Spontaneity

I like making plans, but unfortunately, there are so many things going on in life that often you just have to toss the plans aside and go with the flow. But that's not always bad. See, if I make plans to, for example, go hiking this Saturday, I know ten other things will come up between now and then to destroy those plans. I could be inflexible and say, forget it—I'm hiking anyway. But sometimes it's better just to make things up as you go. Below I'll list a few things that just happened on their own, but turned out well.

At the end of March, we got a late spring snowfall on a Friday night. So next morning, I grabbed the kids and said, "Hey, we're not going to get any more snow this year, so let's go tubing!" Of course, it snowed here until June, but we didn't know that would happen at the time. I asked Miara if she wanted to go. She was still in bed and asked, "When?" "Now," I said. She loves it when I do that. So we had a great time tubing and when we were tired with that, we made giant snow balls and rolled them down the hill.

We were tubing on a golf course, and of course Tian Tian had a great time finding all the yellow golf balls under the melting snow. He and Ro Ro rounded them up and delivered them back to the club house.

Another day in early April, I went down to Miara's room and said, "Hey, the rest of us are going to the zoo, do you want to go?" "When?" "Right now." So we did. That time of year, there aren't a lot of people at the zoo, so it was fun wandering around seeing all the animals that don't like our hot summers. We even bought a season pass, so we can be spontaneous for 365 days. In fact, we've been back twice already.

On another fine April day, Stephanie and I bought some new wardrobes for our room, but on the way home from Ikea, we thought, "The new furniture will look a little out of place in our old room." So by the time we'd arrived home, we'd decided to take everything out of the room, rip out the carpet, repair and paint the walls, install new carpet, THEN put in the wardrobes. I'm not a fan of interior decoration projects, but this turned out OK, despite the banana yellowness all over.

Now here's something I actually sort of planned—a landscaping project. I've been meaning to rip our strip for several years (the parking strip) and replace the grass with rocks. So once I finished the yellowing of our room, I gathered the fam' and we went out to Stansbury Island in the Great Salt Lake and got a trailer full of rocks. Then not long after that, we tore out the grass, put down the fabric, used all the rocks up real quick, then had to go back out for another load of rocks. But with everyone's help, we got it finished.

The Great Salt Lake can be quite pretty in the right light, despite the smell.

So I guess the purpose of this posting is to remind everyone that planning is important, but spontaneity isn't all that bad.