Confessions of a back-slidden blogger

I know I have been recalcitrant on updating the old blog this week, but I do have a legitimate excuse.

Actually, I have THE legitimate excuse.

We’re moving.

I pick that tense with significant remorse since it is an on-going enterprise. The movers, God love them, came Wednesday and stuffed so much stuff in their truck that it’s a wonder it could still roll. But we’ve still got enough leftover at the old abode that I am spending my “off” Saturday driving a significantly smaller but still rented truck filled with the stuff we’ve still got to catch up on.

Moving is like going to the dentist, only more expensive.

Why, you might ask, would we put ourselves through this? My wife’s dogs, which aren’t terribly bright to start with, are having significant difficulty figuring out the answer to that. They’ve been confused all week.

The answer is quite simple, actually. His name is Eli.

The wife, Katy, and I have a grandson who’ll turn 2 in October. He lives in Oakboro, N.C. and we lived in Gastonia. It was about a 60-mile drive, each way, to see Eli and that was just entirely too far.

We’ve picked up and traipsed off to Stanfield, which I like to tell people is located in suburban Locust. We were west of Charlotte. Now we’re east and just a smidge south.

If you go to the end of our street and hang a right, you go past Stanfield Elementary School and swing a right through downtown Stanfield. No, there are no stop lights. Stay on that road a while and it becomes – I swear – Big Lick Road. One more right and a left or two and within about 15 minutes we can be at Eli’s. Or he can be here.

Eli has his own room at the new house, and as he gets a little older I hope he uses it a lot.

He’s the quintessential little boy. He’s got one of the best climbing gears I’ve ever seen. He runs just about everywhere he goes with a little sideways gait that makes it look like he needs to have his wheels aligned and balanced. He loves tractors and says that word as well as any other word he says with the possible exception of “paw paw” (which drives Katy a little nuts, to be honest with you).

We took him over to see the Kyle Petty Charity Ride stop in Charlotte the other night and the sight of a couple hundred motorcycles was the kind of sensory overload I love giving him.

One of these days, I’ll take him to a baseball game in Atlanta or to see the Carolina Panthers or the North Carolina Tar Heels play. (There are some N.C. State fans in the weeds of his side of the family, but I think Eli’s smart enough to see the light on that one.) And yes, I am quite sure he’ll be adding “race car” to his vocabulary soon.

Things will get back to “normal” some time next week. I head up to Indianapolis Thursday for one of my favorite race weekends of the year, and I am sure a lot of stuff will be going on there.

For now, though, I’ve got boxes to pack.
And move.
And unpack.