"SPITFIRE" in the Morning

Scary!!! That is how I would describe what happened.

Bonnie and I are training for a half and full marathon, (well, Bonnie is training, I am thinking about how I should be training.) So, it was a beautiful day and Bonnie had scheduled her 12 mile run for the week on Wednesday to accommodate for my school schedule. As Bonnie leaves for her run, she informs me that she will be back around 12 noon. A side note, Lydia was sleeping so I put Bonnie's phone, (which she left with me) and my phone on vibrate. Mistake #1. Secondly, around 11:45 am I decided to wake Lydia up from her morning nap to feed her lunch. Good job Josh, you remembered to feed your child...Then I took Lydia into the kitchen, without the phones, Mistake #2.

As 12 noon rolls around we are looking for Bonnie but she is nowhere in sight. No worries, maybe she went longer than she originally anticipated. At 12:20 pm I get worried and I decide to go looking for Bonnie. So, I grab Lydia, grab my phone and look at it, “Oh no”, I have six missed calls from an unknown Louisville phone number, over the last 45 minutes. My heart sank, “where is Bonnie?” It was that same feeling you get when you remember that you have a child and you haven't heard a peep from her in 10 minutes and you wonder where is she? and what on earth is she getting into? Except this was a little more terrifying, (a lot more terrifying actually).

So, I call the number and a young female voice answers, “hello?” then I say “is Bonnie near you?” The girl proceeds to tell me that Bonnie stopped in there (there being a coffee shop, which made me wonder at first if this was for real) 45 minutes ago because she was being followed!!! “What?” “Where is she now?” and the girl tells me that Bonnie decided to run home down the major street. “Oh no” our credit card number just got stolen over the weekend, a brick was thrown through our car window in a parking lot while we were sleeping, (All happening while we were at a wedding in Toronto, Canada. “Oh Canada, we stand on guard for thee,” I guess Canadian's don't include foreigners in their theme song...oh well.)so, what next?

Lydia and I (a.k.a. “Search and Rescue”) tore out of the driveway and made it 500ft before we spotted our missing target. She was not happy. I will leave the details out. But, I will tell you, HUSBANDS you would be wise to have your phone duct-taped to your body if your wife is going on a long run and you are her only source of protection. And secondly, you need to arm your wife with “SPITFIRE”!

After Bonnie and I “worked through some things” (I will leave the details out) I decided to go on a mission to find the “SPITFIRE”. I had heard about it somewhere, I don't remember where, but it looked pretty cool. It is basically pepper spray in a device that you can aim in any direction, even hit a target that comes from behind to attack you. Regular pepper spray is awkward and not as precise. So, needless to say I called several running stores, all of them carried it but only one store had any in stock, and they only had one left. (That should tell you something if every running store in Louisville is sold out of them and you yourself don't even have one...told me something) So, I drove to the store and bought the last one. The best $14.99 I spent on protection devices.(Plus the store owner threw in a free refill, awesome!) I rushed home (after stopping at Lowe's by my house to see if they had anything on sale, of course) and surprised Bonnie with her new weapon. I happily attached the weapon to Bonnie's keychain and gave her a thorough demonstration on how to use the weapon.

So, if you haven't purchased a “SPITFIRE” for your wife, now is the time to shine. Make her happy and give her the power of “Fire”. Go to the link below to see the weapon. (I don't get any kickback if you purchase one, just the satisfaction knowing that you are listening to my wisdom.)

http://www.spitfire.us/about.htm

Parking Lot Surprise!

ok, so I had to share this story. A few days ago, Bonnie, Lydia and I went on our nightly walk across the street to our local Ghetto-Wal-Mart to look for potting soil. So, we got our potting soil and headed across the other street to the Posh-Target to look for something else, I forgot what it was. As we were walking, looking for lost treasure in the parking lot we noticed something white, glistening on the ground. Wal-Mart parking lots are notorious for goodies, coins, spare tires, broken sunglasses and an occasional tube sock. But, that day we were in for a surprise. Bonnie spotted the gem first and as we came upon it we noticed that we had seen one before. When we were standing over top of it looking down on it we asked “could this be what we think it is?”. Sure enough we had stumbled upon a pregnancy test. Yep, a USED pregnancy test right there in the Wal-Mart parking lot. So, as we stared at it, face down, we did what anyone would do and I dared Bonnie to flip it over to see what the result was. (I just didn’t want to touch it and I knew Bonnie would not turn down a dare.) So naturally she used the very end of her flip-flop and flipped the object over. As it landed face up we both bent down at the same time to see what the result was. Could it really be? Is it possible? Positive! Someone was pregnant and we got to share in their results right there in the Wal-Mart parking lot. We were amazed we looked around to see if there was anyone to congratulate but nobody suspicious was around so we continued on our journey to the posh-Target, which by the way has a large drink and popcorn combo for $1.50. We get that combo on special occasions and make several laps around the store just so we can eat our popcorn and fill up as many times as possible with our Diet Dr. Pepper/Cherry Coke combo.

A few days after we found the positive pregnancy test in the parking lot I began to wonder, “how did that test find its way onto the dirty, hot pavement in a Wal-Mart parking lot?” I mean, I think we have our first test saved somewhere special in a ziplock bag to keep forever, maybe even get it bronzed one day. I can just imagine the frantic girl buying a pregnancy test at the pharmacy (hopefully she bought it, but I have my doubts) and then rushing to the Wal-Mart bathroom to administer the test. But, my stomach began to turn. What if she didn’t wait long enough? What if she immediately left the bathroom, test in hand, and walked out to the parking lot and looked down and saw that it was negative and threw it on the ground and walked off? Those things can take several minutes to saturate the testing area (I have read the directions thoroughly, that is how I know). She might get a big surprise in a couple months. Somebody is pregnant and I know it. Let’s hope she does too.

On the Road Again, and Again, and Again

The first entry on this blog has been inspired by my friend John Randolph (http://jcrandolph.blogspot.com/). He and his wife travel a lot, but he made the comment that we (Bonnie, Lydia, me) travel more than they do. So this has raised a couple questions, “how much do we travel in a year and how much should we travel in a year?”.

I guess the fact that I started this blog 3 months ago and this is the first entry (and possibly the only entry) is evidence that we do travel a bit, eh? And a side note, the reason this blog was created was for the same reason anyone creates a blog, because it is the thing to do these days. It is like watching A.I. or talking about communism, or even like wearing big white-frame sunglasses to match your big white SUV. Everyone does it and that is all there is to it.

Back to this entry, so how much should a person travel in a year? There are many variables to this question for the sake of argument we are limiting it to pleasure trips, beach, see family, see another country, see a national amusement etc...(no business trips allowed). One blogger blogged her trip around the world in six months and she estimated her budget to be about $3,000 US per person/per month of their travels. (http://www.gonomad.com/traveldesk/0710/how-to-spend.html) So traveling can cost a ton of money. But besides budgets, how should a person decide how much he or she should travel in a year?

One factor that I have “felt” over the past year of traveling is the physical and mental exhaustion (P.M.E. for short) that comes from traveling. I find myself sleeping more, feeling queasy from unfamiliar foods, and feeling physically out of shape. The P.M.E Index, I think, can be a constant and consistent factor in helping a person determine how much he or she should travel in a year. To answer a possible rebuttal, “doesn’t this seem rather subjective?” Yes. But so is determining how much to travel in a year. Some years may require more travel than others, but through a Travel Log Book I think a person can learn how to curb the travel pains over time. Which, this is what I have kept since the very first trip Bonnie and I ever took.

As a pilot, I was trained in keeping a log book (http://www.sportys.com/acb/showdetl.cfm?DID=19&CATID=176&Product_ID=1550&count=1&Pcount=23 about $10 plus s/h), so for fun I bought an extra pilot’s log book and began entering our travels in the log book. I renamed several of the columns to include new titles such as: automobile, train, and races (we run marathons). Then the mode of travel was logged under the proper column and now I can keep a running tally of how many hours we spent in the car, airplane, train etc... Looking at the travels over the past year I have been able to come to some good conclusions about how much we traveled before the P.M.E. kicked in.

Just for numbers sake, Bonnie and I were gone 36 days last year (from July 08-July 09), we spent 13 hours in a plane and 93.5 hours in a car over those days traveling. Not to mention that we had guests stay at our house 83 days over the same course of time, (when we were actually home). This means we were gone 10% of the year and we had visitors 23% of the year, that’s 33% of the year we either had visitors or we were visiting someone.

So, what is our P.M.E. Index? After thinking through this and looking at the numbers I think I can conclude that it takes 2 weeks to fully recover for every 1 week of entertaining visitors and 3 weeks to fully recover for every 1 week of traveling. If we didn’t have responsibilities of work, church, keeping a routine for Lydia, schoolwork, etc... we could travel every few weeks. But, since we have all these responsibilities nothing would get done if we were gone all the time. So, I think 5 weeks a year of traveling is our absolute limit, and 6 weeks a year of entertaining guests is our absolute limit (12 weeks entertaining guests last year was a little too much). This means 11 weeks of the year are either spent traveling or entertaining guests, and at this rate you would have on average 3.7 weeks in between each trip/guests week to recover, which would be sufficient for us based on previous observations. I think that could be a sustainable pace for us.

What is your P.M.E Index? This might be something fun to think through and log how much you really travel and then compare it to us. Do you travel more than the Brown’s (especially you Mr. Randolph)? I would like to know if you do.

For fun and in case you wondered: since we began our traveling in November of 2004, we have spent 634 total hours traveling. This means that we have traveled around the world TWICE by plane and we are a quarter of the way around the earth on our second lap by car. I will let you know when we have traveled to the moon, we are 33% of the way there with only 159,675 miles to go...

Returning from our Virginia trip for Lydia's first Birthday Party.