I like to be warm and cozy as we head into the COLD time of year. Right now I find myself wearing my Lands End down vest in the house and under a jacket when I’m outside. It’s handy at work too!
At home, I have my favorite pair of pajamas and they are so comfortable the only time I don’t wear them is in the dead of summer! They were from Victoria’s Secret many years ago and look like long underwear! On weekday mornings I’m in my workout clothes but, on the weekends, I like to wear these pajamas.
What technology would you be better off without, why?
I have a love/hate relationship with social media.
Social media refers to “the means of interactions among people in which they create, share, and/or exchange information and ideas in virtual communities and networks”. Maybe that’s what it was intended for, maybe some sites are still for that intended use, but for me, it’s an absolute time waster!
I’ve spent so much time doom scrolling, scrolling, scrolling. Will I miss something if I don’t swipe up one more time? I don’t know! Let’s find out!
On the flip side, I use it for our remodeling business by posting projects we’ve completed to entice people to call us! I try to post often enough so we show up in feeds and cross post on a variety of sites. I’m hoping people keep scrolling until they come across my posts.
I’ve deleted Facebook from my phone and IPad for the tenth time in a couple of months so if I want to check our business account, I access it from my computer and quickly switch accounts. I’m hanging on to Instagram because of family chat and if I have to set a timer I will!
What’s the hardest decision you’ve ever had to make? Why?
I left a full-time with benefits job to start up a remodeling company with my husband.
12 year prior I had moved cross country to live with my soon-to-be husband, so I know about making a big leap of faith. But now we’re talking about income, and we have a mortgage and a son to provide for!
For him, he was not happy with the new home builder he was working for, and as an “independent contractor” (really, just a carpenter that back then a company could get away with not putting them on payroll), the builder could make his own rules for paying for their work.
For me, our son was turning 9 and would be heading into 4th grade in September. I had had the week between Christmas and New Year off and Oh Boy, I had a taste of time off, just being home and I wanted more of that!
We got him licensed and insured, he worked on and off for the home builder and, we advertised in the local weekly newspaper that got delivered to homes.
I left my job in early June and we worked out of our unfinished basement. I took care of business and set up appointments during the day for him to go on after his work day. I also picked up a part-time job at our son’s school in the library! I worked from 9 to 1, worked the school schedule, and was in our office in the afternoon. It was a dream setup!
Over the 25 years, we built a garage at our home with office space above where we worked for 12 years, and in 2018, we bought a unit in a business complex for our office. We went from my husband working alone to present day, he’s retired, I’m semi-retired, our son runs the business, we have a great person in the office, and we have 5 employees out in the field.
It was a tough decision, but I had faith that we would succeed. There were a lot of hills and valleys over those years, but we did what we set out to do.
In August of 2019, we took our sixth and final week long motorcycle trip. We traveled to upstate New York. Among the places we visited, our final stop was Storm King Art Center in New Windsor New York.
Wavefield
It’s a 500 acre park with over 100 outdoor sculptures and this is one of “the sculptures”!
It’s called Wavefield and it was created by Maya Lin, the sculptor of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington D.C. The medium is earth and grass – but you probably figured that out!
There are many impressive sculptures in the park and it was fun to wander around the grounds looking at the sculptures. Some move around and one is a giant swing that you can sit on.
I’d love to go back there and walk through the fields!
I had a story thought in my head and came to my computer to spend a(n) half hour writing. Instead, I went to the computer, saw my email account was up, thought I’d check those emails, and then remembered I wanted to order a couple of new bras, so I went to the email I received the other day, browsed through the site, and ordered a couple. Remembered the printer was out of paper so I had to ‘rassle the ream of paper from its illogical location and fill the tray. While waiting for the pages to print, I remembered my original intention was to write about my thoughts from my walk this afternoon.
Thursday afternoon, I watched an author talk with Javier Zamora, author of Solito. He is El Salvadoran and it is a memoir of his excursion from El Salvador to the United States when he was nine years old. Via a “coyote”. I haven’t read the book yet, but as I was listening to his story, I ordered the book through Barnes and Noble and picked it up the next day.
This was an enjoyable way to spend time on the computer. Something productive, something I didn’t have to talk in or answer any questions, and something that was NOT doomscrolling.
For months, my brain and emotions have been overloaded with this election season. Now that it’s over and the real fun begins, I’m not sure how much more I can take. I feel like the social media sites no longer serve their purpose of feeding me flowers, dogs, and friends and are now filled with the political sites I subscribed to over this time.
I’m trying to share fun things to stories along with items that might make you go “hmmmm”, and maybe if I do a little less hearting Instagram posts, my feed might get a little more fun.
We took a Danube River cruise in October 2018 and we had a great time except…. There was sort of a pre-excursion part of the cruise where we stayed at a resort for 2 nights and were bused back to Munich for an excursion and only had an hour at an Oktoberfest. Once we boarded our boat in Passau we cruised forward for the night but then had to be bused to Regensberg and another excursion because the water levels were low and Viking took our spot in Regensberg. It created very long bus rides, shortened excursions, and cranky passengers (not us!).
We decided to cancel all our non-included excursions and woke Sunday morning to the notification that breakfast was ending in five minutes!
We got up, took our showers and headed out to find someplace for breakfast – in a country where we could barely speak the language (ok, we couldn’t at all).
Passau Germany 2018
We found this lovely passage and wandered around a bit until we found a cute little restaurant so we sat down and helped ourselves to the buffet being served. then realized the restaurant was part of a hotel!
They were very gracious and let us have our meal – thank God because we were starved!
The trip improved from there and we enjoyed ourselves traveling down the Danube.
Let’s pretend today is Wednesday! Unless you had such a horrible Wednesday, you’d rather forget it….
This was taken in October 2013. It was another fun travel trip with my sister, Janice, and her daughter Julie. We shared driving duties from Connecticut to Las Vegas, and then Jan and I would hop on planes and fly home.
We planned the trip to allow us to see a little of the area along the way. We timed our day right to stop at this site mid-morning and enjoy the grounds and the view from the TOP.
On our trip to California last year, we planned a day at Hearst Castle in San Simeon. We went on the Grand Rooms tour in the morning and the Upstairs Suites tour in the afternoon. Both tours included a stop at this outdoor pool – I didn’t care because the weather was gorgeous and so was the pool!
I can picture William Randolph Hearst and Marion Davies hosting parties with Cary Grant and Jean Harlow and Clark Gable lounging along side the pool or playing tennis.
I can’t resist taking a picture of my view when I am outside in the early morning. Wednesday there was fog because of the low night time temperatures reacting to the heat we’ve experienced during the day (at least that’s my theory, I don’t know if it’s fact!)
When my workout was done and I was heading back to the house, it was brighter, but the lights were still on and I could see the sky brightening.
A short time later, my husband called me outside to come look at the sunrise –
During the mid-summer, the sun is rising farther to the left behind the trees, so this time of year is always a treat to see it rising.
The day progressed to another sunny and warm one. I don’t know how long it will last so I’m taking advantage of it and taking an afternoon walk when I leave work for the day.
Thoughts From The Passenger Seat 