The kids....

I know - it's been too long. Sorry............ I'm going to post a few today and tomorrow to make up for it - hopefuly!!

The video below was about a month ago, during one of my visits to Maryland for work. Mitch lives in Maryland, so I got to hang out with them for a little bit. Little Emily has discovered that SHE LOVES MICKEY!! We were all cracking up, as she had never done this before.

I just heard from Mitch and Deb two days ago - Little Emily is walking now. Oh jeesh!! Good luck, Mitch and Deb!! The three of them are making their way to Indiana for the weekend of the 31st for Emily's 1st birthday. I am VERY excited to see them!!

I get to hang out with Charlie and Brody this weekend - looking forward to that! Hoping to get some new pictures, as Brody is getting so big now! Can't believe he'll turn 5 in March. Here are the latest from a few weeks ago - maybe a month.

A Little Freaked Out...

Top Five Things That Freaked Me Out This Week......

1.) My nephew is growing up too fast - and noticed that my Dad (his pappoo) is getting old too.
2.) I saw a lot of Monroe Central School Board members while I was in Parker a few days ago.
3.) I had the stomach flu so badly on Monday that I threw up about six times and couldn't move for a good portion of the day.
4.) I landed in White Plains, NY today...expecting to be surrounded by Starwood or Loews Corporate people (not really), and the first thing I saw was a woman cursing as loud as she possibly could while being ushered into the back of a cop car in hand cuffs.
5.) The phone in my room rings once every half and hour.

Cat Vs. Printer

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MeFN5p0ZWQk

THIS IS HILARIOUS!!!

More from Orlando...

Some pictures I've found from the others.....they make me laugh!!

Yeah - I dunno!

At dinner at Mama Della's. This is where I met Mohammed....oh, how I miss him! (NOT! He was a waiter there that seemed to enjoy my company! My goodness, he could talk my ear off!)

One minute until the shuttle take off!! I think you can see my cavities!

Dan, Lyle and I (who were working at three different locations the week we went live in Orlando), just happened to all be wearing pink on the same day! We would usually be able to rotate our pink outfits, purely through coincidence... Not this time!! HAHA!

THAT'S RIGHT!! Four computers going at the same time! That's how we do it, around here!

Playing catch up again....

I left Orlando on the 20th, and made my way to Columbia, MD for a few days. I needed to spend some time in the corporate office to attend some meetings and things. I'm home now, and utterly exhausted! I'm tired to the core. Pretty wimpy, considering most people that do my job are gone longer than I ever am.

Here are some pictures from Orlando - I had such a great time!! I leave on Tuesday morning, bright and early, to go to Connecticut for a week or so. I'm sure that trip will be interesting...hopefully I'll have some good stories!! Thanks for visiting! Hopefully it won't take me too long to write again soon!

I got to see this just about every day... There were water taxis in between the City Walk, and the other two hotels. So - when dinner was at someone else's "house" - we'd take a water taxi past Universal to meet up with them.

Mitch, Deb and Emily came down to Orlando for a weekend. It was so much fun!! We went to Sea World!!

I think this is Shamu's baby. I was so depressed to hear that there are like 15 Shamus. I was a little upset though - didn't even get to see one of them!! Oh well - next time!

Emily was giving us directions. She thought she was so cool with her Tigger hat on!

Okay - it was hot, so don't make fun of Mitch's sweaty pits!! I LOVE this picture!

Did you guys see that?!

She was flirting with someone, I think!

Hi Aunt MinnyMax!!

I almost died a few times while in Orlando. This horrible rash showed up about a week before I left. It itched like crazy!! But - a nice security guy would come and put ointment on it every morning for me. He was pretty cute, so I was okay with that! I had a doctor's appointment yesterday, and my doctor determined that it was poison oak. Hmm...interesting.

This is about three days after I cut my leg shaving (yes, embarrassing). I cut it so badly that it didn't stop bleeding for about two days. My co-workers told me that slitting my ankles is a slow way to die! Haha.

I had a friend (Jeff) come visit me in Orlando. He's another installer, so he knew everyone there. We had a great time - but they managed to get me a little bit intoxicated. Seems he always gets me drunk....

This is how the boys started off their night (I passed on this one). Anyone heard of Absinthe?! I kept calling it Abstinence. You know it's bad when the bar tender warns you against drinking it!

This is me and Jeff at Pat O'Brien's at CityWalk. After three hurricanes, he would've taken a picture with anyone!

Here is the Loews Universal Orlando team (minus one person). We had such a great time, but we were sad to see my training room turned into the "War Room". It was actually pretty cool - they turned it into a jungle and had army "stuff" all over the room! This room was the central location for our cutover process to take them from the old system to the new system.

This is everybody (plus our favorite interface technician), the night before we all left. Oh, how I miss them all already!

One of the many beautiful passage-ways at the Royal Pacific Resort. I was a little sad to leave.

The Hulk ride at Islands of Adventure. My hair was HUGE when I got off this thing!!

My hotel had the best fountain-thingy. The elephants became my best friends. I loved hanging out with them at night.

My parting gift from the hotel. They gave me a plaque-type thing with a picture of all three hotels and their key cards. Most of the employees there signed a piece of paper saying farewell (more like telling me to stay away from green skittles), and they also sent me a chocolate cake. It was SO GREAT!!

Baby Emily....

Oh, she makes me happy. I know it's annoying to watch videos of other people's kids....but considering a lot of you know my brother, Mitch, I thought this might be alright!! I visited them right before I came to Orlando, and had a GREAT time!

Emily is doing great. Every time she gets in to see her doctor, they determine that she's basically off the charts. She's at 10 months now, I think, and she measures at about an average child who is 18 months old! She's going to be just like her Aunt Lindy!!

She getting to that loud and FUN stage, so the next few years will be very adventurous!!!

She's a little tired in this video, but it's the only one I got where she's paying attention to something for more than 30 seconds!

I had to share this one, because I think it's hilarious. Notice the way she eats her grapes!

Shuttle Launch Discovery

The Space Shuttle Discovery was supposed to launch on Tuesday of last week at about 2am. Two of our guys made it down there (it's about an hour drive from where we are) and they post-poned the launch 10 minutes prior to the launch. They re-scheduled it for Wednesday evening, I think. That one didn't go either.

SO - they re-scheduled the launch for Friday night at 11:59 and we decided to go. If it went - we wanted to be there. We got there about 45 minutes prior to the launch and there was lightning right above the launch pad. Well, it looked like there was lightning right above it. But - it could've been further out, I guess. We were sure they were going to post-pone it again. Next thing we knew, we were ten minutes in....five minutes in....then we were counting down.

I still get goose-bumps (sp?) when I talk about it. It was such an amazing sight. The video is a little long, as I was afraid to miss anything. I'm going to grab some pictures from the others and share those too......

Here's the video!! Enjoy!!

Work or Vacation?

OMIGOSH - where to start?! I got down to Orlando on the 14th of August, and haven't really stopped having fun since. Not only is it great to be able to actually unpack my bags, knowing that I'll be somewhere more than a week, but it's also just a GREAT place to be. (Once you get past the heat and humidity...and the hurricanes.) We are doing a very large installation this month (about 40 days long) of three hotels that sit on the Universal Studios campus. AWESOME. It's great - we will never run out of things to do. There are six of us here for the full install, and we're having a great time.

Here are four of us hanging out with Shaggy and Scooby-Do before dinner!

There is so much to cover, and I'm going to do it in several different posts...and in no specific order. We rotate who takes the camera on our little adventures, so I'll need to pilfer some good shots from the others probably.

First of all, here are some pictures from the different hotels.... None of them are very good. I'll work on getting some better ones. You'll find the link to each of the hotels below the title. These places ARE FANTASTIC, and if you go to Orlando...I would HIGHLY recommend them.

HARD ROCK HOTEL

http://www.hardrockhotelorlando.com/

Fountain out front...

The group Molly Hatchett performed in the lobby of the Hard Rock Hotel for their Velvet Sessions on Thursday night. VIP Access.....it was still really loud!!

PORTOFINO BAY HOTEL

http://www.loewshotels.com/en/Hotels/Portofino-Bay-Hotel/Overview.aspx

View from the courtyard area...where the water taxis take off.

This happens every night....I believe.

And these guys know us by now... Sometimes they have a woman singing with them - and SHE IS FABULOUS!! They always sing my song, "Volare". The first night we ate here, we had the entire restaurant swaying and singing with us. We go here at least once a week for dinner!! The guy playing the accordion (sp?) is going to learn "In the Misty Moonlight" eventually, so he can play it for me. I request it every time.

ROYAL PACIFIC RESORT

http://www.loewshotels.com/en/Hotels/Royal-Pacific-Resort/Overview.aspx

The front entrance of the hotel is a bridge over this little canal. This is the view to the left as you're walking in.

To the right....

I SO want to frolick in this little pond thingy with the elephants. This is beautiful. This is a part of their lobby. On the other side, through the glass, is a sushi restaurant that I eat at a lot.

One night the self-parking was full and I had to park in the back of the hotel (before I had even walked around the property and knew where everything was...but I had already heard stories about alligators attacking people). I had to walk for what seemed like 2 miles through the dark fearing a deadly attack from a gator. I turned a corner and these three guys scared the CRAP out of me! I think I even YELPED! I went out the next morning and had to take a picture!!

What a great amenity!! I also got cookies and a big glass of really cold milk. I LOVE REALLY COLD MILK!! This was the best gift ever.... Someone in my training class sent it to me, thanking me for a great week of training. Made me get misty-eyed.

Okay - moving on. I did actually have a pretty intense situation in my first week of training. I think it was the first Thursday of the training classes. For snacks in the training room, they have a number of things...but the best is the HUGE bags of skittles. I love skittles. I was standing in the back of my classroom while some of the folks in my class were discussing a few things. I decided I had time to pop a skittle in my mouth. FAIL.

I chewed a little, then tried to swallow......tried to swallow....kept trying to swallow.....start walking toward the front door of my classroom that led out into a cafeteria.....keep trying to swallow.........try to breath....find out that I CAN'T BREATHE (I was actually making really crazy *gasping for air* noises at this point)....keep walking toward the door....open the door....keep trying to breathe and can't....decide that it's just a DAMN skittle and that I should be able to handle this....with every effort I had left, I pretty much hacked the thing up....I see the green skittle piece go flying out of my mouth.....I gasp for air and have never appreciated oxygen more in my life.

Of course, once I made the crazy hacking noise while hanging outside the door of my own classroom, they got a little quiet! I came back in the room, put my hands on my knees and caught my breath! My throat was so soar, from all of that sour acidic-type stuff in my throat! It was NOT pleasant, and it freaked me out. One of the ladies in my class lectured me for the last 15 minutes of class for going off by myself. She's right - I could've died....on a friggin' skittle. How embarrassing!

It was pretty funny though (since I didn't actually die), and every person in my next class knew about it by the time they got through my door! On the last day of class this week (It's already been over a week since the choking incident took place, and a whole new group of people...), one of my students left this on the table for me!! HA!!

The next post was going to be in this one.... but it's too important to mesh together with this one. READ THE NEXT POST....and watch the video. It's breath-taking! More later, gators!

SORRY!!

Yeah - so I've been a little swamped this past month. No excuse, I know. I've just kind of had to cut a lot of "extras" all of my life....lots of work to do. Things should slow up this weekend, and I'll post something soon. PROMISE.

Thanks guys - hope I didn't lose my readers.
Lindy

What a Weekend!!

A nice Indiana country sunset.

Last week was kind of crazy, but I got to end it with an awesome weekend. I'm going to pretty much tell the story in pictures. Charlie got in touch with me last week and needed some help with Brody. Since I was home, it was SO GREAT to finally be able to hang out with Charlie and the little guy. I drove up to Ft. Wayne on Friday and stayed with Charlie. It was great to get to just hang out with Charlie...haven't been able to spend time like that with each other awhile. I'm probably going to do that more often when I'm home, because I enjoyed myself so much. Then, Brody and I headed to Parker to hang out. As most of you know, I don't really have a house (I live with two married friends that own a house. My bed is in their spare room!!) , so we had to hang out in Parker and I watched Brody and my Dad's house. We did a lot of fun stuff though - check it out!!

Brody learned how to cross his eyes!!


Why is Aunt Linny Max the coolest person ever?! She buys Taco Bell for breakfast! This is Levi and Jake - Charlie's girlfriend's sons. Awesome kids.

ME's Zoo is closing, and my friend Amanda really wanted to go for a last time and sort of say, "Good Bye". Since I had Brody - it seemed like a good time to go!! Amy Bogue and her two sons came along too!! Here's Brody cheesing with a deer!

A nice walk through the zoo. My hair barely survived this fun adventure!

At the zoo - Brody was still heavier than both of Amy Bogue's kids! Brody is six months younger than her oldest, Blake, but is about twice the size!

Talking (blabbering on and on and on) to the llamas, who found Brody verrrrry interesting!

He tried to tell the kangaroo a story, but he wasn't as interested as the llamas!

LOVE IT!!

OH gosh - brain freeze from a Jerry's Juicy Freeze!

Bonfire at Amanda's house!! Since he ate his dinner, I told him he could have as many s'mores as he wanted. He couldn't wait to get over to her house. Turns out - he only had room for one s'more!! HAHAHA. Awesome.

He's fun.

Brody and I looking at the "Brody Star".

Not sure if you can really see - but there are A MILLION mosquito bites on my feet. SO WEIRD. I counted 18 on my right foot today. I'm trying to work from home, but all I have time to do is ITCH, ITCH, ITCH!!

We're certainly going to miss the ME'S Zoo. Amanda has been trying to talk me into buying it for the past few months. Anyone want to be a zookeeper?! Here are some pictures of the animals we'll be missing in Parker City......

I've been anxiously awaiting some life-changing news, and it hasn't come yet. I know from my previous post, some of you were curious about what it is..... Soon we'll know, hopefully. Until next time, friends.