Connie woke up this morning with some sort of respiratory infection/disease and has been battling fever, coughing, post-nasal drip, and various other flu/cold related symptoms all day. Fortunately, Nurse Cratchet (Neil) was here to get her drugs, food, drinks, and provide TLC. He went on a run but other than that stayed around the house…fed her some chicken soup for lunch and cooked a couple of chicken pot pies for dinner since she doesn’t feel up to much else…she even passed up Beer O’clock.

Neil ordered us a new longer telephoto zoom for our Nikon D7000 DSLR…it will make it much easier to get high resolution close ups of various fauna we encounter on our journeys. 

Connie has a couple more medical appointments scheduled for early next week…hopefully they’ll give her the complete OK afterwards. She worked a couple of hours today even through she is sick…it’s that time of year when she’s got a lot to do so she’s just soldiering on despite feeling lousy. 

Not much planned for the weekend at this point…choir on Sunday and we’ll play the rest of the weekend by ear depending on how Connie feels. We already cancelled out on a pot luck we were going to at the park tonight; Neil was gonna make Nestles Quik Brownies but Connie doesn’t feel much like being sociable not to mention doesn’t want to infect anybody with whatever she’s got. Neil is just hoping she doesn’t infect him:-)

Other than that…another day down here in Paradise. We had to fire up the fireplace for awhile this morning as it was 58 or so overnight and the temp in the house was down to 65 or so when we got up but by about 1000 we had the windows and door opened and the fans on; it topped up in the mid 70’s and was clear, low humidity and beautiful. It’s gonna snow an inch or two up in the DC ‘burbs where we used to live…which means Connie got the normal “Abandon your work place now and head out for home” email from the folks at Northern Virginia Community College where she works…and I’m sure Pat Collins on DC News Channel 4 has already had his report talking about the supplies of bread, mild, beer, and toilet paper being sold out at DC area markets…and he’s also already gotten out there with his yardstick to measure the accumulation.

We’ve got our plans for the first couple of months after we leave here pretty much finalized; after our stops in Sarasota, FL;Gulf Shores, AL; Austin ,TX; and Kerrville, TX for the New Horizons rally we’re stopping by Junction CIty, KS at the Camp New Horizons for some warranty work and a couple of upgrades to the house. After that it’s off to Colorado Springs for a bike race, Pikes Peak and other fun in the mountains then head up via Great Falls, MT to Alberta for visits to Edmonton (Saint Säens concert), Jasper and Banff National Parks, Vancouver, and Seattle, WA (another Saint Säens) concert where we’ll stay at an army campground on a lake. The schedule after that gets a little fuzzier although at this point we’re thinking about extreme northwest Washington state to see the Olympic National Park and peninsula then down the Oregon coast then east/north through eastern Washington and Oregon before heading through Idaho, Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Parks in the late summer. After that we’re still thinking; current plans are for either down through southern Arizona to see Antelope Canyon and other national parks in the area (this option would let us see another bike race in the early fall in Colorado) or else down the east side of the Rockies. We’ll probably firm all of that up before we leave Fort Myers the end of next month.

Sorry, no pictures of the sickly Connie today…she didn’t put any makeup or earrings on and declined to be photographed. Take my word for it though…she looks like poop.

Cyas.