Exactly one decade. in A small but passable life.

That’s right. Exactly ten years to the day since the factory closed and I’ve been unemployed. No big deal. I don’t miss it at all.

Tomorrow it is supposed to cool off to the high nineties for a few days.

I booked the first night’s lodging for the road trip. I used 11,000 of the 11,121 points we’d collected. The total for the room at check-in will be $8.17, for a $55 room. All that savings for just twenty minutes on the phone talking to “Elite Member” services. Whatever. The gal on the phone was a wonderful conversationalist though. There were two different La Quinta motels. She looked up and found the newest which also had the most recent renovations. Nice.

Somewhere we have maybe two free nights coming at a Comfort Inn, or one of that group. I say somewhere because I can’t find our member number. I’ll figure it out.

Daughter has been deciding on where we’ll be spending our days camping and hiking during her weekends off while I’m there.

I’d like to spend a night or two sleeping in the grocery store parking lot. You know, the place I lived in the van for more than a year. Just for old times sake. I do remember those cool October mornings. So nice.

When Mom bought the new car I flopped the back of the back seats down and made sure I could stretch out back there. And it is perfect. And now I have the new ThermaRest X-Lite air mattress. So yeah, looking forward to some urban boondocking.

We’ve had the new car nearly three months now and it still has less than four hundred miles on it.

We’re fixing to remedy that though.