In Lima
August 4, 2005. It's been over a year since I posted anything on this blog. I've had so many adventures since then. Anna, my younger daughter, turned 15 on August 11, 2004. She also became a freshman in high school, so I became a mother with two daughters in high school. I picked up an editing job with IBM in September 2004, became the mother of a daughter (Mary) with a learner's Permit, rode in the MS150 for the first time that same month, traveled to New Orleans to try to train Ceres staff on a system that they'd had in place since January 2004(!) and got to complain about those characters to my other friends at P&O.
One of my favorite parts of traveling to New Orleans is hanging out with my friend Will - while I was there, he left P&O Ports and landed a great job after I returned home. He's now working with his friend Todd Marshall, who was also part of the original GEM team from P&O. GEM, for those of you who don't know, is the name of the system that runs the automated gate for the Napoleon Avenue Container Terminal at the Port of New Orleans.
I don't remember much about October, other than meeting a great new group of people (my fellow editors and ITSO managers at the IBM 662 Building) and killing myself to edit RedPapers and RedBooks (as well as finish a freelance ghost writing project) while still handling GEM testing, support, and help (my full time job). I think of October 2004 as a blur of FrameMaker 7.0 and Word files and not much else. I seem to remember that the leaves were beautiful, though.
With November came a welcome respite from all the hard work - it was time for our 7th trip to Myrtle Beach (and the Caravelle Resort) for Thanksgiving. I had some adventures trying to use a touch screen at an Internet Kiosk located in the Caravelle registration building while handling Help Desk calls and during that time, I missed a hotel evacuation caused by some child or teenager pulling the fire alarm bell. Lucky me. When we returned home, my mother called with some very sad news; my cousin Katharine (whom we called Kathy for years) died in her sleep on the Friday after Thanksgiving. She was 50, I believe. She was six years older than me, but I'm not sure when her birthday was. We were closer when I was younger, but I loved her very much and her absence is quite noticeable on special occasions.
December is another FrameMaker 7.0 blur. I had a 660 page IBM Redbook on ThinkVantage Technologies and a TSM exam prep book to put together. I did have a fun evening out with some of the IBMers I work with early in December - we went out to Stonewood Grill, drank trendy martinis, and cracked each other up, but then it was back to all FrameMaker and "GEM Help Desk, May I help you" all the time. Wayne turned 48 on December 15 and I surfaced from my office (which looks like a NASA control center, thanks to all the computers in it) long enough to celebrate that with him, go Christmas shopping, and attend the annual Christmas Eve bash at the Hodges (Wayne's neighbors). By Christmas Eve, Wayne had not received an invitation from the Hodges, so he did a lot of hanging out in his front yard and trying to see if they were even going to have the party. Luckily, their daughter Millie caught him at his mail box and made sure that he knew we were invited. We had a great time as always. The next morning, we arrived at Wayne's to open presents and our gifts to Jeff (a poker-playing table top) and Christina (a new cordless phone that actually works) were a big success. Then, we were off to Charlottesville for the usual time with Lindsay and Dan, Mom and Daddy, Ian and Margaret, and all the dogs.
I returned home to finish up my work, while Mary and Anna spent that week with Alex. Wayne and I decided to go to Oriental for New Years' Eve (we went there on New Years' Eve 1999 for the Y2K non-event) because we had enjoyed ourselves there before. We had a great dinner at M&M's, trying chocolate martinis, and then hung out in the street for the 8:00 dragon parade. Wayne had all these noisemakers he had gotten from volunteering at a Hurricane's game, so we passed them out to the crowd and they were much appreciated. Oriental has a great New Years' Eve tradition - they create a dragon with a papier mache head and a long, long swath of canvas-type cloth with sticks, and certain townspeople and children go under the canvas and hold the sticks. A band plays and the "dragon" parades down the main streets of Oriental while the townspeople bang pots, yell, and click noisemakers (most of them thanks to us). We watched the parade again at 11:00 p.m. and rang in the new year very happily.
The first few hours of the New Year were great - but unfortunately, there would be an unwelcome break in the celebration during an afternoon bike ride. I'll write about the beginning of 2005 in another entry.
One of my favorite parts of traveling to New Orleans is hanging out with my friend Will - while I was there, he left P&O Ports and landed a great job after I returned home. He's now working with his friend Todd Marshall, who was also part of the original GEM team from P&O. GEM, for those of you who don't know, is the name of the system that runs the automated gate for the Napoleon Avenue Container Terminal at the Port of New Orleans.
I don't remember much about October, other than meeting a great new group of people (my fellow editors and ITSO managers at the IBM 662 Building) and killing myself to edit RedPapers and RedBooks (as well as finish a freelance ghost writing project) while still handling GEM testing, support, and help (my full time job). I think of October 2004 as a blur of FrameMaker 7.0 and Word files and not much else. I seem to remember that the leaves were beautiful, though.
With November came a welcome respite from all the hard work - it was time for our 7th trip to Myrtle Beach (and the Caravelle Resort) for Thanksgiving. I had some adventures trying to use a touch screen at an Internet Kiosk located in the Caravelle registration building while handling Help Desk calls and during that time, I missed a hotel evacuation caused by some child or teenager pulling the fire alarm bell. Lucky me. When we returned home, my mother called with some very sad news; my cousin Katharine (whom we called Kathy for years) died in her sleep on the Friday after Thanksgiving. She was 50, I believe. She was six years older than me, but I'm not sure when her birthday was. We were closer when I was younger, but I loved her very much and her absence is quite noticeable on special occasions.
December is another FrameMaker 7.0 blur. I had a 660 page IBM Redbook on ThinkVantage Technologies and a TSM exam prep book to put together. I did have a fun evening out with some of the IBMers I work with early in December - we went out to Stonewood Grill, drank trendy martinis, and cracked each other up, but then it was back to all FrameMaker and "GEM Help Desk, May I help you" all the time. Wayne turned 48 on December 15 and I surfaced from my office (which looks like a NASA control center, thanks to all the computers in it) long enough to celebrate that with him, go Christmas shopping, and attend the annual Christmas Eve bash at the Hodges (Wayne's neighbors). By Christmas Eve, Wayne had not received an invitation from the Hodges, so he did a lot of hanging out in his front yard and trying to see if they were even going to have the party. Luckily, their daughter Millie caught him at his mail box and made sure that he knew we were invited. We had a great time as always. The next morning, we arrived at Wayne's to open presents and our gifts to Jeff (a poker-playing table top) and Christina (a new cordless phone that actually works) were a big success. Then, we were off to Charlottesville for the usual time with Lindsay and Dan, Mom and Daddy, Ian and Margaret, and all the dogs.
I returned home to finish up my work, while Mary and Anna spent that week with Alex. Wayne and I decided to go to Oriental for New Years' Eve (we went there on New Years' Eve 1999 for the Y2K non-event) because we had enjoyed ourselves there before. We had a great dinner at M&M's, trying chocolate martinis, and then hung out in the street for the 8:00 dragon parade. Wayne had all these noisemakers he had gotten from volunteering at a Hurricane's game, so we passed them out to the crowd and they were much appreciated. Oriental has a great New Years' Eve tradition - they create a dragon with a papier mache head and a long, long swath of canvas-type cloth with sticks, and certain townspeople and children go under the canvas and hold the sticks. A band plays and the "dragon" parades down the main streets of Oriental while the townspeople bang pots, yell, and click noisemakers (most of them thanks to us). We watched the parade again at 11:00 p.m. and rang in the new year very happily.
The first few hours of the New Year were great - but unfortunately, there would be an unwelcome break in the celebration during an afternoon bike ride. I'll write about the beginning of 2005 in another entry.
posted by Froshty | 4:40 PM
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