Harboring Impulse Control Issues

This morning, Chandler and I were looking at the United States and we told each other 'we should go on over to Michigan and see the Great Lakes and come home through Ohio.  It's practically the same distance!'  To prove this, we stretched the yarn marking the current route over to the shoreline of Lake Michigan and then straight to the AL state line-same distance!  While we would miss Kansas and Nebraska that route, we'd pick up Minnesota, Wisconsin and Michigan and Ohio.  And, as Chandler pointed out, lots of good public radio comes from Chicago, and we could listen to it on WBEZ.  Maybe actually GO to see Wait, Wait Don't Tell Me.  Or meet Ira Glass. 

Then we started looking at going further, staying longer.  If we don't eat out often and camp every night and...*sigh*  I really do wish we could just drive and see until the tires fall off the van, sell it for the payoff amount plus bus fare and shipping our stuff back and then take a Greyhound home from wherever we end up.  Just head out and come back in the fall, full of stories, with so many photos I have to buy an external hard drive.  Come home with bags stuffed with with postcards and rocks, maps and brochures.  To argue over where exactly we were when we saw the bear or the moose or that porcupine.  With shoes caked in dirt from a dozen different states, with blister stories or new scars from some adventure or another, with a hole in our favorite tee from getting it snagged hiking 'somewhere in the Rockies'.  With tan lines from swimming in the desert and one from swimming in the Great Lakes and a different one from the afternoon on the coast of Maine when we threw rocks into the Atlantic and screamed when the seagulls swooped us. 

I want to get in the van, camping gear and cameras, clothes and laptop on board, headlights pointed that-a-way and gooooooooooo.

ka-put

I have dreamed twice now that I die March 14th.  I am not really sure what that means, but if it's a true omen, I was in bed this morning trying to work out my biggest regrets.

Of course, the kids-I want to see what happens, was unschooling a bad idea in the end?  How does it all work out?  Do they homeschool their own kids?  I also want them to go out west and see more of the country.  Matt can do that with my insurance money.  Someone may have to push this issue in my stead when the time is right.  Say by the...21st of March.

I want to see Jacki again, I would be really bummed to never ever see her again.  Even if she flies up for the funeral, I won't BE there.  (Save your money, J!  You and the girls meet Matt and the kids somewhere out west and throw a rock in a river for me). (And for goodness sake, take a picture of it!)

Mainly, there's just stuff I want to know.  How long will the van run, will the floor repair work on the camper, is Jessie going to be okay-her hips are in BAD shape and she's on meds for it.  I want to know if she gets better.  What happens to Kat in the end?  My bet is she leaves to hunt and never returns.  We notice after a week, maybe two. Do we ever move back to Tennessee?

I will be bummed to have not reached my weight loss goal, but at least I am on the right track and not gaining!  That would be worse, I think. 

There are things I want pictures of.  Places I want to see.  Ideas I have inside me, books I still want to read. 

I can't say there ever won't be, though.  I hope there never is, that I never put my camera down or decide to skip the library one day, that I never wake up one morning and realize nothing is rattling around in my head-no idea, no plans for travel, no random thoughts.

But really, though I still have a great deal of life left (I hope-I am certainly not ready to expire!!), I can't say I have this list of wrongs I hope to right or things I am sorry I have done.  It's all things I still want to do on that list.  That's not a bad feeling.