Damn you, Fracture. After watching you last night, you gave me some of the worst nightmares I’ve had in recent memory. And now it’s 4:30 in the morning and I can’t sleep because they keep coming back whenever I close my eyes.
Note to self: this is why you don’t like scary, or even just suspenseful movies. It is okay to not like or watch them!!! Really.
Over dinner tonight, Rob and I were talking about all the work that will need to be done on my parents’ land if either of us were to move there. I am actually looking forward to it, but I tell you one thing, we’d all need to invest in some good work shoes. The land over there is absolutely beautiful, but it can also be positively brutal if you’re doing much walking in the wooded areas. The sneakers I went down with weren’t really cutting it for anything much more than some mild hiking.
I’ve researched everything else I can think of concerning the move, so it’s only logical that I check out sites for the types of shoes we’ll need. MetBoots.com has a great selection of competitively priced work boots on their site. Their free shipping over $100 offer is also attractive to me because I know I’m going to be doing a lot of online ordering once we’re there since we’ll be pretty isolated. You know I’ve become a true farm girl once I add a pair of work boots to my shoe closet. Stay tuned. ;-)
So I went into work yesterday and was called in to meet the new VP of Marketing almost immediately. We chatted for about 15 minutes and she said, “Why are you not in marketing? You should be over here. I want you here.”
Since I’ve been with the company for 8 years and in the IT department for 7 of them, I wasn’t expecting anything to change. After all, I’ve been asking to go to the marketing department for at least 5 years now. So when she came over to my office 1/2 hour later and said, “Welcome to marketing. I just talked to the owner and he was all for you coming over”, I was momentarily stunned. I think my jaw is still on the floor. However, it’s on the floor in my old office because I have already moved. Is your head spinning? Because mine sure is!
I now have a new boss, a new(ish) job, a new office, and I’m in a new department. I did not expect that to happen when I came back to work from vacation this week! My mind is still reeling from it all, and I’m still just sort of feeling my way around and taking things as they come for now. My new boss seems to be fantastic and I’m excited to work for her. My office now has a window, so my newest high class problem will be having a glare on my computer screen unless I close my blinds.
It’s barely past 8 PM on Friday night, and I’m ready for bed. All of this change has simply exhausted me!
I found a picture of that mountain I was talking about in my previous post!
It’s Tinker Mountain and here is one of the best pictures I could find of it online. It’s still not the best photo of it, but it will have to do until I take my own. It’s still pretty, isn’t it? I think I like it more for it’s interestingness than it’s prettiness, though. Something about it just reaches right out and grabs me.
I dropped a bomb about us possibly moving to Virginia after returning from our trip, but I realized I never gave a proper recap of the trip itself. We really packed a lot into 5 short days, looking back on it.
The trip down was hellacious - we encountered traffic pretty much the entire way and then we ran into ran and fog. Couple that with the fact that we were following my dad, who has a fear of driving in the rain, and you’ve got the recipe for good times right there. We arrived safely, even though our destination was half way up a mountain and it was foggy out. Our first night was spent at the Peaks of Otter lodge in Bedford. We met my dad’s cousin and his wife for dinner at the restaurant there and afterwards went to our rooms to hang out. My dad’s cousin is a hunter and so he knows all the calls for animals. There were some deer on the land beneath the balconies and he started calling to them. They came over! My kids thought this was the greatest thing ever, I guess mostly because the noises he was making sounded like he had some serious gas. It was too foggy and dark to appreciate much else besides the deer that night, but the next morning was simply breathtaking. Rob and the boys decided they were going to hike to the top of Sharp Top that day while the rest of us headed to my uncle’s art show. The guys loved hiking up that mountain, and apparently Connor was quite the outdoorsman, leaving Rob and Aric in the dust!
Experiencing an outdoors art show for the first time was great. The weather was perfect, the people were extremely friendly, and my uncle did very well with selling some of his work, as well as winning an award. I might be a bit biased, but I honestly believe my uncle’s work was some of the best there. I’m so thrilled for him, and it’s so exciting to see how much he’s grown as an artist over the years.
After the show, we headed to my dad’s cousin’s house in Salem, where we were spending our next night. We all went out to dinner at K&W, one of my family’s favorite places to go while visiting Virginia. That night we all crashed pretty hard and woke up refreshed and ready for some exploring. My mom, dad, Aric, and I did the nostalgia tour of Roanoke, visiting my parents’ childhood homes and schools, as well as other places of significance over the years. That was a lot of fun, but it was also sad because so much of the area is run down now. There were also a lot of buildings that were completely gone, so my parents were sad to not be able to see them any more. I loved being able to see my favorite mountain in Roanoke - I didn’t take a picture of it, and I can’t find one online, but I’m going to keep looking to show you all. There’s something mesmerizing about the shape and placement of that mountain that causes me to stop and gaze at it in quiet reflection almost the entire time it’s within my view.
Once we were done the nostalgia tour, we all headed over to what the Roanokers call “the country” - otherwise known as Catawba, or home. :-) My mom’s aunt and uncle have a house up on a mountain there, which you saw in the picture in my previous blog entry. We stayed there for two nights. The first day was spent exploring the land, shooting rifles, and getting rides on the Gator. The boys had a blast. That night Rob and the boys went out on the front deck to spend the night under the stars. It was about 40 degrees out and I wasn’t sure how long they would last out there. Connor apparently lasted about 1/2 hour, but Rob and Aric stayed out there all night! They were both still asleep when I woke up at 7. Rob says they heard all kinds of noises through the night - an owl was hooting and coyotes were in the area most likely having caught their dinner. They didn’t hear or see any bear, which was the big worry. I don’t know if they were relieved or disappointed about that, though. The night sky was amazing - it was a real life planetarium out there. All the constellations were easily identifiable, and it was clear enough to see a satellite moving through the sky, too.
On Monday we spent more time outside, and being in God’s country with perfect weather, how could we not? My uncle, great aunt, and I walked down to my great grandmother’s house - it’s about a 2 1/2 mile walk. The rest of the group rode down in the car - wimps. We strolled around my parents’ property, which is adjacent to my great grandmothers’, and visualized where we would put a house, and what the view would look like from there. Walking around that area brought back a lot of memories because I got to spend some time there when I was younger and my great grandmother was still alive. I always loved going over to the country and how her house smelled as we walked up, because she was always cooking something that we’d never be able to taste anywhere else.
That afternoon and evening, we got our own vegetables from the garden for dinner and helped my great aunt cook a nice southern meal for everyone. I don’t know that I’ve ever had mashed potatoes made from a potato that was just dug out of the earth only hours before. Good stuff. After dinner, Connor saw some deer on the property and decided to mimic my dad’s cousin’s deer call. He was cracking us up with the sounds he was making. The deer were less amused, as they went running for cover after they ignored him for a few minutes until his calls became more insistent. A funny thing happened, though, as he was calling the deer. The cows down in the valley started answering him!! We all had a great time listening to Connor low while rolling around in the grass and hearing the cows responding. Incredible! We dubbed him “The Cattle Caller”.
Sadly, our trip had to come to an end on Tuesday morning. We packed up our things and hit the road before 9 AM. Returning home was bittersweet. I missed having my own space and things, so it was nice to be home for that reason. But I missed the country that had so clearly called to us while we were there even more.
And now we plan.
