Damn Girl, Where Have You Been?

Good question. Where have I been?

Let's see, I can blame it on several things: jury duty and death penalties, New York City and Mom's 80th Birthday celebration, yoga, yoga, yoga and today - layoffs at work.

In July, we ended the penalty phase of the trial. What trial you may ask - I couldn't or rather, didn't want to talk about it. Ten hours of emotional deliberations later, we were unanimous in our decision. I served with twelve wonderful and fair people. I wish them all the best and that we never have to serve again. FYI - for added fun, I was called to serve on a Municipal jury - traffic; I suppose we are entitled to our day in court.

August 14, Mom celebrated her 80th birthday. My brother travelled to NY from CA and I from TX. We had a great time - dinner at Ruth Crist Steak House - delish! New York City sponsors many great events or 'happenings' to coin an old phrase. This summer, Park Avenue was closed to traffic from Central Park all the way down to 'I don't know where'. It became a pedestrian mall for walkers, skaters, bikers and you name it. We, as a family decided to take a walk and it turned out to be the longest walk of my life. Somewhere in the neighborhood of 17 miles - yeah, that's right -17 great miles. We started at 115th street, through Central Park to Park Ave., down Park Ave. through the Village, China Town and other parts of town I don't know the name of, across the Brooklyn Bridge and back (stopping to see the 'Fountains' art exhibit), to Ground Zero and up the waterfront back to 115th St. Along the way, we grew closer as a family, rubbed blisters on our feet and got a glimpse of Tom Cruise and what it is like to be stalked by photographers. I also set up a card shower for Mom, asking my friends and coworkers to send her a card in hopes of getting 80 cards. She was surprised and grateful - and my brother didn't think I could pull it off - ha! (I can do a lot of things you don't think I can do - from getting 80 men and women to send birthday cards to someone they don't know to walking 17 miles in a day.)

Sometime in June, I started practicing Dahn Yoga. I show up in my yoga clothes with my yoga mat and my yoga attitude only to find out that Dahn yoga was not what I was expecting. It's better - I will talk more about this later.

Today, there were big layoffs at my job. I was at home working off a headache so my friends contacted me. I am very sad about this. There have been rumors floating around for a few weeks and we expected something, but we all hoped there would be more of a warning and that it would be handled differently. In the past, we had different times to report to work and we were told our status then. Today, as I understand it, HR visited people in their offices and took them for meeting to give the bad news. There were a lot of surprises. I am nervous about tomorrow since I missed today - don't know if I will be able to sleep tonight. I am feeling anxious now so I better stop. I will post pics of Mom's great looking 80 year old legs and NYC later.