Valentine's Weekend with Riley

Man's steps are ordained by the LORD,


How then can man understand his way?

Proverbs 20:24

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I babysit the kids most days, and usually when I get a day off I only find out about it the night before. But this time it was arranged for me well in advance. It was assumed by many that Riley and I would go away for this three day weekend. It was a three day weekend because of Presidents Day, which Riley had off because he works for the city.

Well we thought and thought about where we might go. The first idea was to take the train somewhere. Well it turns out that living in Oregon makes it quite difficult to go somewhere on the train. It's a long ways to anywhere, or the train simply doesn't go there any way. And then when you get there you have to pay for a hotel, which is most likely rather hard to get to anyway.

So next we thought about going to Sunriver, a most pleasant place if you're in a good place to stay. Well it turns out that any place we liked was rather expensive - as in about $225-250 per night, and deals only for four nights. The only reasonable options were little condos or darkish little houses. Why travel 170 miles to stay in an unpleasant place?


So in the end we decided that we'd really just like to be in our own house, acting like we're on vacation. The bed is the best, and all our things are here, and best of all, at the end of the last day there's no driving for 3 1/2 hours to get home. Now the long drive is okay in the summer, when the sun stays up late and shines all day. But in the winter you drive home in the dark, and possibly the rain or snow. So home it was.


Now unfortunately the start of this weekend was Friday the 13th, and it was true to its reputation. I won't go into it, but we had a fairly major family crisis and it was good that we were going to be staying around. This did give me lots of angst, but I know that God is in charge, and He loves us and has our best interest at the center of what happens to us. So with some prayer and deep breathing, we got on with things. Everyone in the family stepped in to aid in the crisis.


I did have trouble sleeping on Friday night, but by mid morning I was finally relaxing very nicely. I sat up in bed and red all kinds of interesting things that are next to my side of the bed, like CÔTÉ PARIS. Then Riley brought me a beautiful bouquet of pink and white tulips. We decided we would go out for breakfast, and took our time thinking of where we would go.