August 20, 2010

Well, I guess it's been a while!  So let's back track to July 30th or so and see if I can account for our time.

The evening of Friday July 30th was my grandmother's wake.  While a wake could hardly be termed "fun", it was so nice to meet all her friends (some for the first time, some not) and hear many stories of her.  One thing was constant in every conversation - the fact that every single one of her friends had seen every single picture of her great-grandchildren that we had ever sent.  Most of her friends were obsessed with telling me how much I looked like her, even though really I don't look much like her.  But we both have short hair I guess.

Friday night my cousins Brian and Lauren (and Lauren's husband and son) came back to our hotel room and we all hung out.  Josh and I had 2 adjoining rooms (one for the kids) and so the kids were sleeping in one room while we hung out (including Elisabeth, Rob, and Chase) in the other.  Much beer and many stories and laughs later, it was time for bed.

Saturday morning was the funeral.  I don't think I've been in church since my grandfather died back in 1992.  I forgot how much it creeped me out!  But I know Grammy would have wanted it that way, so there you go.  I delivered the eulogy without totally breaking out into tears, though I had hoped to hold it together a little better.  The bottom line is I love her desperately and will miss her every day.  After the funeral and burial was the reception at the Sunday School Hall where Grammy's friends' daughter Lilly did just a wonderful job of getting us all fed.  I was so glad to meet Lilly as she had done so much to help with all the arrangements and been such a good friend to my grandmother.

After the reception (hmmm, is it even called a reception?) we headed to Gray, ME, for the Mann Family reunion (mom's side of the family).  By now Morgan was getting rather irritated with being shoveled from place to place.  We stayed as long as he could tolerate it - the rest of us were having fun.  But Morgan could smell that we were near the lake and after about 2 hours he finally insisted on simply sitting in the car until the rest of us complied with leaving.

That meant it was time to drive around the lake.  We knew Morgan must be hungry and were surprised when he didn't asked to stop at Wendy's or McDonald's.  But then, around the bend, we were approaching the Ice Cream Dugout when we finally heard him speak up: "Ice cream?"

We got all checked into the cabin and Elisabeth & family were not too far behind. The next day Mandy & family and mom and dad joined us.  We had sun sun sun! Mandy and Elisabeth left Sunday and mom and dad left Tuesday morning.  For the rest of the vacation we had more sun sun sun!  Ahhhhh vacation.  It was just oh so awesome.  Beautiful weather, beautiful water, just awesome.  Mostly we just swam every day (one during sunlight hours, again in the evening when we didn't need sunscreen).  We ventured out for food, and also once for shopping and fudge. Generally we subsisted on lobster and wine.

I did have to work a little on vacation.  Right before I left my boss told me she had taken another position and so the big boss offered me her job.  Yikes!  I'm now officially a big freakin' deal and have 95.3 people reporting to me.  Because of the level of the position, there had to be a communication "strategy" that couldn't happen before I left, so I had to do some communication meetings while I was out. Not the biggest deal in the world.

While my first official day in my new job is not until this coming Monday, my soon-to-be old boss was on vacation this week, so really I started this week.  And this morning was my first big meeting where I had to have opinions in front of the CEO, CFO, etc and be questioned on such opinions by them and the onlooking remainder of our senior management.  I'm happy to report I survived the day, and even received unsolicited compliments on my opinion-delivery.  So yay!

Other changes necessitated by my new position: I bought 5 new suits and colored my hair.  Yes, the gray was finally too much.  So as of today, I am gray-free.  I went with just a shade darker than my natural color.  And apparently I have made this decision just in time because in a few weeks I will be recording a web cast with my peers to be broadcast to 25,000 people!  ack!

So I guess that's about it.  School starts 9/1 so one more week of vacation for the kids!