First Blog Post

Well, this is our attempt at blogging. Paul doesn't know it yet, but I'll show it to him when I post. Many people have shown interest in following our travels, so hopefully this will work out. I'm sure the writing and organization will improve as we become more experienced, but I hope you will enjoy it just the same.

As of today, I'm still wandering through the house digging in cupboards and cabinets. It seems everywhere I look I find stashed cardboard: boxes from the cell phone 4 phones ago, the digital camera from 5 years ago, and much, much more.

Paul looked at the weather today and determined it really isn't nice anywhere in the general direction we're going after Thanksgiving. We'd like to avoid 40 and precipitation if at all possible. After some searching we found one bright spot; Oklahoma City. Seems there it's only going to be occasional showers and a better temperature than Denver and New Mexico. Tentatively, for today, we're thinking of going to Oklahoma City for a week while the weather system passes. Then we'll head to Phoenix.

One bright spot of cleaning, I found a really old version of Visio on CD (version 5) that I can use on my laptop for work. It has the shapes and exports to a .jpg, which is all I'm really worried about.

We had an early Thanksgiving at my folks' place. Mom has developed a cold, but still managed to create an excellent meal. Ali was nice and went to pick up Andy after work so that they both could participate in what is likely our last family meal for awhile. She has coordinated to bring him back down to the house on Tuesday so maybe we can have some more family time before going. We'll see what happens. Mom and Paul presented Paul and I with their Christmas gifts for us tonight; a pair of fabulous heavy-duty super cool reclining lounge chairs from Cabelas. We will definitely put them to good use.

We took out a lot of kitchen supplies to the motorhome, so other than food, we're on track to not short ourselves of anything major. Bathroom stuff has been loaded in the motorhome already except for a few bath towels.

We decided to take the electric couch out of the motorhome since it's not that comfortable and we don't need it for sleeping arrangements. There is one recliner already in there and our plan was to take Paul's current chair with us in place of the couch. Unfortunately, it will not be back from repair by the time we need to leave. So this past Friday, November 20th, 2009, Paul went shopping for a new chair.

Paul's daughter, Shanda, met us for lunch and shopping for furniture. She is a pro at fit, function, and feasibility when it comes to shopping. The first stop was to Homemakers where we have purchased all of our past furniture. For a gargantuan store, they sure don't have any chair stock. The few Paul found that he liked they didn't have in stock. Paul went on to American by himself and was re-met by Shanda after she ran some errands. Luckily he found a very suitable recliner and Shanda was most generous and provided it as a past/future birthday/Christmas/birthday gift.

Taking out the couch freed up space in the living room, and we'll bring an end table from home to put in between the chairs. While the couch is safely removed, the seat belts for the couch are not. Paul could crawl under the motorhome and remove them, but I don't want to run the risk of losing them, so I need to sew up some handy little drawstring bags or such to disguise them. Fortunately I have lots of neutral colored fabric scraps which will work just fine for this occasion. The problem, of course, is time. We'll see if I get them done. Right now, they're banded up with wire ties so at least they're out of the way.

That's all I can think of for now. Going to close this post for the night, and I'm sure I'll think of more things to say tomorrow.

Until then,
Ann