Author: robertjames1971

I'm wicked tall.

Time Off Projects

We are about 200 miles from home. We’ll get there sometime tomorrow, probably in the mid-afternoon, after we drop off the rental car at the airport. We were originally coming home on Monday. I booked time off from work on Monday and Tuesday. Eventually the plans changed and we were booked to come home on Sunday but I never cancelled the Monday and Tuesday time off. Now that we’ll be getting home on Sunday, though not as planned, I want to come up with some projects to work on to have something creative and productive to do on those two days off.

The weather is going to suck on Monday, but be pretty good on Tuesday. I think I will try to pull off an album-in-a-day project on Monday. I’ll start it Sunday evening, I think, and then see if I can get 30 minutes of new music written and recorded by the same time on Monday. It will all count toward the 50 songs in 90 days challenge as well.I have only ever pulled off the album-in-a-day thing once. Maybe I can get it done again.

On Tuesday, if the weather is as good as predicted, I hope to do some photography stuff. Sunrise at the ocean, then a spot or two on top. Maybe this will finally be my morning in Boston? Who knows. After the photo-walk (whatever it ends up being) is done I’ll get back to 50/90 for the rest of the day.

Either that or I’ll just watch Doctor Who for the full two days off. We’ll have to see how it goes.

What a Day!

South Carolina, North Carolina which is almost entirely under construction, Virginia where massive traffic jams are apparently the norm, Maryland where massive traffic jams are also the norm, Delaware where we stopped for dinner, New Jersey where the traffic was okay but the Jersey Turnpike toll was $20.05… seriously, New York where the traffic is so bad even after 9:00pm on a Saturday that it makes Virginia and Maryland look like an amusement park, and finally just over the border into Connecticut where we will sleep for the night.

Holy shit, what a day.

In closing, this is a picture of a roller coaster at a park called King’s Dominion. I rode this standing/loop coaster back in 1989 while visiting with my high school band. I felt like a freakin’ daredevil riding that thing.

Future Project

Driving North on route 95 in North Carolina I saw a sign for locally grown peanuts. It made me think of how Jimmy Carter made his fortune growing peanuts. That made me wonder if you can grow peanuts in New England’s climate.

I asked Jen to as Google and now I have a project for next summer.

I am going to grow myself some mutha-truckin’ peanuts boys and girls! Get ready!

I’m going to spend hours upon hours on YouTube learning all there is to know about home-grown peanuts and how to keep them safe from those asshole squirrels!

And then probably forget about the whole thing once next summer arrives.

Go for a Run

Daily writing prompt
How often do you walk or run?
View all responses

The answer to this question is two-fold. I walk or run both every single day and very rarely. It depends on your definition of walk or run.

I get my daily exercise in every day by running in place for 30 minutes. If that’s legally considered running then I guess I run every day. If not, then I haven’t run in a couple of months. I started a couch to 5k training but stopped after a couple of weeks. I want to get back into it but I really don’t enjoy the whole running for really reals part of it.

Walking is similar. I close my Apple Watch Activity App’s exercise ring every day with those morning faux runs. That’s not enough exercise to close the Activity App’s calorie goal so I’ll often do either a second faux run or I will walk in place for a while, while doing something else, to get that ring closed. So if the faux walk counts as going for a walk then I do it often. Otherwise, not very often.

So the answer to this question is both confusing and dumb… and also silly. What can you do though, right?

Friday Drive

Okay, so what happened with the Disney World trip? Put simple, it ended. One of us woke up feeling sick this morning. I won’t say which one, but there are only two of us here, me and my wife, so your chances of guessing correctly are pretty freakin’ good.

Anyway, one of us woke up sick and we debated what to do about it. Stay at Disney World and see if we felt better, then fly home on Sunday. What if we feel worse and we’re just completely miserable in a hotel room for three days and then go through the hellish torture that is flying while under the weather? If you’ve never been on a plane before while you are sick then you might not know how awful an experience it can be. I’ve done it. I never want to do it again.

Also, what if whatever bug we caught turns out to be Covid-19? We can’t fly knowing we have the ‘rona. I’m sure people do it every day, but I won’t be one of them. I am not putting other people at risk that way. No, I put my foot down. I made the call. We’re driving home now. We already had a rental car to get to and from the Orlando airport. Jen called the agency and changed our drop off point to Logan Airport in Boston and off we went. We stopped to pick up some Covid tests just to be sure and they were negative. We’ll probably test again before we get home, and I am willing to bet we’ll still be negative then.

Right now it’s about 9:30pm and we’re in a hotel room somewhere in the middle of South Carolina. We will wake up early in the morning and head out again. I doubt we’ll make it all the way home tomorrow, but we’ll chew up a good chunk of route 95 North and see how far we can get. We’re about 900 miles from home right now. It’s going to be a long day tomorrow, but we’ll be together and that is literally all that matters to me.