We are currently enjoying the warmer weather in Houston, seeing sisters, and enjoying the achievement of being around for three quarters of a century. In a couple weeks my grand niece will be in the Top Hands event at the Houston Rodeo again. She may be physically challenged but sharp as a tack and we watched her win a gold buckle in 2016. We are expecting great results again this year. Late February we will probably wander up through St Louis before getting back to Columbus in mid March. Lori is having her knee rebuilt in early April and we will see how things go from there.
Frankly one of the major reasons for not adding to this site more often has to do with my basic design. I really like the option of jumping from any page to any page but as the site has gotten bigger, the menu that drives that has gotten huge. Doing a copy and paste of well over a hundred lines of code into well over a hundred pages is an adventure and invariably I discover a typo when almost done and have to start over. Been there, done that, wasn't fun. I've tried to minimize the pain by adding a year of travels at a time, but that requires a large block of time to concentrate and we have been moving too fast. Thanks to a Meetup sponsored by Thinkful.com I got directed into learning enough JavaScript to be dangerous. Now adding a page is a simple matter of adding the page and a few lines to my script file.
While not apparent from user viewpoint I have made major changes in how the site works. As the website has grown so has the complexity of the menu that allows a jump from any page to any page generally becoming larger than any information you actually see. Again thanks to some advice from the folks at Thinkful.com I have learned enough JavaScript to consolidate the jumps into a single large file. As you load each page containing the simple menu framework the script fills in the details of other pages available. This does require your browser to have JavaScript activated which you need to navigate any modern site anyway. If not there will be a comment "NEED JavaScript" in the menu which you may see flicker if your connection is a little slow. If it stays on you can find how to turn JavaScript on and why here. Sorry I have not learned enough yet to suppress the flicker or work around the need for JavaScript. I also need to put in a word of thanks and a plug for the Net Ninja channel on YouTube which really got me started.
This site is planed as a work in progress. After retiring in 2006, we started sending reports back to the wonderful lady that had always watched the house while we traveled. Unfortunately Ruth Lambert is no longer with us so the major incentive for the reports is also gone and sending color copies to all our friends and relatives does start to get rather expensive hence this more convenient website presentation. As in our rambling, the reporting tended to be rather erratic and although it only got into 2010 it was reaching 300 pages and filling two 2 inch notebooks. With the old stuff converted that puts me now only nine years behind and working on year five of our travels.
We retired in mid 2006 and decided to wander the USA to actually see what it really looks like. In some 40 years of actually working for a living John has had extensive travel but rare opportunities to see an area. Usually it's dark going into the plant and dark coming out so most of the scenery is the inside of a plant, motel room, or restaurant. Actually in the last six months before retirement John put in two 34 hour days; ya walk into the plant and walk out 34 hours later. So we sold the house and the majority of the "stuff" and are now OLD (medicare recipients), UNEMPLOYED (retired), HOMELESS (not destitute), and enjoying the nomad lifestyle. NO! we don't have an RV; we sold the house, we're not driving it. We have two tents to camp when we want, but mostly motel camp. Staying a week or a month tends to be economical most places and we are definitely budget travelers. Look for us where its warm but not real hot with a reasonable cost of living.