Dr Copa

Thanks to the guest post from Allison Thomlison

Last weekend was one of the best weekends I’ve had in a very long time. Connie invited our family to join her family at her new summer cottage on the lake for the weekend. I’ve been wanting to come see her new place ever since she told me that she had bought it. Of course the promise of a weekend full of boating and tubing made the lure even stronger!

After packing a couple of suitcases, complete with extra life jackets, sun screen, and swimming suits, we set our home security tolleson alarm and set off on the two hour drive to Connie’s place. As we got closer to her place we stopped at a local grocery store and bought the ingredients to my favorite fruit trifle to prepare for the next day’s dinner, and the traditional s’mores ingredients. As promised, we had the best time – especially the part of cooking the s’mores! That is a long-time family favorite!

After the kids were tucked into bed, we watched a movie called The Bucket List from one of the new channels that they had picked up when they took advantage of one of the Direct TV Deals that they purchased for the summer. All in all it was a fantastic weekend!

Today my two brother-in-laws are participating in the Big Rolling Thunder rally in DC. I really wanted to participate with them this year, but have been called away to New England to look after my ailing elderly mother. I hope that they have loads of fun, and I hope that I can join them next year!

I have to hand it to my wife; she is one smart lady!  When we bought this house, we knew that we had several months in which we could pack up our old house and get our items moved down here.  She spent several hours online, comparing house removal costs and decided that the best course of action for us was to rent a self-storage unit near our old house and pack several boxes every day, and then when she had to run an errand into town she would load up the car with the boxes and take them to the storage unit.

Then when we came down to this house for a weekend stay we rented a small one-way moving truck and load it up with boxes from the storage unit and bring them down.  Once we arrived and unloaded the moving truck we would take it to the local rental return location, and we rented a one-way economy car.  We used the car while we were down here, and then drove it back to New England to get us back home.

We did that several times, and it worked out quite well.  We ended up saving ourselves thousands of dollars, and we moved all of our items at our own pace.  Of course, now that we are older, I don’t think either one of us would be up to that much work again!  We hope that we won’t ever have to move again.  Of course, if we won the lottery that might be a different story entirely!

Some guys will ride a motorcycle year round and don’t seem to mind the heavy leather jacket and special gloves to keep from freezing on their bike. That’s not for me. Most motorcycles are not like the snowmobiles with built in hand and feet warmers.

When the weather starts getting warm, I start itching to ride my motorcycle for a couple hours on a weekend. But the truth is, until it hits 70 degrees and stays above 65 at night, riding a motorcycle is bone chilling cold. It is especially rough if you leave out in the warmth of day but get busy and don’t leave for home until well after dark.

Thanks for the ramblings from Sophie Castendada

Some of my fondest childhood fantasies were about traveling the world and spending several months in each country that I visited. I had heard several stories from teachers about how much fun they had when they took villa holidays around Europe.

My Spanish teacher, in particular, would gush on and on about how she loved renting villas in Ibiza and spending several weeks soaking up the culture. As that was decades ago my memories of her are almost gone except for the fact that she told us that she had spent several years in Madrid teaching English to the students there.

I can remember as a child watching bull fights broadcast from Spain on television with my father. I loved watching them at first, I thought that the men fighting the bulls were great athlete. But at some point when I realized that the bull was actually killed at the end of the fight, I started to feel sorry for the bull. And when I watch the news stories on television about the annual running of the bulls in Pamplona I have to admit that I think that the runners have completely lost their minds!

One of the things that I envy about the people of Spain is the lifestyle where they get so much vacation time!  From what I understand the workers in Spain get thirty days off every year for vacation!  That came to my attention via my Spanish teacher as well.  Finding out that I live in a country where the worker gets fewer vacation days than almost every other country in the world rather fries my backside!

In addition to visiting Spain, I think that I’d like to visit Norway and Sweden.  I’ve heard that although the cost of living is very high in those countries, and the taxes are very high, that the government provides a lot more services to the residents that makes their lives much more comfortable.  For example free daycare is provided to working parents!  Here in the United States of America, the cost of daycare is prohibitive and it really doesn’t pay to work outside the home if one has to pay for daycare!  The only thing I don’t think Id like about visiting there is how much fish is consumed there.  I get the impression that the only food available to eat there is fish!  And I’ve never been fond of eating fish.  Although maybe I’d lose some weight if I stayed there very long!