Recharging at Coniston

This past month has been jam packed of lots of good stuff. When we scheduled all of this we were looking at the calendar but did we know that there would be no down time in between all these events. Probably not! Just the highlights which don't include are day to day life events are: 1) San Francisco trip with Bee to see 2 sets of old friends and then sent her off to Taipei for the start of her 9 month comparative religions and cultures class 2) "Quick" trip over the pond to celebrate a sister-in-law's 70th birthday. Those are the major events, and with our normal crazy full lives, I realized on the trip up last night how much I need "Coniston" to recharge. I put quotes around Coniston, because I am not sure it is the place I need but the activity, or lack of activity that I need. Because we have a lot less things up here, there are less chores staring at me, or maybe it is the ever present big front window panes looking out at our affectionately named Channel 1 that allow me to ignore the cob webs and mouse turds that need to be cleaned up. YES, I SAID MOUSE TURDS! OK, these do not make me happy at all, but I guess they are a given when a house is in the middle of all of this wild life. I announced to them that I was coming down the hall last night and made sure they knew that I knew they were more afraid of me, then I am of them. This is was Murg always says, so I said this out loud to reassure myself. Funny story about this concept and Liam the snake. Ask me to tell you this one next time we are together.

Back to the title of this post after that little distraction and I do mean little . . . maybe

We talked almost the entire way up to Coniston last night and tried to answer some big life questions, what do we want to do when we grow up? When do we want to retire? What does it mean to be retired?

One AHA out of that and I have realized this before but not in sure a concrete way as last night, is that when we come to Coniston it is a vacation (Murg actually said this and I have thought about this before). So 2 weekends out of every month, we are on vacation. It helps with how little vacation we get as Americans compared to the rest of the world. That means we have 48 more days of vacation every year if we come up here 4 days a month and there are 12 months in the year.

I don't think in the 18 months that Coniston has been in our lives, that every day up here has been a vacation, but for me 90% of them have.

At the very least, this weekend I have taken the time to post to my blog, which is something I really like to do and have not been able to make the time to do enough in the last month. Enough said.

Back to Channel 1 . . . Here come our wild turkeys