laura705

Back from vacation and here at work.    It’ll take a good chunk of the day to get through the e-mail and I’m taking a break from those right now.  I also have two meetings this afternoon. 

We got home Monday around 4-ish.  Vacation was good, but neither bf or I really liked the 6-hour drive. Next time we might take Amtrak and borrow or rent a car at our destination.  We spent daytime last Fri in downtown Paducah, including a visit to the National Quilt Museum, which was amazing.   We spent Fri evening and all Saturday with bf’s niece and grand-nephew. We went to Ft. Massac during the day, and even saw a battle reenactment (French-Indian War, I think - my knowlege of history is virtually nil).  Sat. evening was the baby’s first b-day mini celebration.

Sunday we drove to our friend’s house in Southern IL and they took us around to several wineries. That area has quite a lot of wineries - we bought a couple bottles of apple wine and a bottle of Kir from a winery that makes only non-grape wines.  It was a gorgeous Indian Summer day and it was just beautiful driving on those country roads.  The peacefulness was so nice.  We ended the day at the lodge at Giant City State Park, where we had dinner.  On the drive back to their house, the night sky was just beautiful. We can hardly see any stars in the Chicago metro area, so it was nice to be in an area where you can see so many stars. We drove home Monday - another nice sunny day.  After days of little physical activity, we took doggy for a nice long walk by the creek after we had unpacked.

I did okay with food while we were gone - not much snacking.  Didn’t do so good since we’ve returned though. Need to get back in the groove.

Yesterday I puttered around in the morning, and did some errands in the afternoon.  Last night was the movies - Couples Retreat.  It was entertaining and I was surprised it actually spent more time than I thought it would on the couples’ relationships outside of all those parts played strictly for laughs.  

Back to work today.  Boo.  Only one day though, because Thurs and Fri I have a conference to attend. Not far from home, so it’ll be a nice change of pace.  Not looking forward to it as much as I normally would, however, because work made a big deal of approving it this year due to budget constraints.  And a couple firms are hosting a joint dinner tomorrow night that I don’t want to attend because it doesn’t start until a couple hours after the last session ends, and I don’t want to have to sit through either happy hour or the dinner itself.  I’m not much into networking… But I feel like I should attend, just to add extra value to this conference.  I also think I should go to the dinner because the 2nd day of the conference ends at about noon and I don’t want to feel too guilty if I don’t really work much at home Friday afternoon except to respond to e-mails.  Sigh. 

Okay, time to publish and get back to the e-mails.