What I Did On My Summer Vacation

I finally strung together several days of vacation to take a whole week off, and I actually took the week off. I had only two very short IM’s that were work related, and sent out one work related email. Otherwise, I didn’t even read my work email during that time.

That may not sound all that remarkable, but you have to remember that I have only been with this company for 3 1/2 years, and had already topped out the vacation allotment. In fact, I hadn?t even accumulated vacation the past two months. I went through a nearly two year period where I had only three days of vacation that were not either cancelled or interrupted to some degree by work.

I have to take responsibility for some of that, as I was probably not as insistent as I should have been. I don’t for a moment think I’m that indispensable, but apparently some people at corporate headquarters do.

Anyway, what did I do with all that time?

I was lucky enough to have to come to Statesville, NC for business the Thursday before the week of the 4th of July, so I stayed over the weekend to visit friends and family.

Thursday night I drove in to Greensboro to have dinner with one of my very best friends there, Glenda Miller. We dined with her husband Scott and her sister Cindy and her boyfriend. It was a lot of fun to catch up in person. We chat almost daily on IM, but its not the same as sitting down and breaking bread.

Friday afternoon, I drove back in to Greensboro and drove around a little. You may not know that I lived there for something like 12 years. While I left with a bad taste in my mouth for the local city government, it’s still a nice place. Some areas had changed a lot with a lot of new business and such, but a lot of the places had not changed all that much, which I was glad to see. I even drove one of the places I lived with some friends on Aberdeen Terrace. The house is still there, and hasn?t changed all that much.

From there I drove over to Elon College. This is a small town between Greensboro and Burlington which is the home of a nice liberal arts college (now a university apparently) Elon University (surprise). A friend from long ago is buried outside of town in a small church cemetery. Jamie was one of the first people in Greensboro diagnosed with AIDS. He’d been largely abandoned by his family years before, and I wound up (along with some great people at just forming AIDS service organization in Greensboro) to take care of Jamie, and help him along. (That is a long and interesting I should elaborate on some time later.) Anyway, I found a florist and got some flowers for his grave. I know no one else ever puts any there (although there was a spray on the big family marker).

After that, I drove down to my hometown of Kings Mountain. This is a small town of of nine thousand people west of Charlotte. My sister Robin picked me up at the airport. I just dropped off the rental, and we met up with the rest of the family in Gastonia for dinner (Robin lives in Charlotte now).

I spent the rest of the weekend hanging out with my Mom and other sister, LeeAnn, and nephew, Jackson.

Saturday night, the big event was fireworks at the Community Center in Kings Mountain. We went there with Mom’s best friend Bobbie Ware. The pictures are some I took of the fireworks they had. While I picked on Jackson about it not being much, it was a lot of fun.

I flew home that Sunday afternoon, and spent the rest of the week sleeping in, doing some reading, working on a refresh of the AIIM New England Chapter website, and taking care of odds and ends around the house.

As Lay was also off that week, we had made plans to go over to the Space Center and tour, but my car wound up in the shop for air conditioner work that day. (You can’t live in Florida without an air-conditioned car let me tell you.)

We did attend a John Kerry/John Edwards campaign rally in St. Pete Tuesday evening. You can read more about that adventure here>>.

I know, it all sounds pretty boring. You have to remember that my job involves a lot of travel, and I’d been doing a lot leading up to this vacation. So, like I told my friend Glenda, it’s a matter of perspective. You have to realize that vacation for me is not having to pack and travel some where.