Green light.....GO!

We got the apartment! Move in date, September 14th!

Yippee!

Next month is going to be busy, that's for sure!

Skid Marks...

Things could be happening to slow down our running!

We have applied for a little bungalow style apartment a few counties over, nestled in some green, leafy burbs. Lots of great scooting potential too.

We are now in waiting mode to see if we get accepted.

Oh, yeah, and I may have found a nice "forever" home for my small dog.

Time will tell on both issues...

Running From and To...

With the impending move, I find myself running.

Not the sneaker, water bottle, fitness type of running.

Running from the coming winter weather which will soon be upon us.

Running from coming gusts of cold, rain, swirling leaves, frosty mornings.

Running toward Autumn.

Running to get things sorted out, packed, and ready for the move toward the west, at the edge of the City.

Running to find a new home. Looking at apartments, viewing houses, talking to real estate agents and rental agents.

Running to get it settled and in place before the cold, rainy weather comes slithering in by mid-October.

Running toward many little goals that are part of this whole moving process.

Goals which involve finding decent homes for two of our rescue dogs. A heart breaking and difficult goal.

Goals of cleaning out, packing, and whittling down to the essence of what we need and want to carry to our new household.

Running to get rid of George Carlin's "stuff".

Running to set up yard sales, Good Will donations, bags for the county dump.

Running from, running to, running toward.

Running toward a new life that will bring with it opportunities for renewed life, joy, inner peace, and opportunity.

Running to the next phase of our life while running from some of the catastrophic sadness of the past phase of our life.

Running, moving, striding, galloping toward sweet, delicious change!

Finally!

Out the door...finally! It was a beautiful day with a balmy feel of slight chill and warm sunshine. With no forethought whatsover, I hopped on the scooter and headed off into the back roads.

About four miles from my house there is a very small village called Lawshe. At one time it was a railroad hub and now is a little place composed of about 6 cross streets. On the way into this area there is a creek running under an old railroad trestle (now the road) and here is that peaceful view looking westward.

I paused here for a bit and took a few snapshots of Squirt. She is such a "ham"!

From there I headed up another ridge road into an area that is cornfields, cattle, and family owned greenhouses. Here is a long, lovely landscape showing a dairy farm in the background and gorgeous clouds overhead.

We rode on for about 20 miles and I came upon a back entrance into another village where I stopped at the local IGA store and loaded up on grapes, plums, orange juice, coffee creamer, dog food, and a chocolate cream pie.

Even though I didn't have my saddle bags on her, Squirt managed to tote all this the final eight miles home thanks to her wire basket, bungees, and under seat bin.

This turned out to be a mighty fine ride and I realized that though I will be facing new scooting adventures, I will miss some of these back roads out here.

Five weeks, no riding. Wow! Now I am back in the saddle and rarin' to ride again!

Changes Put Upon Us

Change can be good, can be bad. Mostly at my age I hate it.

Sometimes it is refreshing. Other times it is downright scarey.

I think it's always better to get to choose change, rather than have it forced upon us.

But then that happens, and it happened to us a few days ago. We got a surprise visit from the people who own the house we rent. They live over 90 miles away in another state, so I knew something was up.

Well it was. Turns out they want their house back for family reunions, etc. and we have so many months to vacate the premises.

Wow. What the hey?

Well, we DID want to move next spring, back closer in toward the city, where there are people and fun things to do and restaurants and just "life".

People living life!

For me it's the social isolation, for my partner it is the 100 mile commute. So we were ready and planning it all in our heads anyway.

But now we've "been told" and so the hunt for a new house or apartment or condo (or whatever we will live in) begins.

We are hoping to be out of here by winter as winter out here is just plain awful.

But I wonder, what will scooting be like where I go? What type of riding will I be able to do? If I am in an apartment, where will I keep my scooter? Will I continue to ride at all if I live where there is a lot of traffic? Many questions emerge.

Change has been put upon me and I wonder if I will be able to continue to ride the back roads somewhere or ride safely at all or even want to continue riding where there is lots of traffic. It does not seem appealing.

Time will tell. As it always does.

Meanwhile, life is soon to be over as we've known it for the past seven years...

Confession...

...I have not ridden my scooter since July 12th! There, I said it. And I feel miserable and yet still can't get myself to get on it and ride.

Day after day I take the cover off and say I will take it out that day and then I don't. Too lazy, too distracted, too busy, too tired, blah, blah, blah.

Granted it's been way too hot some days, raining and storming others, or I've been working or busy or whatnot. But it's more than that and I am struggling to define why I am not riding now.

Part of it has to do with personal stresses that take my concentration to the point that I would not feel focused enough to ride safely.

Another part of it is that I am feeling tired of riding alone all the time or riding to the same places all the time. Boredom has set in.

Also when I feel anxious or depressed about stresses I want to "nest" in my house or on my back porch and not leave the calmness and comfort of my home and my canine companions.

I could add more layers of excuses and I'm not sure I'd really come up with an explanation that would suit me or really define why I am not riding.

It's some kind of "dry spell" that I can't explain. Maybe I need a vacation from the routine. Not sure.

Anyway, this is the way it is for now and I'm wondering...am I the only one who has gone through an extended time of not riding (by choice!) such as this?

Oddly too, it seems the more I don't ride the less I want to push myself to ride.

I love my scooter, but her battery is running down now. I do go out and start her up and let her run on the stand to keep it revved.

I feel I really am a neglectful owner in addition to a curious mixture of laziness, apathy, and "supreme-guilt-on-a-stick".

So I write about lazy dogs and wooley worms and time that is passing by as summer slips into autumn...but not scooting. At least not just now...

Wooley Worms on the Move...

"Wooley Worm", "Wooley Bear", same thing. The little fellow is making his or her way across the county roads right now and stirring up conversations in the fields, around dinner tables, and down at the Wal-Mart aka "general store".

The larval form of the Isabella Tiger Moth, you can read all about them here and follow their doings:

http://www.almanac.com/content/predicting-winter-weather-woolly-bear-caterpillars

I first learned about the Wooley Worm from an old farmer out here in the county when I was doing a home visit as a health care social worker many, many years ago.

He and his brothers stood around their front porch and talked about the characteristics of the fuzzy critter and how it "portended" the severity of the coming winter. They recounted bad winters and good winters and could tell when and where they saw their first Wooley that season and how dark and thick his "hairs" were and what it meant.

And all in fine detail.

If it was dark, fat, and bushy, it meant a snowey, cold, long winter. If it was sparsely "haired" (their words) and thin, then it was going to be a mild winter.

I never forgot that lesson and in the subsequent autumnal visits I made over the years to homes in the area, more of the time the Wooley Worm was brought up in conversation along with the the height of the corn, the amount of rainfall that planting year, and the seasonal movement of the Canadian geese overhead.

This year I saw my first Wooley in mid-July!

I want to ask him, "Why is it whenever I see a you, Wooley Worm, you are always crossing the road, never slinking down the road with me on my scooter, bicycle, or in my car?"

He never replies, as odd as he is, but when he shows up fat and dark and bushy I shiver a bit and feel a sense of the ice, snow, and darkness that will surely follow after Thanksgiving and Christmas.

God's "first meteorologist" or the farmer's faithful eye on the horizon, the Wooley Worm never fails to get it right.

Or so they say...

Time

Time is many things, has many qualities, many variations.

We do many things to Time. We pass it. We kill it. We buy it.

Some Times are good, some are old, some are hard.

We lament our lack of it..."if I only had more"....

When the "Time is right" it works. When it's not, it is "all wrong".

It waits for no man, while others serve it.

We take it for granted, yet it passes quickly.

We can look back at it and wonder where it went, we can glimpse it for a second in the present, and for the young there is all of it in the world.

Many regret the passing of it.

Many win victories or even medals due to how briefly it passes.

Clocks track it, the spin of the Earth drives it forward, everyone wastes it, some don't know how to fill it, yet all want more of it.

Time.

Crossed Over to the Dark Side....

And I'm riding a MOTORCYCLE!

Er, I meant "MOWERCYCLE"!

Between the heat of the day and the acres of grass that continue to grow in spite of it, I figured why not combine the two pastimes while I'm at it?

And she "runs like a deer" too! LOL


(photo courtesy of some clever person on the Internet)