November was another whirlwind month. After Susan's return from CA, we left that weekend for a church retreat on the "shore" in NJ (that's what the locals call the beach - kinda silly, huh?) The retreat was a great time to get to know more people in the church and to be challenged to live life in abundance.

After the retreat, we drove straight to Connecticut, where Ivan had several days of training. We had a great time lounging around in the hotel between sessions and even made a few runs to Costco to buy some much needed winter gear.

The next week we were scheduled to go on another business trip to Orlando and we had made plans to go down early and spend time with Susan's relatives who we had last seen in 2003, but the trip was cancelled and we missed out on hanging with the cousins.

The week after that was Thanksgiving. Ivan shared his testimony in the Thanksgiving Eve service (he did a great job, considering he only had 3 minutes to share it) and bright and early on Thanksgiving Day we headed off to CA to spend the holiday with Susan's family at Claire's place in Sacramento. She had to work Thanksgiving Day, so it wasn't a problem for us to travel on that day (and it helped us get slightly cheaper tickets). We celebrated on Saturday the 29th and flew home on Sunday the 30th. We decided that, for future reference, it probably isn't worth the 10+ hours of flying to spend 2 whole days with relatives, but it was fun to have the whole family together for the first Thanksgiving in probably 7 years.

Labels: Quick Trip, Summary

Yes. I back date my posts. Is that evil? I hope you don't think so. But I feel bad having a gap in our lives from October to January. We didn't disappear off the face of the earth. We were just very busy. Here's a summary of how the balance of October 2008 (and the first few days of November) was spent.

Susan, being quite frustrated with her research, decided to head to California to take care of business. What business might that be? In no particular order: Jury Duty, Vote, and talk to people at UCLA about research. She also snuck a quick trip in there to visit her sister, who was working in Sacramento for awhile. That was a fun trip - with her parents in their brand-spankin'-new motorhome. Road trips are so much more fun when you can get up and walk around and make yummy sandwiches to eat during the drive. Though Susan still insists that one of the best things about a road trip is stopping to eat at Taco Bell.

In general, the trip was productive, but quite a long time to be away from her husband. We were glad to be together again after 3 weeks apart.

Labels: Summary