Heading Out

This week will see me taking off for a new destination – I’m heading to Alaska for work for a few days. Unfortunately, I have a feeling that this will be an all work trip and I’ll have basically no time for exploring. And my digital camera has picked a lousy time to go on the fritz. Ah well…I’ll have to take a picture with my mind. The trip was approved at the very last minute, so I still have to remind myself that I’m actually going.

Things have been *insane* lately, for reasons both good and bad. (Hence the lack o' writing.) My brother and his family were in town, and it was great to spend so much time with them. My nephews are getting so big, and my niece is freaking me out with how quickly she’s growing – they are awesome kids. We also had my brother and sister in law over for dinner one night, and it was really fun to have time to just hang out.

In the midst of all this family togetherness, we also had a lovely party to attend for Brunette’s upcoming nuptials. Special K whipped up some of his special roasted red pepper and ancho chile salsa (thank you, Bobby Flay), and I made some artichoke-goat cheese dip and a raspberry-lemon cake. AS made some of her family recipe hummus and all of this was complimented by some delicious barbeque. Mmm…barbeque. It was a great day and a really fun celebration.

The non-fun part in all of this was that I had a major work deadline moved up on me by about 6 weeks, which resulted in a lot of hours last week. I think it’s been largely successful so far, but there will be more work to come. I knew that my fairly reasonable schedule wasn’t going to be something I could count on all the time, and it appears that I’ve hit my anticipated busy patch. It’s fine, though - it’s still different from life at my old company in many, many good ways.

Now I just need to catch up on sleep.

Special K is a very happy boy today, because he received his referral bonus for referring me to the company. We had previously agreed that he would have some of that money to spend on whatever he wanted, and the rest of it would go for our more responsible financial endeavors (i.e., digging out of our mountain of debt). So he is now the proud owner-to-be of a new 8-inch tom, courtesy of eBay, new drumheads, and a cymbal, courtesy of Guitar Center’s Independence Day sale. I figure that he’s got a gift and it’s really the only thing he spends any amount of money on – so that’s something that we should encourage as a family. So, we do.

And now, back to the pile of work awaiting me. Lots to do in the next couple of days, so we’ll see how it goes.