SIX Weeks!!  Where has the time gone?  Oh yeah, retirement ceremony, getting a new job, starting my three week interlude vacation, ripping the carpet out of my son’s room and putting in laminate hardwood, putting new furniture there, working in the basement and on the fairy playset, the tornado that destroyed Cian and Cathy’s house (they came to live with us), starting my new job…but still…six weeks is WAY too long to go without writing.  What happened to all the people who were supposed to scold me?  :-)  Even my hasselbot hasn’t been sending me emails to tell me to write.  So I guess I’ll just have to find the mental fortitude to do it myself.

I LOVE my new place of work.  Granted, it’s only been two days (Friday and Tuesday) and it’s still the honeymoon period, but everything works, the people are nice, the work suits me, and the commute is ten minutes less than my old job.  I am thrilled.  I even get to walk through a beautiful park in downtown DC from my car to my building.  What could be better?  (I suppose that walk won’t be pretty this winter, but this is the honeymoon, we’ll get to the winter when we get to it).

My retirement ceremony was beyond description.  LTG Maples was a remarkable speaker, though I’m still not sure who he was talking about, my colleagues made a slideshow of pictures of my life (set to music) that set me to tears, and the retirement picnic on the weekend was a blast.  Perhaps when I am more distant from the emotions of the day…I can describe it better.  Meanwhile, I have to sort through all the little notes that I have about things I should be writing about.  Oh yeah…I still have to get the good COL out of the nexus…