Tag: Travel

Be resourceful

September 20, 2024

Sometimes the best laid plans don’t always work out as you intended.

The Asheville Quilt Show is next week. This event has been on my calendar for several months. Originally, I’d planned for an overnight stay in Asheville and hubs would be home to keep the dog. He now has an event with TR next week.

The sticky wicket: What to do with Sadie?

It’s Fall Break for our local school district. Our doggy day care is full. Friends who could keep her are on vacation themselves. The college student who occasionally housesits for us, now has a full-time job. Even Grandma and Poppy are away next week.

I really didn’t want to cancel my trip, so Sadie is coming with me. I understand Asheville is a super dog-friendly city. We’ll see if that is true. I have a pet-friendly hotel arranged AND doggy day care session(s) reserved for her while I attend the quilt show. The weather is also cool enough for her to safely sit in the car if I want to stop somewhere along the way. Let’s hope the 10 day weather forecast is wrong about the rain. We’d both appreciate getting to explore Asheville without getting soaked.

Excited for what’s next

July 10, 2024

Last night hubs and I celebrated my birthday at The Blue Ridge Grille in Buckhead. It’s one of our favorite places to celebrate extra special events. The food and service were superb, as usual. I think the last time we were there was to celebrate hubs retiring from Home Depot. That’s been well over two years ago.

Anyhow, this particular birthday meant I finally achieved the “magic age” for my teacher retirement benefits to kick in. (No more mortgage level health insurance premiums either!) We celebrated what’s ahead as we finally exit the holding pattern we’ve been in the past two years. Retirement officially begins August 1st.

We don’t expect much to change when it comes to our day-to-day activities. We’re just excited to have the funds previously earmarked to pay exorbitant health insurance premiums now available to tackle some minor home improvement projects and put toward a couple more bucket list trips. Sadie is also slated to get a new dogmobile (my SUV) by year end.

We’ve also started thinking seriously about where we’d like to live in retirement. That’s a tough one. We love our location and neighborhood, but are not happy about future plans for our area. I’ll be attending a DOT open house today about the future express lanes coming to the top end of I-285. I’m curious to see how they plan to add toll lanes in each direction with all the multimillion dollar homes along the proposed path between Vinings and Sandy Springs. I’m more interested in how the planned entrance/exit ramp less than 1 mile from our home will impact the surrounding residential neighborhoods.

Dining table decorated for birthday celebration
Cute table decorations that greeted us when celebrating my birthday!

Holiday Reflections

December 30, 2023

Mid-December was a whirlwind as we celebrated Christmas a little early with our extended families. Sadie & I managed to get in a couple of extra facility visits, too, which brought cheer to staff and guests. Kids were out of school by 12/19, so CraftLAB was in session for holiday crafting. Sadie was overjoyed to see her fan club!  We even added a new member to CraftLAB! Somewhere in all the festivities, hubs and I managed to catch the crud that’s been making the rounds. It made for a rather low-key Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. 

Being sick also meant that my SUV sat idle for a couple of days. The intermittent dead battery saga continues; however, we now know the underlying issue is a lot more complicated than first thought. Apparently my driving the SUV daily recharged the battery just enough to mask any power drain. Preliminary tests by the local mechanic pointed to a computer control module somewhere in the vehicle causing a 1 amp parasitic battery draw. (This is enough to drain a battery in 24-36 hours.) This is a dealer issue, so my vehicle will be there next week. I’m grateful we caught this now instead of me being stranded somewhere.

I’ve really enjoyed the Christmas season this year (which is a big deal because I normally don’t enjoy the month of December) and look forward to ringing in the new year.  I’m ready for two online quilting events happening New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day. Will I see you in the livestream chat?

Photo by Jill Wellington on Pexels.com