We are horrible at planning vacations. There are so many places we want to visit that we can never narrow it down. Once we finally decide on a place, then we can’t figure out what to do. At times, it’s frustrating.

Two years ago we spent ten days in Ireland. Originally, we were thinking of going on an Alaskan cruise or Hawaii. We were being good and had narrowed it down! But I’m not a fan of boats thanks to a stupid (and I do mean stupid) boating accident and the more I thought of a cruise the more panicked I felt. Then we found out how long the trip to Hawaii was. ELEVEN hours. Ugh. I had never been in a plane before and we thought that doing a shorter trip would be best. Surely European countries were longer. Right? Wrong.

So to Ireland we went and we didn’t go on a vacation since.

Sure, we went on long weekend trips, but it’s not the same. We had decided it was time to go away for a week or so and had decided November would be the best time. Then we hit November and couldn’t decide on a local so pushed the target back to December, which we didin’t hit.

See where I’m going with this? We are awful at this. But finally, we decided. Well, we went to a travel agent and had him help us to decide. Sometime in 2007 (being a bit vague here), we will be flying 11 hours to spend 7 days in Kauai. Now we just need to figure out what to do.

I hope your Thanksgiving dinner was as good as ours. Must go under food coma now…

I love living in the North East. We have seasons, very few earthquakes and tornadoes, and I don’t need to go anywhere to admire the changing leaves. In fact, on my twenty-minute drive to work, I get to admire the leaves changing every day until the trees are bare and snow is on the ground. I believe that I am very lucky to experience this so easily. Except, of course, when I must rake the fallen leaves or be buried alive underneath.

And that’s exactly what we did for most of Saturday. Rake. And rake and rake and rake and rake. The neighborhood has a truck that comes along once a week and vacuums up the leaves so all we need to do is move the leaves to the edge of the road. The pile was easily two feet tall and sadly, we’re not technically done. But we have a lawn again.

Unless, of course, the wind has since blown the leaves back on to the lawn. That would not be fun.

As many of you may have noticed, Penultimatum.com wasn’t updated much. The pages were all HTML and while I intended to create a PHP version of this site, I just never got around to it. So month after month, nothing much happened here. On the rare occasions that I went to this site, I would look at the “News” section and cringe reading the most recent date of a year ago. Our little space on the Web had become a waste of space instead.

So I’ve been overhaulin’ Penultimatum with WordPress and redefining what this site is. I’m not finished. I’m still trying to figure out what this space should be and how it needs to be set up. Right now I’m trying to fashion this as a blog for family and friends to use to see what we’re doing. We’ll have public commentary on our lives and photos with what we are doing. I still need to move a lot of information over from the old site, but it is started and now live.

Hopefully, this new direction will make our little space on the Web a little less wasteful.