Just a little vacation from blogging!

Oops. If blogging every day of my 40th year was really an important goal for me, I certainly have not demonstrated that. Guess I have a LOT of catching up to do. Here are the highlights of the past three months.

September we started our month+ of travel.

The week of September 7th I delivered PMP training in San Francisco for one of our partner companies. The great thing about doing their classes is that we use MY materials. So much better. I had a great group and ended up becoming good friends in particular with one of the ladies. She is just one of those cool people that love to hang out with and talk to. She was so cool, as a matter of fact, she was able to get Brooke backstage passes to the Journey / Night Ranger concert in Pensacola. Always enlightening when we do classes for other companies to identify the deficiencies... specifically in customer service. Really bothers me when people aren't accurately prepared for the class. My theory... once you get in that class you should worry about nothing other than learning all of the material.

At this time we had already purchased our three-leg flight for the Dominican Republic. We were supposed to go to DR with Telle and Kristin and then fly up to Boston and deliver a PMP class for a local chapter up in New England. A week before we were to leave, the chapter cancelled the class. Can you say "oh shit"? We already had the books, the reservations, etc. We scrambled and were able to successfully pull together a Boston class.

DR was incredible and although we felt terribly guilty that we were taking a vacation under such poor financial conditions, we convinced ourselves that it was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, it was super cheap, we couldn't let Telle and Kristin down, on and on. Anything to make ourselves feel better! The resort was beautiful and it was just a truly relaxing, phenomenal trip. It was a little frustrating not having consistent access to WiFi but we managed to get some work done. Devin was a champ and would walk up to the lobby with me twice a day so we could do emails and work on our class enrollment. We met some great people and learned that it is totally possible to spend 8 days in a very small room with another couple and still be friends at the end of the trip!

We flew from DR to Boston and it was so nice to be able to get home during the fall. The leaves were amazing! We picked up Kim and took a drive up through New Hampshire to Fryeburg and finally got to attend the Fryeburg Fair - it's been YEARS!! It was perfect...and it was so awesome to expose Devin to the fair. He got to see the world's largest pig. He can die a happy man now!.

Class went well in Boston but we received the pretty devastating news that the hard drive that crashed was completely unrecoverable. All of our movies, pictures, and worse... our course documents. It was a pretty painful and expensive lesson to just BACK UP YOUR FILES!!! DUH!!! Here it is December and we are still working on recreating our files. Some stuff is just lost forever. :-( Very thankful that I had a copy of our pictures, or at least most of them, on my laptop.

We got back from Boston and had one day to get the house ready from top to bottom for the home exchange. It was a crazy 36 hours and before we knew it, we were sitting on the plane heading to Chicago and then off to Paris. The home exchange was amazing, better than I could have imagined! I'll detail that out in another blog.

We got back to Phoenix on October 27th and real life kicked back in. The following week I did a class in Phoenix and then I was off to Altanta. Atlanta was pretty good with the exception of the last day of class. The parking lot was up on a hill in front of the hotel, with wide concrete steps. I had a little spring in my step that morning - wearing my pin-striped suit, hair done, good make-up - on my way to the office to film some videos for our client. Then BAM. Face-first down on the concrete steps. How embarrassing! Big black egg on my chin. My jaw hurt for a few days. But other than that the pain was more in the humiliation. So much for filming videos!

Home for a week to celebrate Thanksgiving. We decide to do a very small, very quiet Thanksgiving at home. Just the girls. It was heart-breaking, though, that Brooke wasn't able to come home. So strange to have our first big holiday without one of the girls. Brandy was home and Brit came over with Nate... it was a day of eating, wine, and playing games. The surprise of the day was that I won the American Idol singing game. Just messed up. I'm the worse singer in the world!! LOL

This week was DC and I'm now sitting in the gate waiting to go home. I can't wait. And I'll actually be home for awhile!! :-)