Where does the time go? Well, for me, since the last time I managed to post here, a fair chunk of it has gone to travel. Over Memorial Day weekend, I went to Illinois. My brother was there, too, and we spent some time with Mom at her house, continuing the cleanup effort needed before we can put it on the market. It’s definitely not a fast or easy process. At one point this particular weekend, Mom got very upset because she felt her wishes weren’t being taken into consideration, which made me feel super mean, but the reality is that only a tiny fraction of the stuff from her 3-bedroom house will fit into her new space at my niece’s. We can’t grant her wishes to bring everything she wants. I could and did take her the next day to the Irish pub she wanted to try and didn’t say anything about her diabetes when she ordered the bread pudding for dessert. It made her happy, and that made me happy.

I spent the weekend after Memorial Day at home, then the next three days at Purple Systems’ annual user conference, which this year was in Columbus, Ohio. The number of employees who were sent to staff the conference was cut back from prior years, which meant those of us who did go were scheduled for more events, which meant it was even more exhausting than usual. I didn’t have much time to spend in my hotel room, but when I was there I spent a fair bit of time looking out the windows, as I was on the 16th floor and that’s a perspective I don’t get much—trains from above and such. The convention center the conference was in is the same one that Mom and I went to a quilt show at five years ago, so that was nice to already have some familiarity with the layout.

Then I came home from the conference, unpacked, and repacked for a long weekend trip to Texas for Mr. Karen’s family reunion. This was the trip I’d messed up the tickets for, so instead of having an evening, a full day, and a morning to spend with family, we ended up with a not-quite-full day plus a lot of driving. We packed a lot into that day, though—the usual eating and games and talking (both in person and on the phone to relatives who weren’t able to make it), plus petting horses (some rode but I did not) and tooling around in ATVs and flying in the host’s small plane and generally being impressed by all the stuff our hosts had for us to see and do. We were so late getting to the hotel on Saturday night after the reunion festivities that the front desk clerk was calling a sister hotel in the area to see if we’d accidentally gone there—she was spelling our last name into the phone as we walked up.

Because Flickr changed their interface and it now makes my head hurt to spend much time there, I don’t have links to photo sets for any of these trips, as I haven’t made photosets for them. I just posted a sampling of shots and will circle back around and tweak things once I get around to catching up on my photo a day project. I may never make the photosets, though. Maybe I’ll go old school and finally upgrade my gallery installation here at hatontop.com and go back to making sets there. Woe if I find the latest version of that is all tabletized and desktop-unfriendly.