There’s still one week left in the month of June, but by all counts it’s already been a good month in my life. For a lot of reasons. It’s been incredibly busy, frustrating at times, deliriously happy at others, and a good first taste of this new lifestyle we’ve adopted, wherein we live at “home” in Minnesota but Barbara maintains her executive position in Spokane. And it’s not over yet.
Currently, as I write this, the NHRA Mello Yello tour is in the midst of a very real summer grind. Six races in seven weeks is at the heart of it, but the bigger summer picture shows the classic crunch. The teams get a breather on either side of Joliet, then it’s off to the Western Swing for three straight. Blink when that’s over, and you’ll miss Brainerd and it will be time for Indy.
As a couple, Barbara and I have moved a bunch. Before we got married in 1997, I moved from Indianapolis to her home, in Chapel Hill, N.C., then after about six months there, IBM transferred her to Austin, Tex. We loved both places, although Austin officially did make it almost impossible for me to find any Mexican food that meets the Tex-Mex standards I became accustomed to in that fine city. After four years in Austin, we moved to Woodbury and our beautiful 3-level home on the pond. After 10 years there, we were off to Liberty Lake for what we figured would be two years. It ended up being four.
It was a long trip. It was a long week. It was a long time coming.
Moving is not easy, even when a moving company is involved. Months of advance planning led to weeks of actual change, as we modified the look of our Liberty Lake house to stage it as well as possible for showing. Then, when niece Leah and her boyfriend Levi came out to “go shopping” and take whatever they wanted back to Colorado, to furnish their new house, we had more changes to make and more adjustments to deal with. Finally, when the movers descended on the house to pack us up and load our goods, we dealt with two more days of displacement, even going so far as to spend those two nights at the Residence Inn in Spokane Valley, since we had no place to sit or sleep.