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Rural Indiana, corn & soybeans

Bridge at Louisville, glad we're northbound

Yesterday was a long day.  A really long day.  An extra long day, since we decided to ignore the giant "Alternate route for Chicago-bound on I-65, take I-74 to I-54" signs alongside and over I-65 and trust our GPS to get us around the road closure.  Yeah, that didn't work.  Robert did route us through, around, and about rural central Indiana, but he just took us right back to I-65 in the middle of the closed part so we had to backtrack a few miles and join the throng of detour-ers.  That added an hour to our trip although it did allow us to have a Subway lunch in Thorntown, IN which is about the size of our house from end to end.  The detour and backtracking was an experience that I feel helped me grow as a person because I only spent a couple miles berating myself (like I usually would for the rest of the day) and sighing deeply before Durwood convinced me that we really weren't in a hurry and could stop for the night if we got tired so we should just enjoy the pastoral scenery and drive.  So I did.

I drove my first two hour turn which got us through Louisville and into Indiana, where Durwood took over until we got to Thorntown for lunch.  Then I drove to Crowne Point, IN (just before the excitement that is driving on I-80 through Gary and onto the Illinois Tollway) where we stopped for gas, he took us through Chicago and Milwaukee (I got to do those on the way down, we kind of squabble over who gets to drive those), then I drove us on from Grafton, stopped in Sheboygan at the Charcoal Inn (just in time) for a brat for supper, then I drove home.  We don't adhere religiously to the "two hours on-two hours off" thing but we are religious about breaks from being at the wheel which makes us both get out of the van, stand up to let the blood flow in our legs and butts, walk around the van (at the very least) before hopping in and driving off again.  We probably added 2 1/2 hours to the trip with all the potty stops, doodling around in rural parts, and stopping for food, but the traffic was light, big cities were a snap, and now we're home having had a wonderful, relaxing time in Lexington with DD and SIL1, and on our own too.

Old photo, same old woman

Better yet, I discovered this morning that I lost 6# on the trip.  I need to remember how and what I ate--and do it again and again.  I didn't feel deprived (except I only had ice cream once, on the last night I dodged into Wendy's for a Frostee--no wait, I had a little on my birthday cake on Sunday--see? not deprived), ate what I wanted, didn't really exercise, and still lost weight.  Maybe it was so hot I melted?  Yeah, probably not.  Whatever, seeing that big minus when I stepped on the scale this morning motivated me to do 10 minutes of step aerobics on the Wii.  I plan on a bit of yoga this afternoon.  I need to keep whatever this is going.

Remember I said that I thought I didn't have enough of the Berry colored yarn to finish my Sudoku afghan?  I do now.  I found someone on Ravelry with a bit of it in her stash that she was willing to part with for just the cost of shipping.  How's that for nice?  It came while we were gone and I think it matches just fine.  See?

I had increased navigational duties yesterday so only got this much of Sudoku Maize #8 knitted (two more increase rows and then I start decreasing back to four stitches--downhill, yeah!)  I imagined that I'd sit beavering away at Sudoku squares all last week, never casting on the Virgo (Audrey) Hat, never starting the Bee Stitch Cloth but I didn't and I did.  It was my vacation, I'm not too fussed.  Those squares are terrific work and group knitting projects, very little thinking or counting involved.  Now that the Berry yarn reinforcements have arrived my enthusiasm for knitting those little squares is renewed.

September 6--Dennis Galante, Calendar Page.  The first thing Julie did when she got to the kitchen each morning was tear off the previous day's calendar page.  She used the back of the pages to make grocery lists and notes to herself.  Sometimes she would jot down interesting words or phrases she read in books or heard on TV.  She remembered being a kid and complaining when her mom wrote notes to her teacher on the back of a sheet of junk mail or an envelope.  She thought the teacher or, worse yet, the other kids would think she was too poor to use fresh, clean paper.  Those were the days before everyone was into reusing and recycling.  Nowadays you got chastised for throwing away "perfectly good paper" with a blank side.  When had she turned into her mom?

For some reason my phone won't talk to my computer so I can't post any of the cool pictures Durwood and I took on our drive yesterday.  We didn't get the coolest one.  At the very end of the detour the road took us through that long swath of windmills that I always admire near Lafayette, IN but this time we could look down the row of them all lined up one after the other and see the blades turning.  They weren't in sync so it looked, for just a split second, like one tower with 25 or 30 blades going around.  Very cool, but not worth getting rear-ended to stop for a photo.  Lots of laundry today and perhaps a trip to the AT&T phone store to see what's wrong with Ethel.  If running Spybot and Ad-Aware on the laptop help, I'll update the post with a couple pictures.  I'm sure you're dying to see them.  **3:45 PM--Ethel finally got her pixels or bytes or whatever buzzes in cellphones' brains together and let me download the pictures.  Whew, saved me from having to call Tech Support.
--Barbara