Trip prep for Saskatchewan (posted from home)

(This post covers 22-29 July)

Saturday, 29 July-
I washed and gassed up Mocha Joe this morning and then loaded up our gear and luggage for tomorrow’s departure. We each get a backpack-style soft suitcase and a small carry-on for our clothing. That doesn’t seem like much for a two-month trip but of course we can use Laundromats along the way as we need to. We’re taking the bikes but not taking the sea kayaks this trip; the extra storage will be nice though we will probably miss having the kayaks somewhere along the way. We are a bit concerned about the record-setting temperatures lately given that Mocha Joe doesn’t have air conditioning but we’ll be fine. The Fantastic Fan in the roof vent will help and I have a portable 12-volt Fantastic Fan if we need to move air across us while we sleep. I wouldn’t be surprised to find that Wal-mart parking lots will be too hot to stay there early in this trip.
I've stopped Netflix for the duration of our trip so we watched 'Enemy of the State' on TV tonight.
Tomorrow is departure day!

Friday, 28 July-
We have today and tomorrow yet to prepare for our trip. Labashi took care of moving her 20-or-so plants to their new home for the duration of our trip. She has found that they do best in our guest room. They apparently get plenty of light from the patio doors and they prefer this room’s more moderate temperature swings through the day. She also managed to get all her packing done.
I made a quick run to Eastern Market for supplies and then mowed the lawn for about two and a half hours in the 90-degree afternoon heat. Fortunately, the wind kicked up a bit and that helped a lot.
That evening we watched ‘The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada’, the film-direction debut of Tommy Lee Jones. Our opinions split on this one. Labashi liked it, I didn’t. Ebert and Roper gave it two thumbs but the only reason I can think of for that is Mr. Jones’ respectful treatment of the Mexican characters in the film—a refreshing change indeed. But I thought the plot too unbelievable.

Thursday, 27 July-
With the van nearly ready to go, we took time off from trip prep to go buy the overhead cabinets we will need to finish the laundry/mud-room when we return. We had a discount certificate to help ease the financial pain a little but the main thing we wanted was to avoid any problems in the future with the vendor running out of stock or changing suppliers or designs.
In the afternoon I did the end-to-end jog at Rocky Ridge. I thought I might suffer a little on this one since the temperature was over ninety before I left the house. But I got lucky— shortly after I started jogging, clouds moved in and cooled things off a bit. My watch said I took an hour and 30 minutes for this one.


Wednesday, 26 July-
Today we spent most of the day removing nearly everything from Mocha Joe, cleaning the interior and then re-stowing. This process not only gives us a fresh start, it also gives us a chance to verify that we have adequate supplies and also to notice things that have been broken or removed. This time, for instance, I noticed that my bike helmet was missing—oh, yeah— I used that for a mountain bike ride and didn’t return it. And we’re short on butane for the cookstove.

Tuesday, 25 July-
Today I spent most of the morning cleaning the fiberglass top and windows on Mocha Joe and doing routine pre-trip maintenance checks. Mocha Joe now has 75K on the odometer and I’m a little concerned about the automatic transmission; it has had two or three instances of not going into gear as quickly as it should. Later in the day we went into town for Labashi to buy a polarizer for her film camera. She’s hoping to use it to good advantage in the big-sky country we’ll be visiting. We also found a nice little lightweight tripod that will fit in our day-pack and should prove useful for lower-light shots (and we couldn’t resist the $20 price tag).
That evening we watched ‘The Squid and the Whale’. I’m not a fan.

Monday, 24 July-
This week we need to start preparing in earnest for our upcoming trip to Canada but we have time to also mix in some household chores. While Labashi worked in her beloved compost-production facility, I probed our underground rain-gutter drains with a long plumber’s snake to ensure there are no blockages; that completes (hopefully!) the gutter work for this year. We also did some organization work in the laundry/mud-room and made some decisions on what else we need to do there when we get back. In the afternoon I took the Concours to Rocky Ridge Park and did another end-to-end jog. That evening I heard Labashi shout for me from the shower. She had found a wood tick dug in near her hip—apparently from her work in the compost area. We tried the new tick-removal technique we had recently read about. This one recommends covering the tick with a blob of liquid soap held in place with a paper towel. This reportedly blocks off air to the tick and once he lets go, you just throw the paper towel away. Well, maybe….but it didn’t seem to work for us. I had some difficulty keeping a good blob of liquid soap on the tick because we were trying it with Labashi standing up. But after several failed attempts with that, I retrieved a wooden match from the kitchen, lit it, blew it out, and touched the hot matchstick to the tick’s rear end (as Labashi watched intently!). The tick let go immediately. I put it on the sink where it played dead for a few minutes, then started wiggling its legs to try to get off its back. What a tough little guy!
Once the tick excitement subsided we watched the Special Features on the ‘The 400 Blows’ DVD. That turned out to be a very, very good thing. The feature about the making of the film was very good at explaining the context and history of the film and we loved the interviews with Truffaut. Highly recommended.

Sunday, 23 July-
This morning I replaced the Korky valve and I was surprised it went so easily. The whole process, including getting all the water out of the tank, disconnecting and removing the old valve and putting in the new one took only 20 minutes. Not many of my plumbing projects go so quickly (or work on the first try).
Later that morning we drove to Chambersburg to visit my Mom. We went out for lunch and then took Mom to visit her parent’s graves.
That evening we watched ‘The 400 Blows’, the classic 1959 French film by Francois Truffaut. At the end of the film we felt we needed to see the Special Features for more info about the film but it was too late to go on tonight.

Saturday, 22 July-
This morning Labashi assembled the five Black and Decker standing utility cabinets for the south wall of the laundry/mud-room. We then cleared away everything along that wall and put the cabinets in place. That afternoon I took the KLR to the motorcycle shop for a walk-inspection then spent the rest of the afternoon blogging. That evening we noticed the toilet tank valve wasn’t working so I zipped in to Lowe’s on the bike to buy a new ‘Korky’ valve.

Drywall, plumbing, and storage-cabinet work, ‘Promises’, ‘Tony Takitani’ (posted from home)

(this post covers 14-21 July)

Friday, 21 July-
Today we installed the last three overhead storage cabinets to finish off the north wall hanging cabinets and assembled a new Black and Decker standing utility cabinet for the south wall. Late in the day we went to town and bought five more standing utility cabinets for the south wall. If this doesn’t give us enough storage, I don’t know what will. Actually, these will allow us to bring some things in from our storage barn which really shouldn’t be out there—things like insecticides and other liquids which should not be allowed to freeze. This will also allow me to re-use the old storage drawers from that wall for my camping, fishing, and kayaking gear.
I also picked up both Cherry Larry and the Miata today. Cherry Larry’s shifter problem turned out to be the shifter mechanism under the dash. That one cost $50 to find and fix with a couple of new screws. The body work on the Miata turned out very well. The local shop did a completely professional job of bondo-ing the blisters and matching the paint. And they even gave me a bonus. When I dropped off the car for the agreed-upon fix, I asked if they could also ‘see what they could do’ about the chipped paint on the Miata’s plastic hubcaps. They did a good job of matching the hub covers to the rest of the wheels and didn’t charge me anything for it. I’ve got to give these guys some more work.

Thursday, 20 July-
After all the searching yesterday afternoon for storage cabinets we finally bought them today. We bought five each 30-inches-wide by 24-inches-high by 15-inches-deep wall cabinets and managed to install two of them by day’s end. They are going to line the upper portion of the north wall of the mud-room above our existing storage cabinets.
That evening we watched the bonus disk for Deadwood Season Two. We were disappointed by the featurette on historical Deadwood but it was very interesting to watch David Milch at work.

Wednesday, 19 July-
We had a problem yesterday with our ‘beater’ van (the one we call Cherry Larry). The automatic transmission shifter suddenly lost the Park position while we were in town. Something must have slipped in the shifting mechanism. I can still start it in Neutral but the interesting challenge is to find Neutral since the indicator is no longer pointing correctly. Park is now Reverse and Reverse is now Neutral (sometimes!). Anyway I dropped it off at the local garage for them to have a look when they can get to it.
We finished drywalling the east and north walls today. Then we went shopping for storage cabinets. No movie tonight. (Boo, Netflix shipping delays!)

Tuesday, 18 July-
Today we dry-walled the end of the mud-room and started the north wall. Netflix seems to have lost my last movie return so we don’t have a movie to watch. But we need the time to plan our upcoming Canada trip anyway so that’s not a problem.

Monday, 17 July-
Today we had a plumber in to install a laundry tub. This required not only new drain pipe and new copper connections for hot and cold water but also required our well-pump pressure tank to be relocated to make room for the pipe runs so we thought it best to call in a pro. The plumber finished up by 1330 so we went to town and bought some more drywall. I also dropped off the Miata at a local body shop to have two small rust blisters repaired in the lower quarter panels. I had stopped in at a Mazda dealer last week for a quote and the estimate came back at $825. That was ridiculous for what I wanted done so I went to a local shop and the quote was a much more reasonable $150.

Sunday, 16 July-
Today I helped Labashi hang more drywall in the laundry/mud-room section of the basement. I also had some plumbing adventures today. I replaced an old copper turnoff valve that has been troublesome over the years with a new ball valve and in doing so noticed that a nearby elbow was very slowly seeping. After removing the old elbow, cleaning everything up, and re-assembling, I completely blew my initial attempt at sweating the joints on the new elbow by using too little flux and overheating the joint. What a disaster. But it didn’t really take all that long to clean everything up and try again and this time it went fine. Later in the day I went jogging at Rocky Ridge, the end-to-end jog that takes me an hour and a half. I struggled with this one—it was very hot and I felt lucky to pass a box turtle I came upon going my direction in the single-track. Good thing he wasn’t bigger (or faster); I might not have had enough left to pass.


Saturday, 15 July-
Today we turned our attention to working on the basement again. I helped Labashi drywall some of the south wall of the laundry/mud-room. She only needed my help to hoist the panels; she did all the planning and made all the cuts and fastening. I ‘sawzalled’ out a partial door frame that had been left over from our work last fall so we can drywall that area too. That afternoon I went jogging and Labashi finished off dry-walling that south wall.
That evening we watched ‘Tony Takitani’, a very interesting Japanese film based on a short story. IMDb.com aptly summarizes the plot as follows:
“This film, minimalist in the best possible sense, is a lyrical study of isolation and loss. Tony Takitani (Issei Ogata) grows up the loner kid of a jazz-playing, loner father. Like his father, Tony masters an art, drawing, and eventually becomes very successful. Early in his adulthood Tony has a few failed romances but never considers marriage until, in middle age, he meets a woman fifteen years his junior, the sight of whom for the first time adds an unshakable pain to his profound solitude.
…And then Tony's story itself begins, and if you are going to fall for this film, you do it then. From start to finish, really, the film is an episodic accumulation of small, deeply-touching scenes tied together by very simple yet evocative piano music and the enchanting voice of a narrator (Hidetoshi Nishijima) whose warm, thoughtful delivery makes one think of some poet of a bygone era.”

I loved this film for its visuals and its music. I was also very interested afterwards to read the original short story and found it on the web. I loved seeing how the screenwriter chose to modify the original for the screen. Very highly recommended.


Friday, 14 July-
Today I blogged for much of the morning, then Labashi and I went shopping for lighting fixture parts. She is in the process of modernizing the lights in our bathroom. After much shopping and searching the web, she has decided the best route is to replace the glass globes with new, well-shaped glass shades and new bulbs. Unfortunately, the new shades require shade holders which are an inch smaller in diameter and those aren’t easy to find (as we learned this afternoon). Looks like we’ll have to order from the internet. Along the way we had lunch at a new restaurant for us—‘Al Dente’ Italian restaurant in York. Though we at first thought the restaurant was going to be more expensive than we wanted, we split a meal and that worked out well. We’ve got to try this one for dinner sometime. It ‘feels’ right.
That evening we watched ‘Promises’, a 2002 nominee for an Oscar for Best Documentary Feature. It tells the stories of seven Israeli and Palestinian children, both individually and as they are given the opportunity to meet each other. Two years later, a followup visit helps us understand how complex the Mideast issues are for both Palistinians and Israelis. Highly recommended, particularly so in light of recent news.

‘Nobody Knows’, ‘Head On’… (posted from home)

(this post covers 9-13 July)

Thursday, 13 July-
In the morning I started working on planning for our next trip. The basic idea of this one is to go see Labashi’s birth city in Canada then go on to the Canadian Rockies. In the afternoon I did the end-to-end jog at Rocky Ridge in the reverse direction. I got caught in a fairly strong rain shower right after parking the bike for this jog. I liked the cooling-off it gave me but the ultra-high humidity caused my glasses to fog shortly after I started jogging so I did most of it without my glasses. 94 minutes for this one.
That evening we watched the last two episodes of Deadwood Season 2.

Wednesday, 12 July-
Today I completed the gutter work on the front of the house by replacing every other gutter nail with a gutter screw. Now I could hang from the gutter if I wanted to; they are much, much stronger than the nails. I spent the rest of the day mowing the lawn, finishing in about 3-1/2 hours in the near-90 heat. We also had our electrical contractor back today and he completed the installation of the outdoors outlets and their in-use covers. That evening I helped my buddy go get his free motorcycle and bring it back to his garage for re-hab this winter.

Tuesday, 11 July-
I had a dental appointment this morning to fill a small cavity discovered in my last checkup. That was easy—I didn’t even need novocaine and the whole process only took five minutes. That afternoon I rode the Concours down to Rocky Ridge Park and jogged the end-to-end jog in just under 90 minutes—not bad for an above-90-degree day. That evening we watched ‘Head On’ (‘Gegen Die Wand’), a very interesting German film about two Turkish expatriates living in Hamburg. After Cahit tries to end his troubles by crashing his car into a wall, he meets Sibel, who had recently attempted to slit her wrists. Sibel talks Cahit into a sham marriage which he reluctantly agrees to. But they are soon in trouble; they fall in love…. Highly recommended!

Monday, 10 July-
Today I removed the covers from the front gutters and cleaned them inside and out. While I don’t have the same problem with the fascia as the back of the house, I did find many loose gutter nails to replace once I buy more gutter screws. We also had an electrical contractor in today to run new circuit wiring for two external outlets. In preparing for his visit, I used a SawZall to help remove some long-unused metal ductwork and managed to cut into a live electric circuit. Fortunately, the double-insulated saw saved me; I didn’t get shocked and only had a small scare from the shower of sparks and setting the insulation backing afire (!!!!). The electrician took a look at it and verified that I had only cut through the insulation which he fixed with a few wraps of high-voltage insulating tape. In the evening I went along with a friend to look at a motorcycle a friend has offered to him. The owner had nearly been hit while riding one day and had decided on the spot to never to ride again. The bike has been stored outside under a cover for at least six years. We looked it over closely and it looks to be worth doing some work to get it running again.

Sunday, 9 July-
Today I blogged all morning on this hot-and-sticky day. Labashi and I drove down to Rocky Ridge Park in the early afternoon and took a leisurely walk on the gravel trail to stretch out our stiff muscles after our work day yesterday. Afterwards we had an early supper at Charlie Brown’s Steakhouse. Back home, we watched ‘Nobody Knows’ (‘Dare Mo Shiranai’), a Japanese film. The IMDb plot summary: “Four siblings live happily with their mother in a small apartment in Tokyo. The children all have different fathers and have never been to school. The very existence of three of them has been hidden from the landlord. One day, the mother leaves behind a little money and a note, charging her oldest boy to look after the others. And so begins the children's odyssey, a journey nobody knows. Though engulfed by the cruel fate of abandonment, the four children do their best to survive in their own little world, devising and following their own set of rules. When they are forced to engage with the world outside their cocooned universe, the fragile balance that has sustained them collapses. Their innocent longing for their mother, their wary fascination toward the outside world, their anxiety over their increasingly desperate situation, their inarticulate cries, their kindness to each other, their determination to survive on wits and courage.” While the plot summary sounds pretty grim, the movie is very well done and tells the story in an understated and loving manner. Highly recommended.

Willow, ‘Last of the Mohicans (1992)’, ‘Syriana’ again, gutter work, ‘All About My Mother’ (posted from home)

(this post covers 30 June-8 July)


Saturday, 8 July—
I wasn’t looking forward to today. I spent all day working on the gutter. I put all the gap-covers in place, cleaned the inside of the gutter (mostly residue from the roof accumulated over the years), cleaned the outside of the gutter, and then re-hung the gutter with a proper drainage angle. Instead of using gutter nails I used gutter screws, a much more secure fitting than the nails, though a pain to install. By late afternoon I was exhausted from all the trips up and down the ladder and from moving the ladder time after time as I worked my way back and forth.
That evening we watched ‘All About My Mother’, a Pedro Almodovar film. This 1999 Spanish film received a very high rating on rottentomatoes.com and it’s well-earned. It’s a bit of a strange film in that the plot summary is something like this: A woman’s life is shattered by the accidental death of her son. She goes to Barcelona to tell the father (who doesn’t know about the son at all) but can’t find him and instead finds one of her and her husband’s former friends, a pre-op transvestite. She also meets a pregnant nun, who was impregnated by the same man, who, we later learn, is also a pre-op transvestite! Interesting stuff happens. I know, it sounds sordid. But it’s actually very funny and very human. And the interview with Almodovar is interesting. He says he does stories about women because the Spanish men are so macho that they aren’t interesting, they’re uni-dimensional where the women lead more interesting, multi-dimensional lives. That’s an interesting observation. I’ve always thought I wouldn’t want to be a woman because women have too many, often conflicting, roles to fill. Men are like dogs, life is much simpler for us. Arf.

Friday, 7 July-
Today I worked on the leak at the window. The inside is drying nicely under the fan we set up for it and the outside is now ready caulk and paint. I found a soft section of wood along the sill of the other basement window and dug that out to dry. I can fill that in with bondo (rather than replace the entire window frame). I pulled off the gutter cover from the rear gutter and started repairs. Whoever installed the gutter and soffit originally hadn’t done it properly. The aluminum face cover wasn’t fitted under the drip strip at the roof line. It wasn’t even close. There was a gap of about an inch of bare wood there—a perfect place for water from an over-flowing gutter to work its way back into the house. So I started the process of pulling all the gutter-nails to pull away the gutter and fix that. It didn’t take me long to realize that I could cut suitable vinyl pieces from the now-discarded gutter covers and use them to fit into the drip-strip and cover the gap. I spent the rest of the day covering the gap along the entire length of the roofline.
That evening we watched Deadwood2, Episode 10.


Thursday, 6 July-
This morning we were moving some items in the basement when we saw a water leak at the window. It has been raining every day but last night’s rain was both fairly hard and also wind-blown against the north wall of the house. This is an area where Labashi had done a very good job of stuffing in the insulation in preparation for eventual drywall. It was disheartening to have to pull out the insulation but in actuality was pretty easy. It’s much better to have this happen now than after dry-walling. I believe the leak is at the top of the window frame so I removed the shutters and started the process of chipping out all the old caulk and sanding and scraping the window frame for repainting.
We also noticed a damp spot on our bedroom ceiling along that same wall. I think that one comes from water overflowing the gutter because of gutter covers I installed some time ago. Those gutter covers have been a pain from the beginning. The idea was to put on the covers to keep the pine needles and leaves out of the gutters but I’ve spent more trips up the ladder to fix the gutter covers than I did to clean out the gutters twice a year. The covers also resulted in large icicles forming all along the roof in winter as well as causing our sidewalk to ice up at our front door. I’ve decided to take the covers off.
I also picked up the Miata today from its appointment to fix a noise I had diagnosed as a release bearing. That turned out to also involve the pressure plate and clutch so those were all replaced. Cost was $475.
I also jogged at Pinchot today, just a little slow-jog near the disc-golf course for an hour.
That evening we watched Deadwood2, Episodes 8 and 9.

Wednesday, 5 July-
It was a rainy day today. I drove Cherry Larry up to Duncannon and talked to ‘Terry’ in the municipal office there and gained permission to put geocaches on their property. Afterwards I went looking for a water bottle holder for jogging at Wildware and at Bass Pro Shops but couldn’t find anything. On the way home I jogged at Pinchot, this time pushing it a bit with a faster jog. My new watch says the benchmark for this section is now 49 minutes.
That evening we watched ‘Syriana’ again. It was very helpful to have watched the features and to read a few reviews before our second viewing. The movie has an interesting premise but we still feel the story-telling method gets in the way rather than helps us understand. I get the feeling that the book on which the movie is based would be more interesting than the movie.

Tuesday, 4 July-
I took it easy today after yesterday’s excess / success. I spent the day on the web, mostly researching some alternatives for my geocaches.

Monday, 3 July-
Today I overdid the jogging a little. I rode down to Rocky Ridge Park around lunch time and jogged the end-to-end jog which took an hour and a half according to my new watch. After cooling down, I started home but decided to stop at Rudy Park to check out their 5K cross-country trail (I had learned about it last week from some walkers I met at Rocky Ridge). I sat on a nearby picnic table in the shade for awhile and wondered if I should try it today. It was quite warm (around 90) and I could tell from the map that there’s very little shade on the course. I saw that the course looped around the outer edges of the park so that meant I wouldn’t really be all that far from the bike if I couldn’t go on--- I’d just have to cut across the soccer fields or open grass areas to get back. So I gave it a shot. I felt fine after the first loop of the observatory field but by the end of the second loop I was starting to struggle—that would be only about half-way through the three-mile course. But I eventually made it. I wouldn’t say I was moving very quickly toward the end; a walker could have overtaken me, I think.

Sunday, 2 July-
Labashi and I needed some time together away from the house today. We started by having lunch and a glass of wine at Olive Garden. We then drove down to Nixon Park to visit the Nature Center. I had recently been to the park for a walk and had briefly stopped in the Nature Center and wanted to re-visit when I wasn’t rushed. It’s a great little place filled with taxidermy mounts and an extensive worldwide butterfly collection. The greater part of the taxidermy mounts were donated by a great-white-hunter guy from York, William Kohler and they are fantastic. They include a number of animals I’ve not seen anywhere else and the whole-animal mounts are placed in dioramas representing their homelands.
That evening we watched ‘Last of the Mohicans’, the 1992 version with Daniel Day Lewis. After having recently seen the silent version and learning about the historical background of the novel, we wanted to see what the latest version did with the history. We learned that the history is only barely referred to in passing. So now I need to read the original novel.


Saturday, 1 July-
Today I spent some of the morning checking out Pennsylvania DCNR websites to see what’s happening in the state parks and state forests. Then I took the Concours over to Pinchot Park to rent a mountain bike. My mountain bike has no suspension and I wanted to try a fully-suspended one, i.e., one with shock absorbers on both the front and back wheels. I had seen two fully-suspended bikes among the dozen-or-so bikes for rent at Pinchot and knew that I had to go over there on the weekend since that’s the only time the rental office is open. Unfortunately, both fully-suspended bikes were now broken. Rather than just go home, I took one with a front-suspension for an hour. I was surprised how much the front-suspension helped dampen out the jarring ride but still want to try a bike with springs on both ends.
After the hour on the bike I wasn’t ready to go home so did the hour-long jog from the parking area to the dam and back.
.

Friday, 30 June-
I spent the morning blogging, then rode down to the driver’s license photo center to get my photo license renewed. I picked up ‘The Nudger Dilemma’, a book of detective stories, from the Starbucks free bookshelf then rode over to the Appalachian Trail Regional Office in Boiling Springs to meet with the AT Boundary Manager about my geocaches. The manager didn’t show but the trail’s chief ranger, Todd Remaley, spent quite a lot of time with me and pulled out detailed maps to help determine where the AT Corridor lies so I can relocate my caches off the corridor. After the meeting I talked with ‘Willow’, a thru-hiker who was on the porch awaiting a ride. She has an interesting and pain-filled journal on trailjournals.com. She’s from Asheville, NC and we talked awhile about Asheville and my recent visit there. She is renting out her condo while she’s on the trail and is having problems with the renters and is trying to manage that while hiking. Here’s a copy of her ‘About’ page:
I am 39 years old, a Gemini. I am the mother of two teenage boys, Joseph and Grayson. For the last 7 years I have toiled at a thankless office job for a pittance in the shadow of corporate doom and profit mongering gloom. I’ve been an hourly slave, whose college degree meant nothing, and whose delusions of security and financial stability have faded as the cost of insurance premiums out-stripped any 2.5% raise I could scrap from the inner circles of power and overtime ended with a bang. In the last two years, I have instilled more changes in my life than I could have ever thought was possible or ever thought was needed, and found that I have so much more to go. A catalyst for my freedom to make changes was the fear that I would lose the person I’ve loved since I was 19 to another woman. This fear sent me deep inside myself to find what specifically did I not have, that I thought I should have, that made me feel so miserable about myself as to stoop to jealousy, an emotion I had never really lived. I pulled out every stop in my search. I went to conferences, I wrote volumes, I started projects, I took on community service, I learned CPR, I started swimming 3 times a week, I ran a mile a day, I started doing yoga again, I taught classes and volunteered. Then, I learned to fly a plane. My searching stopped; I found my equilibrium again; I could see, finally. Somewhere over Transylvania County I realized that I had to be free again, that I had been suffocating in responsibility ever since my children were born. I had been a stay-at-home mother alone most of the time (Jody’s job kept him out of town 3-4 days a week), then I had been a full-time student, part-time employee, stay-at-home mom for a few years, and then I was a full-time employee single mom for the rest of the time. My free spirit of my early 20’s had been shackled and was fading after all this time. As I learned to solo the Cessna, I learned that I could do whatever I wanted to do, something I had always been told and never believed. For many months during college in Boone, I lived out of my backpack, keeping my school stuff and extra clothes in my dorm room and staying gone most of the time in the woods. Then I moved into a friend’s tipi while he left to hike the Everglades. I moved to a 2500 acre farm in Vermont, skiing and driving a team of draft horses. A few years later, when the boys were small and Jody’s job did not take him away all the time, we used to backpack often with them. When his job changed, all outdoor activities as a family stopped. I simply could not pull off a full fledged backpacking trip with two children under 5 alone. My backpacking days ended. I never gave it a thought, until 11 years later when I began to lose my sanity. I am coming home one step at a time.