Another Week Squandered

Do you ever listen to the NPR show called "Car Talk"? Sometimes I will catch the tail end of it on Saturdays when I am driving somewhere. The goofy hosts always conclude the show by saying, "Well, you've done it again. You've squandered an hour by listening to 'Car Talk.'"

This last month as my blog posts have been sporadic at best, I've said to myself here and there, "Well, you've done it again. You've squandered another week without a blog post."

I know that most of you probably use an RSS feed or some such, so you probably don't notice when I go nearly ten days without a post. I don't show up in your reader, and you forget about me. But if you are one of the handful of people who regularly comes to my actual blog and then arrives only to discover that my most recent post is still just the one about some nerdy board game, then I'm sorry to disappoint.

We went to see our new house yesterday. I'm so excited to have a dishwasher, a stove top that works (and is gas instead of electric, hallelujah!), a washer and drier, plenty of counter space, plenty of cabinet space, a whole entire room to put Ike's stuff in, a garage, a fireplace, and oh, I could go on and on. Mostly, I'm excited about not having to move again for a very long time. This will be our twelfth move, and it comes roughly one month before our sixth wedding anniversary. Knowing that we won't have to do this again for several years is beyond thrilling.

Along those lines, I think we've figured out a good way to get the necessary help we will need for moving. It involves a little back story.

This summer when Eric went on a 540 mile canoe trip, two of the people on the trip were his Uncle Paul and cousin Seth. The cousin is 16 (or nearly so) and wants to be a Navy Seal. He really pushed the men on the canoe trip, and he was the main reason Eric got home in time to attend the twenty-week ultrasound where we found out we were having an Ike instead of an Ina. Seth is an intense kid. He also happens to think he is a grown person (which, he nearly is) and he wants to go on a canoe trip with his buddies this summer. They plan to go down a section of the Green River which Eric has done three times. (I went with a huge flotilla of the L. family in the summer of 2006.) As far as canoeing goes, it's really quite simple. The river is flat and slow, and when we went in 2006 we spent almost as much time swimming and floating down the river as we did actually paddling in our canoes. It's only about 60 miles, which might sound like a lot, but it's not really. You can start on a Thursday morning and be done by Saturday afternoon.
With all that said, Seth's mom and his friends' moms are not so keen to let their teenage sons do this trip alone. And none of the boys particularly want to be accompanied by a grownup, so Seth has asked Eric to be the chaperone. I'm pretty sure we'll be able to use this as leverage to get some hardy whippersnappers to help us move.