Today was a holiday (Twelfth Night/Epiphany) and I had hoped to get outside for a bit but it was pouring down rain most of the day, so I stayed inside and worked on projects instead. Anders removed the lights from the trees and took them apart. You should have seen the circle of green needles on the floor in the playroom! An inch deep!
It took me nearly all day to pack up the tree ornaments, but I finally got it done, and then promptly covered the dining room table again with DVDs. I want to inventory what we have, make sure there all of them are keepers and Anders and I are discussing some new storage/shelf solutions for them as well as the rest of the stuff in the computer room/library.
I also got the PDF downloaded from Livejournal so I can start formatting my 2013 book. 🙂 Project progress!
Karin sprained her ankle badly during the indoor soccer tournament she played in on Friday. It was the first time she’s played soccer in more than two months as she was taking time off to really rest up her knees and going to the gym for strength training to help get them in shape. She played 5 indoor games and was hurt at the very end. Her team took third place (her actual soccer team had three teams in this tournament and one of the others took first place). Good thing we had saved my crutches from when I sprained my foot several years ago. Martin got them down from the attic and she’s been hobbling about all weekend with her foot wrapped. Ouch! She had already been invited to her boyfriend’s house for dinner yesterday, so I drove her over there to drop her off and when she got out of the car, he came out to get her and swept her up into his arms to carry her into the house. Awwwwww!
Russell and I spent several hours on Skype both yesterday and the day before going over all our options for our BIG birthday trip this coming summer. The problem was that even though San Diego was HIS idea and he basically had to talk ME into it back before Christmas, the more he thought about it, the less excited he got. I have rather mixed feelings about it because after being convinced and then doing some research I really thought southern California sounded like a lot of fun. There’s so much to do and see and it would have meant a lot of options if we turn out to be a big group.
BUT we both need to be excited about this, so we started going back over the places we had discussed before: Ireland, Benelux, Prague, the Pacific Northwest, and still southern California. The problems were that we are planning this trip for late summer and we didn’t want to go anywhere that would be too hot, which rules out a HUGE amount of choices. Some of our earlier options were ruled out simply because of that: no Greece, no Spain, no east coast USA. Asia and Australia were ruled out as too far and too expensive. St. Petersburg went on and then off the table again because of visa issues. And we knew that if we chose someplace in Europe, that would mean friends and family in the States would have a harder time coming and vice versa. BUT again, we also knew that we couldn’t base the trip on what would be most convenient for others: it had to make US happy.
We ended up taking the night to think about, research and come back to make a final decision yesterday. The other major issue was that Russell and Kathey have been EVERYWHERE. I didn’t feel right about picking a place that they had already been to, though that turned out to be nearly impossible anyway. And we wanted our destination to be either someplace we had either never been to and really wanted to visit or someplace we had been to but loved and wanted to go back to.
Ironically, the very first place either of us ever mentioned in conjunction with this trip was the one that kept coming up over and over so finally we just slapped our foreheads and said, OKAY. Ireland it is! My brother bought a Lonely Plant travel book for Ireland before we had even talked the second time. Karin, of course, is really upset about not getting to go to San Diego and I don’t know how to make it up to her for that, but I DO really want to go to Ireland and it’s MY birthday, so she’ll just have to suck it up.