Another Busy Day

Yesterday was another busy day for us. But hopefully it will be the last one for a while.

We started out driving to the northwest side of Orlando to drop off a truckload of bins of envelopes at the commercial mail service. I was surprised that, while it was busy, traffic wasn’t the usual madhouse it often is on Interstate 4.

After that chore was done, we took boxes of envelopes to UPS to send out to the mail forwarding services that many of our traveling subscribers use. It’s interesting that when fuel prices spike upward like they did a while back, UPS and FedEx implement a surcharge, but when fuel drops back down like it has recently, their shipping rates never seem to drop back down. Why is that?

We still weren’t done. I dropped Terry off at WalMart, since I try to avoid all of the big box stores between Thanksgiving and Christmas. While she was dealing with the holiday shoppers, I spent my time in a long line at the post office, where I had even more bins of First Class envelopes to drop off. Fortunately, most of them had mailing labels attached with pre-printed postage, since we use Stamps.com. So those were just handed off to a clerk, but I still had to stand in line to send out papers to our Canadian subscribers. Later in the evening, the local news said it was the busiest day of the year for the post office, and I believe it.

I got back to WalMart just about the time Terry was in the checkout line, so I didn’t have to wait too long for her. Which meant I couldn’t take a nap while I waited.

Back at the Thousand Trails campground, we stopped to pick up our mail at the activity center, where I ran into Michael and Ann Barnhardt, who attended one of our western Gypsy Journal rallies a few years ago in Arizona. It was nice to see them again.

One of the items waiting in our mail was the proof copy of the printed version of Crazy Days in Big Lake. It looked pretty good, but there were a couple of little things I tweaked. It should be available for purchase in just a few days, and I’ll let you know when.

I had a lot of e-mail waiting for me when we finally got back home and spent an hour or so working my way through them. That was a challenge because even though we have full bars of signal on both our 3G air card and 4G MiFi, the Verizon service is incredibly slow. It was much better at Three Flags, even though all we had there was 3G. I guess it’s because the campground is so busy.

One of the e-mails I received was from a couple who wrote to tell me that their Christmas gift to each other was that January 1^st they were hitting the road as brand new fulltimers. What a way to start the new year, with a brand new lifestyle! How cool is that?

With the e-mail done, I laid down on the couch and took a well deserved nap. Well, at least I thought I deserved it. While I was doing that, Terry made a delicious dinner of homemade lasagna with garlic cheese toast and a spinach salad for Terry. Actually, delicious doesn’t do it justice. It was wonderful and we both ate way too much.

Today will be a catch our breath day, and I want to get back to work on my new book. At 3 PM I’m scheduled to do a telephone interview with somebody from Amazon about my experiences publishing in their Kindle bookstore. And Terry said something about making some banana nut bread, so I imagine I’ll get drafted into being her quality control taste tester. It’s a tough job, but somebody’s got to do it.

Thought For The Day – Too many people are thinking the grass is greener on the other side of the fence, when they ought to just water the grass they are standing on. – Amar Dave

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