Update

I know I've been offline lately but life here continues at a good pace.

We are busy at work planning our next big trip. We're going to be gone from mid-September to the end of October in Europe again with a focus on Austria, Italy, and maybe Slovenia, Croatia, and Hungary.  We had a whole different agenda in mind but life interfered and people who we though would be with us couldn't make it.

We took a short (in time) road trip to Omaha Nebraska for Wife to attend and provide major genealogical support to a reunion of cousins on her Mother's side of the family. Wife's Mother came for a very large family so their are scads of cousins in this line. Wife's Mother also was the primary cataloger of information for that family and she passed all those records on to Wife when she passed many years ago. Wife took up the torch in recent years as her interest in genealogy grew.  We left Albuquerque on a Wednesday, got to Omaha on Thursday, spent Friday and Saturday at the reunion, left on Sunday and were home on Monday.  It's interesting driving because you don't stay on the interstates very much. You take I-40 east for a little over 200 miles (that doesn't even get you out of New Mexico) and then you head diagonally northeast on US highways through the Texas panhandle, the Oklahoma panhandle, all of Kansas and into Nebraska until you get to I-80 for about 80 miles to reach Omaha.  It's actually pretty easy driving with not much traffic and pretty low stress...except when certain family members who will remain unnamed to protect this blogger decide to pass trucks and find there's not as much time as they thought...then it's more like a stress test.

The semi-retired life is great. I've got this workout routine that I think is doing good things in terms of my overall strength, balance and flexibility - all things that we older folk need to be paying attention to.  Meditation and spiritual life is strong and deepening. I have plenty of energy. One side effect of this is that in the evenings I'd much rather be reading or writing rather than watch TV. I work just enough to keep me engaged especially with those people who actually have lives and aren't just talking about their ailments or latest doctor visits (that would be all my peers which includes me when I'm with them!). And I'm making pretty good money since I don't invest anything into 'growing my business' which pushes the financial margins out enough that we can do the things we want.

The home decorating continues.  After some test runs with the new lounge we decided that the seating wasn't going to work for four people so we're researching something else. We're on to work on the living room. We purged our library of almost half its contents (we still have a hell of a lot of books!).  We have some things that need to be done to the yard still and are looking for a maintenance person.

And the book is done! Once I had all the back stories figured out I only had a couple of big re characterizations to figure out and when those were done the rewriting just flowed.  It is a very, very curious thing because not only has the ideas for this book flowed but there is this gusher of ideas that have led to me outlining two new books (prequel and a sequel). Especially when I do my hiking/solitude workouts, the stuff just comes. I'm not even trying to think about it.  I get back from those and I will put down all the ideas that came out in the new book outlines. Very strange.