As another year ticks off, we all claim to make changes, to live better, to see family more, to change bad habits. Ehh, we are pretty much animals and unless acted upon by an outside force, we rarely have motivation enough to change. I've tried year after year, I'll work out more, I'll eat less, maybe we'll go visit our hometown more often. Then reality hits, I work a twelve hour shift, although I can find time to work out, we have a gym at work, I end up feeling guilty, always leaving my younger kid, either with my wife or other son, to get my time in. Eventually, I ignore the gym, what am I gonna do, pick up hot chicks? No, I'm a fat dad, who cares what I look like. My wife tried changing our diets. We went on a liquid diet, sometime in the summer. Seemed to be working, I lost 10 pounds within the first two weeks, but it didn't agree with my wife, she said it cost too much to be buying fruits and vegetables to be making health shakes every day. Blender got put away. My folks come up from our small hometown in the middle of nowhere. They enjoy going to the mall, eating out. If they are retired and can afford to come up once a month, why should we make the three hour drive. We both work, usually one of us has to do something on a weekend for work. It feels like we are constantly running in place, just to keep up with our busy lives.
Our big push for the new year is to continue helping our son on his third year at Tx State, our younger boy keep shining in 4th grade. We have a couple adventures, such as going on a week getaway on our timeshare in the Spring. My In-laws want to go to Disney in the summer, plus we have an RV, we'll use that for a couple months on the coast in the summer. Add in my folks coming up to visit every three-four weeks, my wife having to go out of town on conferences, football season in the fall, Schlitterbahn season passes good all spring and summer, and all of a sudden there's barely any time to rest. Plus call me lame, but I love going to a zoo. So we go once a year, usually to SA Zoo. This year we saw the Dallas Zoo, very nice. Spare the "zoos are cruel BS, more animals would be extinct without them at this point. And where would most of us see a hippo take a big ole dump in the water, if not for the SA Zoo. That was awesome, just poof, water changed to a green mixture, everything went cloudy for a second. It was hilarious for my young boy who loves the poop humor.
Speaking of the timeshare, yes we are one of the "dummies" that got duped into purchasing, but so far, it has been good. We bought with Silverleaf Resorts. Maybe it's not the best use of our money, but by doing so, we have been able to take a couple trips we normally would not have. We went and stayed a week by Lake Palestine at The Villages. The units were a little older, but the experience was cool. We were surrounded by tall pine trees, the lake was about a hundred yards from our doorstep. We managed to go to Louisiana and Dallas on IH-20, and we normally would never have done that. We ended up in a gator farm, right at the Texas Louisiana border, and I thought overall, it was a very good trip. Also had getaway weekends to Galveston, Lake Conroe, and the original location in New Braunfels. They call, right now they've been calling, they want us to go and visit another Resort. I think that's cool, it keeps us interested and we get to travel to a different destination. You get a standard week to use, but they offer "get away" weekends which we can use anytime, provided they have openings at a resort. We get a website which shows the resorts and we are free to choose where we want to go, as long as we are flexible, this can work to our advantage. Silverleaf has 13 resorts affiliated with them, and our plan is to visit all of them, from Texas to Maine and Florida.
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