Presentations, weekends, etc

Helloooo! I think my last proper entry said something about closing the loop on what I had been up to that weekend. And now another weekend has passed since and I've been slack. Let's see how far I get on updates this time, considering it's getting close to bedtime.

Firstly, the presentations went really well. Many thanks to everyone who sent their good luck messages - they worked! I presented on Thurs and Fri and got really good 'reviews' from not only my colleagues at IBM but also the participants and even the project folks on the client side. I don't know how much I have talked about this here, so forgive me if I am repeating myself, but the client is... let's say... tough. They are not easy to please and many times find fault with things you would have to look closely at to find fault. But they gave me rave reviews and the project sponsor (on the client side) even said in front of the entire IBM and client team that my workshop should be the model for all workshops going forward on how to present and work with their company. These sorts of things do not happen often to me professionally (saying that, would it ever happen personally?) so I am going to take the time to put aside humbleness and bask in my success. Because, not to be a pessimist, but these moments can be fleeting as we all know!

So anyway, I was very pumped on Friday that the presentations were over. No matter how good they went, I had spent most of the week waiting for them to be finished. I was really looking forward to getting home to John and the cats and maybe having some wine to celebrate (I seem to remember writing a couple of weeks ago that I would get drunk to celebrate them once they were through!), and wouldn't you know my flight was cancelled after waiting in the airport for about 3 hours. So I drove home and didn't get in until 1:30 am. And just as a note, what kind of a city has bumper-to-bumper traffic at 10:30 pm? Reena, sort it out!

Saturday John and I had an appointment with a realtor that had arranged to show us some houses from 9 am. It makes me tired just thinking of it! We saw about 8 houses in about 4 or 14 hours. Even though I was tired I must admit it was fun looking around the different places and narrowing some down. While I'm on the subject here is a tip from me: eight houses is a lot to see in one day. We have some more to see this weekend. John has been a star getting all these appointments for us and he's been going around and seeing them from the outside first in case any are easily weeded out by location, etc.

Sunday we went down to Lake Monroe to my dad's condo. That was a lot of fun. We went out on the boat (it was actually a nice day even though I don't think it was predicted to be), then sat on their porch overlooking the lake for the evening. They made a wonderful dinner and we sat and talked until bedtime. Very relaxing.

Monday was Labor Day and even consultants don't have to work on Labor Day (at least we didn't, anyway). So John and I came back from Bloomington and had the day to ourselves. We tried out this Mexican place down the road from us that was really good.

And to tie out my update on the weekend before last, we had my nephew Jesse's third birthday party on the Saturday. Can you believe he's three? He's so cute. It was a bowling party and he had lots of friends and family there. My mom was cracking me up because she brought her bowling ball (my guess is she was a Pink Lady), which she hadn't used for so long that the zipper to her bag was stuck (molded into place?) so she had to cut the bag open. She was so ready to bowl that she even brought some baby powder to put on the bottoms of her shoes to make them slide (or keep them from sliding? Something like that). My mom is not the competitive type. She's very good natured and laid back. So I wasn't ready to see how fired up she gets about bowling! She came to her grandson's birthday party to kick arse and take names! That was funny enough, but the funniest thing was the fact that she has completely lost her technique! She threw gutter ball after gutter ball. The woman who brought her own ball! I think she was still in single digits on the third frame. Bless her. She figured out that she had to let go of the ball all the way on the far right-hand corner of her lane in order to try to not get her mastered gutter-ball-down-via-left-gutter, and even then she could only knock a couple of them down each time. All of this added up to lots of entertainment for me, because she was getting annoyed about it all (in a joking way of course). And incidentally I got the high score in my group, woo hoo! Man, I am so humble in this blog entry! I don't know if I've mentioned this before, but I am really, really humble. I mean, I don't like to brag, but I am like SUPER humble. Probably a lot more humble than you. But that should humble you, so don't worry, you'll get there.