The blog is going on haitus
I’m sorry to do this but I’m putting Balance in All Things on haitus for a while.
The reason is simply that my father was my most loyal reader. He commented to me on more than one occasion that he enjoyed what I wrote and continued to encourage me on it. I don’t think he knew how much writing I actually did before I started this blog, or at least I never wrote anything that he related with. So this blog turned out to be something special between us.
Now, when I sit down to write a post… I just come up blank. I think about Dad and just cannot focus on the post. It is basically too emotional for me to write.
I hope in time that I can come back to it, but for the immediate future, I’ll be walking away.
Thanks for reading.
Posted: December 23rd, 2008 under Decisions.
Comments: none
I’m taking half a day off from work to go shooting with a friend of mine. We’ll be doing trap shooting (like skeet only no walking around), target shooting, and testing out our rifles. It’s a good bunch of male bonding and surprisingly relaxing. I know in today’s world even talking about shooting can suddenly label you as a potential “going postal” person and that just annoys me to no end. Target shooting is a very challenging and enjoyable sport. But guns are a politically charged subject and thus cause immediate reactions from people. Le sigh. 
Yesterday morning I noticed I had no long-sleeve shirts ironed. It is no big deal, but typically my wife keeps up with the ironing. The holiday and the fact that she is working again this holiday season interrupted the oh-so-fine ironing time. So I figured I’d grab the iron when I got home and flatten some shirts. Well, when I came home, I saw that she had already ironed most of my shirts and they were hanging waiting for me to put in my closet. I still had a few shirts left to iron, so I went ahead and grabbed them. My daughter asked if I could do something with her, so I said “let me just iron these shirts first.”
I’ve had a GPS giving me driving directions for years, before those stick on your dash units became affordable. It was a Compact Flash GPS that plugged into my PDA. I’ve used it on every trip I’ve been on since I got it and it has worked extremely well for me. It is so nice to know that someone is there telling me where to go. On occasion though, the GPS will tell me to turn one direction and I think that I should turn the other. When I decide to go with my gut, 75% of the time I’m wrong. When I trust the GPS, I’m typically right. So fast forward to a family trip to visit my Grandmother in Maine. We drove down from Maine back to Boston to catch our flight, the little GPS telling us where to go. Then we came upon a crossroads. The highway said to take a certain exit to get to Logan airport, but the GPS said to keep going straight. What to do? 
As you can imagine, it gets pretty windy in Oklahoma, especially during the spring. There are tornadoes, of course, but we also have days of very strong straight line winds and these often do as much damage, if not more, than the tornadoes do. I remember one year, the straight line winds smashed the windows of cars inside a parking garage at a local mall. I couldn’t imagine coming out and seeing all that broken glass around your car, talk about stressful. Well one day we had strong straight line winds and as I was in the kitchen, I heard a loud crack in the back yard. Since we don’t have any trees there, I thought nothing of it. I figured a limb fell off one of the trees in my neighbor’s yard. Turns out, I was wrong.