Yesterday I didn't have any meetings to go to, and enjoyed a relaxing day at home. I used the time to study up on government contracting regulations and the plans for reconstructing our highway. I don't understand some of the engineering drawings that are end views of cross cuts, but eventually I will. Before I went to bed last night I made two batches of cookie dough - rolled out sugar cookies and a ginger cookie that doesn't have molasses.

I didn't get around to baking the cookies until about 8 o'clock tonight because I spent the day working on governance documents for our river coalition. Bylaws, resolutions for the Board of Directors, Conflict of Interest, Document Retention Policy, Ethics, Whistleblower Policy, and a couple more. I read every word in 8 documents, to my sorrow. It's always hard to get started on that kind of thing, but once I get into it, it's okay.

Tomorrow I am driving an hour and a half (if the roads are not slick) to have a nice Thanksgiving dinner with my in-laws. If it snows too much during the day, I'll stay overnight, but it's not supposed to be a bad storm. The big thing about it is the cold, 4 degrees F at my house tomorrow night. That will keep the snow dry and fly-away on the highways.

Friday some neighbors downstream 4 miles invited me to come over and see what food they might have. I've heard they are the go-to house in that neighborhood when a person is hungry, so I'm looking forward to it. It's always nice to talk to the neighbors on the river. For one thing, I get to stand on their riverbank and see things from their viewpoint, instead of whizzing past on the highway.

And then I have to call somebody about those 8 governance documents to see if she has anything to add to what I saw in them.

Saturday and Sunday: my own days unless something comes up. Monday I'm riding to Denver for a meeting about river coalition stuff. We got a disaster recovery grant to hire watershed coordinators and thought once they got going the landowners could relax, but not so. For one thing, the company we hired to administer the grant that pays their salaries resigned with 15 days notice and we are having to scramble to find a replacement. The coordinator staff shouldn't have to worry about their own human resources issues and where their next paycheck is coming from, so the volunteers running the river coalition have had to stay involved in all of that.

We found a replacement organization, but they need $10,000 flat fee up front in order to take us on. Everyone thought we had a state agency ready to pay that for us, but now they are hesitating, and the whole deal could fall apart. When I'm not telling myself 'not my circus, not my monkeys,' I'm telling myself 'the Big Thompson River is too big to fail' meaning that the state agencies can't afford to leave us stranded.

Tickety-tock, I'm counting the days until I can pack the cat in my new truck and drive to Las Vegas for 19 days. It hardly seems worth al that driving to stay about a week, so I have started looking at flights. It's $78 to take the shuttle to the airport, but then I wouldn't have parking fees, which would be double that. If I drive and take the cat, I could decide to not come back for a long time. That's so tempting.

Meanwhile, I need to get cracking on Christmas things - cards, gifts to mail, make doll clothes for my cousins, more cookies for the next river coalition meeting.