocache, I wanted to check out a new campground and we all wanted to go to the museum and see the sun set at Cheaha.

We started out leaving later than I planned, which set everything back an hour.  Then the place Matt wanted to cache was not where I had understood it to be, so we ended up driving a long way to get there.  We cached about an hour and then went to get lunch and to check out the campground.   There is a bridge out about 5 miles back on the roads you take to get there, so I did not get to see it.  : (  By the time we got back out to a paved road, it was after 3, so we decided to skip the museum this time in order to get to the state park and play a while before the sun went down.

We were taking some family shots and Matt nailed his head on a rock, which pretty much ended the whole 'fun' part of the evening, so we drove around to watch the sun set and headed home.  Not the great adventure I had hoped for, but I do know the roads to the campground are maintained and hard-packed, I would take Poppy out there for a few days.  If I knew what the campground looked like.

We went caching at the old Coosa River Annex in Talladega.

It's that part of Alabama that is a combination of pine trees, bramble and red mud

There are these 'igloos' all over the 300 some odd acres. They used to house explosives.

Now they hold graffiti and tire marks.  The echo inside is amazing, I have never heard anything like it.

There was a cemetery in the annex, so I had to go check it out. It was run-down and depressing, the graves were in the side of a rocky red hill and none had been tended in years, most of the stones were falling apart.

It looks like the city might be doing something with some of the old bunkers.  We passed this crew right near the front cutting a bigger opening into the front of one of the bunkers.  There is a man in a white hard hat sitting down beside that truck.  He's operating a water-cooled cutter via remote!

I really did not take many pictures, this is at Cheaha out on Bald Rock.

The sunset was not spectacular.  There were no clouds to bounce color off of and the sun was simply directly ahead and blinding.  I got what I could, it was FREEZING on the brow.