Travel, repairs. travail

It was good to get home Saturday evening. It was even better to have Monday off to compensate for being on the road all day Saturday. Unfortunately, I did not get a lot of things done either Saturday evening or yesterday because my back was hurting badly. I guess standing is the hardest thing for my back to handle at this time – and I have to do a lot of it when I teach. I am home for the rest of this week but for the next two weeks I will be mostly out of town. Traveling to New Mexico next week and to Michigan the following week. Mama will be going with me when I go to teach two classes in Port Huron, MI. I have been looking for an opportunity to take he on one of the out of town assignments and that one looked like a good candidate to have her travel with me.

I do hope we have better flights than I had Thursday. Actually, the flight itself was not bad. Recovering my checked bag was a pain. I flew into Nashville because the flights into northern Alabama were horrifically overpriced due to the hurricane that just passed through. It was about a two-hour drive to Athens, AL from the airport – not bad. I did not have to check my bag but it was a very full flight and the flight attendants asked if anyone was willing to check their carry-on bag to ensure there would be enough room in the overhead bins. It did not seem like a big deal but when we arrived in Nashville it took almost an hour for the luggage to come through. Renting the car was a breeze and the drive through southern Tennessee was a pleasure. Thanks to the maps app on the phone – and the fact that I had been to the site before - it was pretty easy to get around once I got to my destination.

The flight back was a mirror image of the flight over but I had never flown into Terminal C in DFW. It is set up completely differently than all the other terminals with individual baggage claim carrousels spaced separately throughout the terminal. It took me a few minutes to find the right person to tell me where I needed to be to get my bag. Once again, it took about 45 minutes. Oh, well.

I spent a couple hours yesterday working on rabbit cages – after I went to the meat market to pick up our goat meat. We needed to get a cage repaired so we could separate a couple of maturing females. They tend to fight when they get to a certain age and it was evident that they had reached that age. I was planning on processing the largest of the females because Mama does not like her. She is very mean, but I promised to wait until the boys were through with school work before I began getting her ready for the freezer. I could have simply moved one young female into the vacated cage but it seemed a good idea to take the time to make the repairs I had been putting off. Mama and I had bought the specialized clips I needed to make the repairs when we were in Kansas with Brittany but I had not taken the time to use them for the repairs until yesterday. I think Mama will like what she has now. I should find out today. She came home early from school yesterday and headed straight for bed to rest up for the FBI class we had last night.

Mama came in Saturday evening to welcome me home with a terrible grimace on her face. She is dealing with some pretty intense female pain at the moment. It did not abate much through the weekend. Her body seems resistant to the change it must go through based on age. Pray for her that that pain would ease.