Raven’s Range
Blather around a virtual range

Sunday, 06 January 2008 21:13

06 January 2008

Filed in Blog

Last Sunday was last year, and I spent it working on “preparation” for the upcoming New Year. The closest I can get to this is that I like to try to tie up loose ends, while working on my goals and getting into a quiet state of mind–ready to make the transition to a new year. The entire week after Christmas is like that for me, and this has been a particularly intense year with a lot of processing to do. ;)

New Year’s Eve rolled around, and after a stock-up trip around an insanely busy supermarket I spent it seeing in the year with friends old and new at my chat room. Each time zone’s midnight ticked by and then it was my turn. I got a lump in my throat and was very glad to kiss 2007 goodbye. It’s a huge relief to be saying, “Okay, 2007 was last year.”

The first day of the year I went for my traditional motorcycle ride under a cold blue sky. I headed out to Amador County, new terrain for me (at least on a bike), and a route that took me around some of the magnificent dams and reservoirs with the snowy Sierra Nevada in the far, far distance. Following another tradition, I was sure to snarf a couple of landmarks for the 2008 Markeroni Challenge, too…and of course, this blog launched, too.

Wednesday was sunny, but my neck, stiff and sore from a few days before New Year was troubling me and I decided to stay at home. I haven’t done much long-distance lately, and I could feel it in my muscles and energy levels. Quietness was called for.

The day after, all hell broke out. We took a fair share of what experts were calling one of the worst ten storms in California for a hundred years and the journalists gleefully called “Winter Blast.” The wind whipped up to 45 mph and the gusts were 60 mph. The RV rocked and rolled! We lost power and had to do an emergency run outdoors at four in the morning to tie down the banging awning which, we were sure from the violent sound, we’d lost. It was a powerful, exhilarating, scary storm and we spent the rest of the morning watching the big rigs pull off the freeway to safety and listening to reports of trees across railroad tracks, crashes and heart attacks until we finally got tired enough to sleep through anything and took a long nap. ;)

Our internet has been very spotty since then. We lost the phone for a few days, and the net is tied in with that. Sometimes we get an hour or so at a go, sometimes just minutes. I upgraded all my blogs to the latest and greatest Wordpress and worked on ways to do categories and tags at Markeroni, an outstanding job that will have the pleasant side effect of reducing my backlog of admin tasks down to almost zero. The worst of the storm was over on Friday and yet there are still multiple bands of wind and rain coming in and not a complete dry day expected until nearly the weekend. I have been reading a lot, and catching up on writing blog posts offline in hopes that I will have good enough connectivity to actually post them some day.

I slipped out yesterday to lay in a supply of bread and canned goods just in case. It was freeing and wonderful to chat the rain and be on my bike, if only for an hour. I arrived back moments before it started to rain heavily once again. Later, though, for a brief and glorious moment the evening sun came out and produced a fantastic, huge double rainbow that ended, like a blessing, right on top of our RV–our Coachmen Leprechaun. :)

So, that has been my week. The honeymoon period of the New Year has been washed away in the dark, oppressive rain of this storm, and now the hard work of sticking to my goals begins. I am looking forward to it.