Family Matters

So, things are still hectic around here, ergo my blogging schedule has been hit or miss.
Last Saturday, we were three hours from home for Lily's OM tournament. Unfortunately, her team did not win in their category, and will not be going on to the World Finals in Iowa.
The other team from her school took first place and will be going on to compete again next month. We wish them the best of luck and are pulling for them!

In other news, my dad has just spent the last eleven days in the hospital, fighting off pneumonia. Naturally, while he was in there, they found lots of other things going on with him. He had an accident in 1992, and has been in a wheelchair for the last ten years or so. When he fell, he suffered nerve damage that has been gradually degenerating over time.
This past February, he fell and it looks like he tore his left rotator cuff. That was basically the one straw too many, and was what initially sent him to the ER last week in the first place. Today, he was released from the hospital and admitted to a long-term physical rehab center. They are going to help him lose weight, try to get his diabetes under control, and work on that shoulder every day.

We are really optimistic that this intensive physical therapy is going to benefit him, but it's going to take time - like, three months or so. Because my mother doesn't drive, I am going to be spending a lot of time on the highway. (We live about fifty miles from my parents' house.)

In an effort to try to adjust schedules and exert a bit of control over this new (albeit temporary) lifestyle, I have spent today doing a complete overhaul on the menu board. With the weather warming up, it was time to swap out recipes anyway, and tomorrow is grocery day, so it seemed like the right time to do it. For the foreseeable future, all of our meals are going to be thrown in the crock pot before I leave to be ready by dinner, or it will be items I can throw in the pressure cooker and have done in minutes. (I <3 my pressure cooker. It is my kitchen bff.) I am also making sure that these are recipes I can mix up, put in a zipper bag and freeze. No muss, no fuss, just a quick semi-defrost in the microwave, drop it in the crock pot and go about my business.

I am not sure that the blogsphere needs another "crapload of crockpot meals" post, but if anybody really wants to know what I chose, I suppose I can post it. Since the recipes are Pinterest finds from all over the internet, I might try to review them as we try them out. Time permitting, of course. 

Scheduled Meandering and the OCD Traveler

     True facts, ladies and gentlemen - I am a pain in the ass to travel with.
     When I travel, I strive to be hyper organized and I tend to get really stressy and uptight when things don't go my way. Alternatively, my husband's vacation mindset tends to be "Hey, that looks interesting, let's go that way!"
     These drastically opposing vacation styles do not mesh well, trust me. Thankfully, in the almost fifteen years we have been married, we have managed to find a happy medium. I am allowed to make a flexible schedule, and he is allowed a certain amount of "free exploration".
     Naturally, when we travel by plane or train, I have us scheduled down to the minute. About a year after we were married, we won a trip to LA and nearly missed our flight because my husband doesn't understand the wibbly-wobbly-timey-wimey screwed up way that time works inside an airport. He spent years living that one down. 
     But, when we are on a family road trip with no time constraints, I am content to let him take over and we go where the day takes us. At least as long as we are in transit - once we arrive, the Schedule Monster tries to take over. "If we want to take the kids to this show/activity/event at X time, we need to leave the hotel by Y o'clock. We can stop at Z on the way, but we can only stay for 14 and a half minutes, any longer than that and we'll miss the beginning of show/activity/event. You know what? Let's just go straight to show/activity/event and we'll do the rest after."  And, heaven forbid something should cause us to end up being late for show/activity/event anyway, because then I am irate for the next three hours. Yay, OCD!
     I am currently sitting down to plan our trip for Spring Break. We were originally planning to go to Williamsburg, VA, but due to this winter's snowpocalypse, the husband lost three days of vacation time, and it looks like the children may lose three days of theirs as well. So we've cancelled Williamsburg in favor spending a three day weekend exploring some of what our home state has to offer. Inspired by Daughter The Elder and her interest in all places spooky, we're going to check out as many of the haunted, weird and creepy places we can find in NC.
     And I get to plan the itinerary! It's borderline perverse how happy this makes me.