But what if it SNOWS?????!!!

Right now, I should be chipping into the exorbitant amount of reading that I need to accomplish in the next week, and I will, soon, when I finish this entry. I promise.

Yesterday marked the culmination of perhaps the most impressive thing I have ever done, short of completing my undergrad thesis, which, actually, wasn't all that significant in retrospect. Yesterday, the Center for Gifted Education's 13th Annual Focusing on the Future conference was held. This conference was planned, in large part, by me.

On Thursday, the phone calls started:

"Have you rescheduled?"
"I'm sure you've heard that bad weather is possible."
"It might snow. We're coming from three hours away."

Of course, this possibility had been considered months before. In fact, three years ago, the conference was canceled because of snow, so we had a contingency plan in place, which we communicated to all attendees with their confirmation the month before. Not that they read the mail we send them. Dealing with all these inane questions was frustrating, and I finally just put an extended absence message on my machine instructing participants what to do if they were worried about snow, and let it ring through.

Saturday, I arrived at 6:45, and stayed until 5:00pm. But the conference went off without any major disasters which was a major blessing. There was the small incident of the kid allergic to peanuts eating a (wait for it) peanut M&M in the Culinary Arts session, and the one mother hysterical that she lost her daughter at the end of the day, when she was really just waiting for a tour, but other than these relatively minor things, all was well. My volunteers were amazing and competent, my planning was well worth the effort, and one mother said to me, "I was in the army for 22 years, and this conference ran like clockwork. It was wonderful." I couldn't have been more pleased, and I feel extremely proud of myself for pulling it off and being, for all intents and purposes, done with my major project of the year. Of course, a report needs to be written, and evaluation data types of and analyzed, but I am thankful that tomorrow is a holiday so I can work on these things at the Center without staff leaning over my shoulder for a day.

A couple more items of note, which, I know, will seem completely contradictory.

One, I have been attending Mass since the new year, and am really appreciating it. Today, Father gave a sermon about how he had been on a cruise and was really impressed with the people who consider service to be their calling, not just something they do until something better come along. I love that notion, because I'm starting to really feel that working a grunt job that requires minimal education but that really gets something done is what I want to do with my life. I like being in the trenches. I also asked for a patron saint of the year, and am enjoying that little treat, too -- I got paired with two, out of a (fortunate) miscommunication: St. John of God is the first, who went a little mentally ill and then dedicated his life to serving the poor after his recovery: perfect for my interest in psych, my current interest in abnormal psych, and my career conflict of wanting to just find a do-gooder non-profit job next year. My second was Bl. Francis de Montmorency Lavale, who did a lot of work with the expansion of the Catholic church in Canada in the 1600s, especially in Quebec. Because of impending location changes to Vermont (and a honeymoon in Montreal:), I'm feeling like Francis is looking over my move to the North and my joining a family with a French Canadian history.

Secondly, we had our first meeting for the Vagina Monologues tonight, and it was really fun. I think the group I'm working with is great, and although the performance interrupts the week Andy is visiting (which is nice that he gets to see it, but a bummer that I'll be busy in the evenings over one of the weekends), I'm glad to be involved in something.

Overall, my goal for the semester is to be happy and not feel sorry for myself. I'm going to get out, and not make school work a top priority, because last semester, it ate me up, and frankly, I don't like my program enough to be quite that involved again. Chilling out and focusing on other things has been good for me, and I like my frame of mind of late. So we're going to try to stick with that.

And now, off to read. Seriously. At least for awhile.