It’s a destination, not a journey

We’re heading out this morning on the 2 day trip to Naples FL. The car is packed, the dog is at the kennel, the cats have been rounded up and the house sitter has arrived (She brought her netbook, I warrned her about the phone problem)

We’ve decided on the wander through Virginia and North Carolina route for the beginning of the trip and then cut down 301 to Ocala or Gainsville (we almost always miss the Gainsville exit) to meet up with I75 route for the end of the trip. I predict we will get lost in Danville or maybe Lynchburg because it wouldn’t be a vacation without driving 10-15 miles in the wrong direction. Though maybe for variety construction detours around Columbia SC will confuse us into heading west rather than south. It’s been a few years for that one.

The longest part of this 1150 mile drive, mentally, is the 272 miles on I75. Florida just goes on and on.  And it’s interstate so apart from spotting Waffle Houses there isn’t much to do but watch the mile markers go by and calculate in your head how much longer this trip is going to take. One year I counted all the Waffle Houses we passed from Washington DC to Naples. It was an impressive total but I cannot recall it.

The boys have picked out some movies for the trip – mostly Scooby Doos, plus Wall-E, The Road to El Dorado and Ratatoulli. I have Scooby Doo’s complete 3rd season as a surprise for the long I75 stretch.  I also have Mario Party for the DS as a surprise if needed though I’m hoping on keeping it for I95 in Virginia part of the trip back (it’s the longest part of the trip home).

DH and I have some audio books to listen to (the boys have headsets for the DVD player & we set the radio speakers to the front only so we don’t have sound overlap). We have Terry Pratchett’s The Color of Magic and Going Postal. We also have the latest Hitchhiker’s Guide book - And Another Thing by Eoin Colfer. It’s had mixed reviews but listening to Douglas Adams on the trip is a tradition we’ve had since 1994, so we’re giving it a chance. We also have a BBC radio program – Old Harry’s Game, which is very funny. 

We’re hoping to get to Savannah, GA today. Theoretically we should get there about 10pm. I’ll be twittering & updating Facebook as events unfold so you can follow along if you want.

Technology is helping me again

I really wish it would stop doing that.

It’s the phone this time.

Actually it has been the phone for almost two years now but it comes in waves. Sometimes all those wonderful ‘features’ are the problem.

When I grew up (oh here she goes…) in the 70’s, a phone was physically attached to the wall. Possibly if there was a second phone in the house it was ‘portable’ in the sense that you could carry it into another room and plug it into a phone jack there (assuming there was a phone jack there and probably there was not) and then use it, but you were still tethered in place by a cord. Maybe, if you parents really loved you, you might have had a princess phone in your room, which was sleeker and lighter & usually had a longer cord so you could roll around on your canopy bed and hang upside down off the side while talking to your best friend about what this guy said to this girl about this other girl (we didn’t have BFFs back in the day. We had to use whole words). If they really really loved you they might have had a second line put in JUST FOR YOU! My parents didn’t love me that much (no phone in my room, no canopy bed and certainly no second line) so I had to stand in the kitchen, where the phone was mounted, when I was on the phone. Eventually a long cord for the handset was purchased and I could sit on the floor in the hall. But due to the house layout everyone could here exactly what I was saying.

It was hell.

But no one in my family ever stood in the kitchen listening to a vague distant ringing while shouting “Where the hell is the phone?!?!” and sometimes I sorta miss knowing exactly where the phone is. Today for example.

We have 2 portable phones. We got them because it would be convenient to be able to wander around the house while talking, which it is. And there is no jack in the kitchen or the playroom and it' would be handy to be able to just take the handset with us so we don’t have to keep getting up and going to the other end of the house when the phone rings. Which it is. But 75% of the time we leave the phone where ever we were when we finished speaking so we still have to get up and go get it – assuming we can find it. It only rings 4 times before the answering machine comes on and sometimes that is not enough ringing to find even one handset. Especially when both of them are later discovered in the towel closet & no one can remember even being in the towel closet.

One of the helpful features of our portable phone set is that it scan a couple of bands for the best frequency when you answer the phone. One of those frequencies is the one the wireless router uses. So about half the time if you answer the phone you cut off the internet. There is no way to tell it to stop doing this. You can have it rescan once you realize it has cut off the router but there is no way of preventing it.

The problem we hadn’t foreseen at all is one of power. There is no battery back up. The phone unit runs on electricity so if the power goes out, so does the phone. Meaning I can’t call the electric company to tell them I have no power. We only get cell signal in one corner of the house where the cell booster lives and it runs on electricity. So in order to call the electric company I have to go outside in whatever bad weather is happening and stand on the highest ground I can find and hope for a bar on my cell. Also due to a recent weird wiring issue the phone base had to be plugged into the jack in the living room instead of our bedroom. The nearest electrical outlet is one that is on the switch. So we can never turn the lights off completely in the living room or the phone won’t work.

In the past week I have lost one handset completely, even the locator beep doesn’t turn it up. The phone is currently cutting out my internet connection about 85% of the time. I absentmindedly turned the living room lights off twice on days when I was expecting phone calls and only realized when wondered why it had been so blessedly telemarketing call free all afternoon. And the power went out yesterday morning. I asked DH to call me at 9am because I had an appointment & a dead cell phone so no way of knowing what time it was. Both of us forgot it wouldn’t matter if he called me because the phone wouldn’t work.

I swear I am going to go buy one of those old school wall mount phones off of ebay & run a jack back to the spot on the kitchen wall where there originally was a phone mounted in 1978.

Photos for a timeline

There will be no photos in this post despite the title.

Havoc came home with a school project. It is related to their current social studies segment somehow that was never adequately explained. They have to do a time line of their lives.

All 6-7 years of it

What came home was a couple pieces of construction paper glued together with numbers running along the bottom. The child is supposed to, with parental help, mark milestones or events for each year, they want you to use photos. Parent helps arrange the photos & labels & the child decorates it.

Havoc says “Do we have some photos of me to use?”

Oh little boy. Are they so prevalent they are background decor in your life now? Have the numerous photo albums, the hardbound book of your play last year and the non stop photo slide show screen saver on my computer become the same as the legos on the floor? Just things you don’t notice?

I say “Havoc. Mommy has over 10,000 photos that she knows of and that doesn't include the last 5 months.”

“You have 10,000 photos of me?”

“Of you and your brother mostly, but a couple thousand are of things like toys and the house and vacations.”

Havoc goes off to inform Mayhem that Mama has “Ten thousand photos of ME, Mayhem”, which of course sends Mayhem to me wondering “You have 10 fousand pichers of me?”

We looked at the folders of photos on my laptop. Mayhem did not mind that his brother had 15 folders all to himself, while he did not. Until Havoc started bragging on how he has more photos than Mayhem. I had to explain to Mayhem that 10 years from now Havoc would move out & go to college and Mayhem would still be here. Then there would be folders of just Mayhem photos. This seemed to satisfy him and he went back to playing Lego Batman while Havoc and I sorted out timeline photos.

OMG! I have so many photos! I am so not lying when I say over 10,000 and geez can we say ‘excessive’? Havoc had about 20 photos picked out before we finished years 0 & 1 and there was no room. 4 photos a year was pretty much the max. It took us over an hour to choose 30 photos for 8 columns. Every column has a birthday photo, a vacation photo, a Christmas related photo and either a 1st day of school or Ren Fair photo. I had to start skipping folders and just going right to the month with the event because Havoc wanted to look at and discuss every single thing in every photo. Which is sweet and fun to do for about 45 minutes. But after and hour and beginning each time with “how old was I in this photo” which when you are looking at things chronologically and are still looking at pictures in the May2005 folder, gets really really annoying.

It’s a cute timeline. We glued in the pictures I printed & Havoc drew in the columns around them images he remembered from the photos we weren’t able to fit. He took it in today.

I wish I had taken a picture of it.

A problem with rural life

Directions.

I live in the middle of nowhere. There is a town to the east of us and a tiny town south west of us in a 20 mile radius. If you double and add some to that radius you get a larger town north of us and a small city south of us. There is one main road connecting all 4 places and we live about 12 miles from that. Everything else is winding country roads. We don’t exist on Google or Mapquest. Our address comes up about a mile & half from where we actually live and on a different dirt road in another county. Directions from that spot to the main road include this bit “turn left onto unnamed dirt road 0.7 miles” which is totally bogus. The road has a name and if you drive about 50 yards further there is a perfectly good paved road that parallels ‘unnamed dirt road’.

The kennel we are putting the dog in while on vacation has a similar problem. (Athena does not stay on her lead run, she gets out of every collar & harness ever made & then disappears for a few hours & turns up again around 4pm. We don’t want to stress out the house sitter with worrying about the dog getting loose & whether she will ever come back. The cats just hang out in the yard). They say on their website basically - “Google us for directions? Good luck with that.” and then spell out different ways you can get to them from the various towns in the area. (including helpful bits like ‘if the bridge is flooded out, go back to this road…) What we can’t figure out is if there is a more direct way or which of the two nearest places should be our starting point. We have to pick up the directions midway in whichever we choose but I wish I could figure out the mileage so I knew which was shorter. The road we’d meet up with from the south town does seem like it goes on forever but I think that is because it’s just the one road, then just one turn there at the end (well, not the end but the road the kennel is on, 3.2 miles later). If we met up with the road in the east town directions there are 3 other roads we’d have to turn on before that last one, which keeps things from seeming to take so long.

I’ve been moving routes around on google maps, getting from the general area of my house to the turn for the road to the kennel, which are at least locations google can find, but it can’t seem to make up it’s mind how I should get there and knowing it will not make the 50 yard change to a paved road I distrust everything it says. It says it’s only 15 miles away but should take anywhere from 43 to 47 minutes to get there. Which leads me to suspect there are dirt roads involved

Tomorrow I have to sort out how to get to Florida. Do I go to I95 and straight down to Jacksonville or do I drive through Virginia, meander into North Carolina, then using various interstates, finally meeting up with I95 near the Georgia border? Do I cut across Florida at Jacksonville and pick up I75 somewhere north of Tampa? Continue down 95 to I4 and take it across to I75?  Or do I head south from Orlando to Immokalee and then from there over to Naples? Could I just avoid Tampa and Orlando somehow? The trip, on paper could take 17 to 19.5 hours depending on changes. I just find endless I95 boring, though really ‘get on I95 in Washington DC, drive 850 miles to I4, make a left’ makes it hard to get lost. And we regularly get lost driving through the small towns on the US & state routes in Virginia and Florida. Last year we drove a half hour in the wrong direction around Immokalee after turning around because we though we had originally been headed the wrong way, though it turned out we weren’t. Interstate travel keeps that from happening.

But it’s so dull.

Weekly Winners - week 46

The weather was finally enough to rake up the leaves.

and jump in the pile

These guys joined us

for a game of Hunt the Dinosaur

they were well hidden

For more Weekly Winners please visit Lotus at Sarcastic Mom. Thanks for stopping by