It's amazing what the sacrament of reconciliation can do for your overall outlook. :)
Life is good lately, in spite of the fact that I've been a bit grumpy. Joe is done with school for the summer, so as soon as the buttheads at Bob Evans get his schedule straightened out, we will get to spend Saturdays together. :) A whole day every week, I don't remember the last time we had one of those!
We have some plans for the summer but nothing too major... just looking for time to relax more than anything I think. We do have tickets to see Journey at Darien Lake in August. :D That's going to be an awesome concert! We're also hoping to get to Cleveland and visit Tim and Cathy, and maybe to North Carolina to visit Mike. Plus there will be trips to Caz to see my Aunt Kristie in July, and my sister in August. And when you get down to it, that doesn't really leave very many more weekends. ;) I'm sure we'll make time for Shakespeare in Delaware Park, Niagara Falls, the Erie County Fair, etc, and then summer will be over and Joe heads back to school!
I never mind the coming of fall though. :) It gets busy with Joe having class and homework and regular work, but this will be his last semester... in December he is done! That will be strange. :) But certainly not unwelcome. :D Besides, fall also means football season (we have Bills tickets for November), and theater season (I'm bringing my mom to see My Fair Lady), and my birthday (;)), and the start of RCIA (which gives me something useful to do). And then the holidays. :) And THEN, next February we are going back to Tybee Island, which I can't wait for -- it will be me and Joe, my parents, my Aunt Dotty, and hopefully Angela and Mike! So that's only 8 months away at this point but hey, it's something to look forward to. :)
But anyway... now it is summer. :) Bit gloomy today but it's been nice. At work I'm taking a class in Java and OOP which runs through the end of July. It sucks in a way because it means I have to do homework on top of working full time, but on the bright side it is free training to put on my resume.
The past few weeks I've been organizing my pictures and filling up albums. I have a renewed love for photo albums, after having stored my photos in a box for the past 10 years or so. I even transferred all the photos and memorabilia from my France trip into a new album. :) (I found one with the Eiffel Tower on the cover and couldn't leave the store without it. :P) Now that the albums are caught up I'm planning to get to work on that scrapbook. :) Hopefully finish that in time for... well, who knows. :) But it would be nice to finish.
Last week I said goodbye to Father Jim, who is leaving our parish to become the pastor at St John the Baptist in Alden. Now I have gone through lots of pastors and priests leaving, both as a Protestant and as a Catholic, and most of the time it hasn't affected me too much. But I spent last Sunday's farewell Mass choking back tears (actually, the Mass where he announced he was leaving, which was Mother's Day and the day my dad was with me, I was also choking back tears). I managed to pull myself together fairly successfully by the end... and then Fr. Mark, our pastor, came out to give Fr. Jim a final blessing. I had never seen Fr. Mark get really emotional, but HE was in tears and could hardly speak, and I think half the congregation lost it then (including me). Fr. Jim is the one who was most directly involved with RCIA, who confirmed me, and who's been my main confessor for the past year, so needless to say I'm going to miss him. He's a great guy. But that's the way things go. It will be interesting to see what our new priest will be like. :)
Oh... I got my hair cut this week too. :) I even gave in and bought a special "reconstructing" conditioner from the salon to try and get my hair to be healthy. (Okay, it wasn't really a salon, it was Supercuts, but whatever.) I guess I've always been a little vain about my hair. :P It's my favorite feature. I only took maybe 5 inches off it, so it's still long and the only people that noticed the cut are the ones that I told. ;) But most of the split ends are gone and it feels a lot nicer now so I'm happy. :)
Anyhow, I've been blabbing for awhile so I'm going to go do something else now. Maybe pull out the scrapbook... maybe just play The Sims. Doesn't really matter though. It's nice having free time. :)