Off we go again

Wednesday morning sometime, Tim got a call informing him that he had been selected to sing with and open for Imogen Heap. In Salt Lake City. On Saturday.

At 3:00 he finally woke me up to tell me. I said, "So we're leaving tomorrow?" He said, "How about tonight?"
We figured if we left by 9:00, we'd get in at 4:00 am, and that's the time I was going to bed anyway....

So I hopped out of bed and we rushed to work--washing dishes, sorting laundry, picking up, packing....all the stuff we'd planned to do for the next 3-4 days before we left on Monday the 14th.

At around dusk, Tim came in and said Dan had been helping him clean out the trailer and had accidentally pulled out some wires and could I come check them. They were pulled clean out and had a splicer on them, so it was an easy repair.

Except then the trailer lights wouldn't go on.

3 hours later, after working in the dark with the help of 3 kids and re-doing five wire splices twice and cleaning all the copper I could find, we managed to get enough of the trailer lights going on that we could go. Couldn't do anything about the check engine light that was on, too, or the missing front turn signal light, so we decided to pray we made it (and we did).

But then we still had to finish dishes, laundry, taking out garbages, packing, etc--all the things that have to be done when the tour is more than 4 days long.

So we left for Utah at 1:30 am, tired and hungry.

And we drove. And drove. And drove. And drove.

Every river we drove past or over was raging, full, overflowing its banks.  Lots of flooded fields and campgrounds. We went through a couple of rainstorms.

We had a toddler cry for an hour before we discovered his car seat was cutting into his neck (there's still a mark there, 3 days later).

We got in to Lehi at 10:51 am, and didn't get everyone to bed until about noon--Nathanael was so happy to be out of the car he ran around chasing chickens and dancing his guts out all over the house.

And now here we are in Utah.

We had a fairly intense Thursday, with sleeping all the wrong hours and then visiting with family (11 children, 8 yo and under, running crazy all at once). Lots of preparation for the wedding next week.

Few hiccups: Tim found he couldn't do the video editing with the equipment he had, and then the studio he thought he'd be able to use was really busy and needed all their machines. Thanks to some friends, that got worked out and we will still have an income next month. So today was a little stressful.  There was a minor family crisis (of a rather private nature) that caused a great deal of distress in one sister's family on Tuesday and Wednesday, and by coming here we managed to jump right into that as well as the wedding preparations/moving my other sister into her new home.

And I discovered that, for a person who was just barely making it through each day before (me!), jumping into a public place full of work and crises has not been so easy.  It's bad enough to let everything slide when you're at home. It's really embarrassing to let everything slide at someone else's house.

It's also been really hard to be here and see my siblings struggling--some with happy hard things and some with sad hard things--and not have the physical or emotional energy to take them in and love them and pay attention to them as intensely as I want to. Thank goodness there are other people who also love them and have the physical ability to help right now!

Coming out here early made me miss my self-imposed deadline for my novel. It's not done today like it was supposed to be. That's not entirely bad. During the long drive I figured out something I'd done wrong in the plot that was detrimental to the main character's character arc. So now I can fix that on the first go-around instead of in a later revision. Hooray!  And I still have time to finish the book and print a copy for Anda's birthday (which is what she wants).

So here we are!

Come visit. We'd love to see everyone.