Well posting every day on our California trip didn’t exactly work out as planned.  Driving around 400 miles a day with extended stops for photo ops didn’t leave much time for writing or editing pictures.  The first hint of a problem came in Oklahoma City when we spent a total of about 4 hours at the National Memorial for the 1995 bombing.  I did manage to pull the pictures off the camera and put them into labeled folders on the laptop every night, but that’s about all.  The few things we managed to post along the way are not even the tip of the iceberg that our ship crashed against.

It’s been a very busy month, with no end in sight.  We’ve been home (well sort of) for a week and I haven’t even gotten caught up on all my email, much less updating websites and editing pictures.

To do the trip the way we originally conceived it would have taken, at least, twice as long.  We really needed to visit attractions and shoot photos on one day, spend the next day editing pictures, checking email, working on websites, and updating the blog-, then travel to the next destination on the third day.  Then we would have needed to add on the week for visiting with friends.  So we would have been gone about 2 months.  Oh well, the dream’s still there.  Maybe when Jim retires again, we’ll be able to make the trip that way.

In the meantime, we still want to share our pictures and adventures, so we’ll be adding them along and linking to them from Facebook as we did while traveling.  As we make other, shorter trips, we’ll undoubtedly  sandwich them in as well.

We got home in the evening of Saturday, the 8th, unloaded the car and crashed.  I didn’t even attempt to unpack, much less do any work.  After church last Sunday, I worked on updating that website and Jim attempted to edit the videos.  Unfortunately, he was having a mysterious computer glitch and his video work kept getting interrupted by the infamous “blue screen of death.”

On Monday, I made a trip to Richmond and Jim worked.  On Tuesday, we both went to Nashville.  Jim had an appointment with the VA eye clinic there.  On the way back, we stopped at Best Buy in Clarksville to pick up a power supply to try fixing Jim’s computer problems.  Wednesday, after spending the morning unpacking, doing laundry and checking email, paying bills online, and disposing of snail junk mail, I ran around town all afternoon catching up on other business matters.

Thursday and Friday, I did not leave the house.  I spent those two days recuperating and transferring my photos from the laptop to my desktop.  Since there were more than 3 thousand images, I didn’t have time to do much more than move them from one place to the other.

On Saturday, we spent most of the day grocery shopping.  Davie, the brother I live with, didn’t do any real shopping while I was gone.  He just picked up emergency stuff day by day. The freezer and pantry were almost empty.  My grandson’s reaction the day I got home was, “Thank God you’re home, maybe now Uncle Davie will go to the store.”  We went to Ft. Campbell for most of it, then hit Walmart, Kroger’s, and Market Place here in town.

Today, I am working on updating the church website again.  I still have two weekends worth of services to finish updating.  On Monday, my daughter and I will be leaving for Baltimore, MD to pick her son and his family up from the airport.

Next weekend, Jim and I will be heading to the Pennyrile Photography Weekend at Dawson Springs. It’s a study in finding new ways to look at an area where we have a lifelong history.  More on that subject later. Then my daughter, Chrystal, and I are planning a trip to the Illinois Garden of the Gods with the photography club on November 5th.  I seem to be spending more time on the road than at home.  At this rate, it may take me until next year to post all the photos.