And, I'm Off

I'm heading to the STC conference in Philadelphia. I'm leaving tonight and will be gone a whole week. Am I worried about leaving Craig and the kids for that long? I often feel it would be nice to get away by myself for awhile, but now I'm worried about how much I'll miss them. It didn't seem like that big of a deal until I started packing.

Thank God for video and picture messaging.

We're on a deadline with Fred. We have to have it done by the 20th to get the rest of the insurance money. Craig'll need to work on it while I'm gone. Luckily, my mom will help out and Craig's mom will come over a few times. This way Craig can keep working on Fred.

I can't believe that I'm actually presenting! It's a "cool" presentation, that is, if you get excited when someone uses Keynote on a Mac instead of PowerPoint on a Windows machine.

Fred Update
Craig is powering through this project, and although we have a deadline, I'm confident he'll have it all done. My dad's been helping Craig out some, but my carpenter pro hubby's been doing been really doing a great job. They've been at it less than 2 weeks and you can see the results below.

I'm Alive.

I'm just so busy! Grrrr.

In a nutshell:

• I went to Michigan Tech as part of the STC dept advisory board. It was a lot of fun, and I went by myself so I had a little break from the kids.
• We're working on building a garage/barn/shed-thing to replace the well house that had a tree land on it last August. (Yeah, nine months ago. We're really on top of things!) I've decided to call the new building Fred, since it's not really a shed, barn, or garage.
  
• I'm also at nearing the end of a product release, and I'm super busy documenting Morae, our usability/user research software. If you don't know about it, it's way better than the old Unicrap usability lab and costs a lot less than the pompous fool manager guy put into that lab.
• I took Chase to Cedar Point with our friend Susanne and her son Ethan. Ethan's just 9 months older than Chase, so the boys really have a good time together. We did an evening and then a whole day at the park, followed by a couple hours at the indoor waterpark.
  

Here's pictures of the CP trip, Cory, and the Fred building.