Letting go, part 4 Friday, Aug 29 2008 

Family Life Fran 7:34 pm

So…..we took off after enjoying the beautiful sunrise.  We drove for an hour before finding a Cracker Barrel

for the kind of breakfast Larry and Mike enjoy–especially the biscuits. 

Then, we continued traveling east to get Mike signed in for ROTC before arriving at UD in Irving, Texas.  UD has a cross-town agreement with several universities for ROTC students.  This was a MAJOR snag.  We went into the unit office and though he introduced himself, they didn’t know who he was or what he was doing there.  So the officer started to tell Mike about ROTC and I finally couldn’t stand it anymore and told him that Mike had already been awarded a scholarship and was there to report.  They had no paperwork for him and require all kinds of documentation that I have at home and could easily have brought with us.  So when we return home I have to look for all these papers and send them overnight.  For those of you who know what a paperwork nightmare the application process for ROTC and the service academies was, this should come as no surprise.

More tomorrow as we figure out how to get everything settled.

 

Letting go, part 3 Friday, Aug 29 2008 

Family Life , , , Fran 4:45 am

After Mike got home from his evening out with his siblings, he cleaned his room, finished the aquarium, said goodbye to the cat and packed up the car.  Packed is too mild a description.  Perhaps loaded is more apropos.  At any rate, we planned to leave at 0600 and left around 0620.  Somewhere along the way we decided to check on our hotel reservation in Wichita Falls, so we stopped at a Texas welcoming center to use the free WIFI.  Lo and behold, with planning for 3 trips in the space of one month, we had forgotten to secure a hotel for this one night.  So we decided to see if the Air Force Inn in Wichita Falls had any space.  Boy, did they have space.  They assigned us a house where we had room to spread out.  Too bad we were only there one night.

It was on our walk at Sheppard Air Force Base that Mike discovered the humor of jack rabbits.  These creatures run like antelope.  To hide, they scrunch themselves down in the grass, so they look like so many blobs of tan fur littered on the grass.

Mike also met his first cicada.  He didn’t actually see it, but he heard it in the tree next to our house.  It is amazing that this creature can make so much noise.

  By the way, the bug is not bigger than the jack rabbit…………………….

We rose early to leave for Dallas and this is almost exactly how the sky looked.  The camera couldn’t capture the sun as it was though—a bright red ball.