Trippin' with Susan Straley

 Life flows on, sometimes we are starting something new, sometimes we are saying goodbye to a time or people or activity. I have a friend, Ron F. on Facebook is now unable to bike.  Biking was such a big part of his life (like mine).  He vacationed around biking, he belonged to several bicycle communities.   Now he is reaching out to me and others that are visiting trails and areas where he and his wife have biked.  He shares his experiences, and in that way hangs onto his identity.   I don't know why that came to mind when I start thinking about leaving Rhinelander this year.  I depart on Sunday, August 15th. It feels surreal to be leaving my sister and her husband and the people and activities I have connected with here.  I plan to return a little bit next year. Flowing on, I am so excited to meet up with friends that I know from Florida! I will be meeting up with Diane in Marquette, Michigan.  We will bike and camp together.  I was going to meet up with friends Tony and Colleen

  The rain is often an invitation to go out and dance. Unless it is cold.  It is hard to stay warm when you are wet. Yesterday I read that Inverness, Florida has had many days of rain. And I thought, boy am I lucky to be here, the weather has been great! It started raining today around 11:00 a.m.  Now it is three in the afternoon it looks like it is going to continue through the night. There is music in town this evening... outside.  I think I will stay inside. I have not moved forward on book three since I got the edits back from my beta readers.  Today would be the perfect day to get going on that. And I may start today.  Though I have the whiny girl on my chest stamping her feet and saying, "I don't wanna do that!"  What is that about? I read what other people have written and I feel unworthy to put my thoughts on paper.  What am I thinking to expose my crude thoughts and language to book readers?  I know I am not supposed to compare myself to others, but isn't tha

It is nice to be in one place.  No days spent packing up and driving to the next place.     Physical Training   I have mapped out a nice nine-mile route that I ride my bike on several mornings a week.  Eventually I will add weight and practice the hilly route loaded.     I am training my body for the 300 plus mile tour I will be doing in September with friend Joan.  We will be riding the Allegheny Gap Trail and the C&O trail.  The C&O Trail has some very rough surfaces, so I am training on my two-wheel bicycle.  Since I arrived in Rhinelander, Wisconsin, I have not even removed my recumbent tricycle from the van! I set some physical goals for myself and went to meet with a personal trainer at Anytime Fitness.  Sydney is a slim young woman with a physical training degree and a cheerleader inside her.   I told her I wanted to be able to jump up onto something.  I told her that I was afraid to even jump onto a rug for fear of catching my toe.  Well, I guess that was negative self-

 February 12, 2021 Today was the final day of the annual Caregivers' conference put on by Coping with Dementia .   This morning I was part of a panel of three authors talking about keeping a journal.  We had all been caregivers for someone with dementia, we had all kept journals in some form.  Vicki Veasey started out keeping her journal in calendar form.  This helped her keep track of her parents' symptoms, appointments, happenings.  By keeping track on a calendar she was able to see that her father experienced symptoms around the time of the full moon.  That realization helped her be prepared to deal with those symptoms. That's interesting!  The other panelist was Linda Burhans that does a regular radio show dedicated to caregivers .   Journal Writing 101 I write on paper and I write online. You don't need to commit to every day.  I don't do commitment. With a journal it can be private for just your eyes. You don't need to write full sentences. You can do jus

 Hello!  I have not written to you in a while.  Sorry, procrastination happens.   Maybe it wasn't procrastination as much as the anxiety or weirdness of the political unrest. (For you reading this in the future, on January 6th, 2021 there was an attack on our US Capital with the crowd chanting to hang the vice president who was about to certify the election results from the 50 states.)  The events on top of a year of the rise in cases of COVID19 has many of us anxious and I didn't want to write anything about it and add to our anxiety.  But how could I write and not mention it?  Families and friends are torn apart by not just differing opinions, but deep beliefs in what is the truth. How do you prove what is real when someone insists that every source you site they don't trust.  Every fact you site they believe is false. That is some of our experiences during these times. Anyway, that isn't what I am writing about.   What I wanted to let you know about is a free virtual

 For those of you who have hooked up trailers to pull, you know that there are two satisfying sounds.   The first is when the cup receiver on the trailer slides down onto the ball of the hitch on your towing vehicle.  At first it was a scary sound for me, but after a few times the sound was cause for a mini-celebration, a pat on the back.   The second sound is when one pushes the latch into place.  There is a latch that slides under the ball to prevent the trailer cup from bouncing off the ball.  Sometimes I have gotten the first sound (the receiver engaged with the ball) but I couldn't get the latch to move into place. That has required me to wind the trailer back up off the ball in order to free the latch and try again. I am telling you all this technical stuff because this morning I thought I heard both good sounds.  I thought I saw that the ball and receiver were engaged.  I guess I was relying a bit more on the sounds because it was still dark out at 6:30 this morning when I w