Dry Docking

I apologize profusely for inflicting the longest post I’ve ever written yesterday but I felt I owed, at least to myself, to capture how special the week was for me as well as my fellow travelers. It’s not as if I forced you to read it, right? This extended writing time yesterday morning was not exactly welcome by certain wives who felt I had much more important tasks to address, such as finding a place to live.

Garage Full of Memories

An unpleasant surprise upon returning home was to find the garage still chock full of furniture and various other items that a local charity was supposed to pick up. We’d arranged for the neighbors to open the garage when they came but that didn’t work out since we found a note saying the charity’s truck had been there.

Since I didn’t want to move the stuff back into the basement I thought the easiest option was to rent a U-Haul truck for a couple hours and deliver it straight to the charity. Easy, until you try to find a U-Haul truck to rent on a busy spring Saturday afternoon.

I eventually found one less than two miles from home after ranging far afield, I didn’t even realize the truck rental place existed there. They had a fifteen foot box truck available which I had loaded in short order with some supervisory assistance from the wife. For some strange reason I enjoyed driving the truck around although some of my fellow drivers may not have shared my joy.

As I unloaded the furniture at the charity in Worcester I had a strange reaction. While this stuff had languished in our basement for years I felt an odd sense of loss at these relics from an earlier life composed of school aged children as well as multiple moves during my military career. These inanimate objects had memories latched to their dusty surfaces which were hard to let go of. I kept telling myself the memories would remain but I felt as if I was abandoning old companions.

After overcoming this bout of maudlin sentimentality and returning the truck I faced a veritable jungle of a lawn which had taken advantage of our absence with some riotous growth. The sentimentality continued to seep into my mind as I realize this was one of the last times I would be mowing this lawn and didn’t feel the same sense of connection I had in the past. For some idiotic reason I’ve always enjoyed mowing the lawn, at least since I got the riding lawn mower. I guess I’m starting the process of disengaging.

Of course it could all be that I’m trying to readjust to reality after a week of entirely too much fun. I found myself thinking back constantly to the past week and wondering what was going on right then on the Norwegian Dawn. Time to get focused; stand by tomorrow for a huge news announcement that will dwarf all prior posts in sheer power.