The Best Laid Plans

Sometimes even if you have a great plan, things go awry. Count me among the people that likes to plan.

...........And I've had a lot to plan about recently. I'm leaving on vacation next Saturday - flying to Tampa and then traveling in my girlfriend's motor home from Florida up the eastern seaboard to an RV park on Virginia's Chesapeake Bay - where she has a summer job beginning May 1st.

So you know the planning involved in vacating your home for two or three weeks.

I've also got company coming this weekend. Three of the girls that traveled with me to Africa in December are going to be here for Easter. We're all really excited to get together again, but I've been busily washing bedding, making beds, cleaning up clutter..........did I mention that I've had to clean up clutter? Yikes but I sure to have a lot of that.

And cooking. I've mixed up a batch of three-month bran muffins. (They don't ever last that long, but supposedly you can store the unused batter in the fridge for three full months). So now when we get hungry in the mornings, all we have to do is plop some batter into muffin tins, pop them in the oven, wait 20 minutes and voila.......nice warm muffins.

The girls are arriving Friday night (two of them are from Canada, the other from Spokane) and then I'm going to leave them HOME ALONE on Saturday, because I'm in charge of a trail ride that morning - put on by a riding club I belong to. We ride out at 10:30am from the trail head, so I'll be leaving the house about 8:30am or so. But they told me not to worry, because they intend to decorate eggs and "stuff" while I'm gone. Oh dear!

As part of the prep for vacation departure, I have been working on my sprinkler lines. They were all working except for this one that I always have trouble with, so I started on it this morning. Dug it all up, checked the sprinkler head, took my flashlight out and checked why still no water was emerging from the pipe, even with no sprinkler attached, and discovered a huge piece of old PVC pipe in the line. I got a neighbor guy to come over and check it out and he said "go turn it on and let me see what happens". Well, I went to turn it on............and NO OUTSIDE WATER. Apparently our irrigation water isn't running right now. I called to report the problem, but in the meantime...........I can't fix it.

So as you can see, even with the best laid plans, sometimes things just go wrong. It's very frustrating, especially when I want the yard to look all pretty for my guests (had the lawn mowed today and it does look gorgeous). But it appears my friends may just have to stare at a piece of cardboard with a bunch of dirt on top of it by the driveway. We'll see.

I do have another person I can call that can help me. But that will only be when (or if) I get water. And now I'm also fretting about if this is going to continue to happen when I'm gone. Because if it does, it means that I will have to water the horses from another source. And I hate to have to ask someone who is already doing me a favor by feeding my animals, to add "one more thing" to their list of duties.

For now, I wait on water.

Hope you all have a wonderful Easter weekend. I'll try to get pictures of all of the gala activities taking place here this weekend.