On behalf of myself and all the other veterans out there, you're welcome. Beth and I Geocached for the 2nd Memorial Day in a row. We went all the way to Fort Wayne today, catching four caches including our first webcam cache, with some help from Mom K. This past week at work was...busy, what with being out all the previous one. Thursday, Terminix came to the house to put some sort of chemicals all around the house, hopefully we will never see (or have unseen) termites in the house again. Cost us big, but what are you going to do, let the bugs eat? Anyway, over the long weekend we moved the sectional sofa downstairs (by ourselves...it's never coming up until we move, I guarantee) where we now like it a lot better. There's more room upstairs (especially with the new dining room table) and it matches so much better down here. This is what we wanted to do with it at first. We should have had it down here all along. We also rented some movies to watch over the long weekend and actually watched them...with the TV seasons over we even watched 'The Aviator' which had been on our DVR since September when we bought it on PPV. And another potty breakthrough...Alex pooped in the potty for the first time! I think it may have been more good timing than anything, but he's been pretty good about saying when he has to pee lately so there's hope for him going to preschool in the fall after all.

I just spent the past week away from work on business. Monday the department had an offsite, then there was a validation summit followed by a CAPA summit in Chicago. I was lucky enough to have been delegated to go because my boss was on vacation. Late Monday after the kids were in bed I took off for Chicago and spent Tuesday in one great big meeting talking about how Zimmer is doing validations. Afterwards, some of the other attendees and I took the train into the city (we were in Rosemont) to go to the Cubs game. They had been stinking lately but they shut out the Nationals 4-0 in a pretty good show, then we saw a fight out on the street after the game on the way back. Wednesday I had to duck out for a meeting at Rush Medical with one of the research doctors there, my boss' boss, and my boss' boss' boss. After that meeting they headed to another meeting they had downtown and I took the train back. It takes about 90 minutes to go from Rush to Rosemont but it is a straight shot on the blue line. I missed most of the day's seminar activities, which was apparently ok because I heard they were useless. After the seminar was over, there was a team building exercise, aka a dinner cruise on the Spirit of Chicago. We took this great big boat out on a cruise from Navy Pier to the planetarium and back around in a few circles, having a nice (but not great) dinner, an open bar, and dancing (which didn't really get started en masse until YMCA, then fizzled out again) including our quality systems director playing Diana Ross in a skit with the entertainment cast. I was a little concerned we wouldn't get to do the cruise because of the weather...just as we were getting to the pier it started raining, then pouring, then storming, then storming and hailing hard enough that you couldn't see the buildings in the loop from the pier and there was maybe an inch of ice on the ground. But it blew over and the evening was nice. Thursday was the last day of meetings for almost everyone so nothing was planned for afterwards, and I just wandered around the hotel area for a while and ate in the hotel restaurant before watching TV in my room for the rest of the evening. Friday was all about CAPA. Talk about a complete and total waste of my time. I should never have been there. Saturday, there was a swarm of swarmer termites in our garage, right near where the old damage was and I had the door replaced a while back Called Terminix right away, they're supposed to call back. Later on, Beth and I got a babysitter so we could go see "The DaVinci Code" which was good (not an endorsement of the views expressed therein).

The dining room table we ordered in March was delivered today. Beth is just beside herself with joy. Our bowling league season ended last weekend, and it looks like there will be a season next year again (we weren't sure the alley would remain open since the owners are retiring). Softball was tonight for the first time in a couple weeks (last 2 weeks were rained out). I had a good game, 2-for-3 with a few really good catches in the outfield.