Labor Day Weekend
Okay, so I have not made the time to blog for almost a month. I have a lot to catch up on. I took on a new role at work. I am the IT Lead for CHI Connect initiative. Mercy is part of Catholic Health Initiatives. They own 72 hospitals, clinics and care facilities through out the country. We are their 2nd largest hospital, and they are attempting to get all 72 places using the same timekeeping and payroll systems. We happen to use both already, but of course what we are going to is going to be very different. Unfortunately, we are having to dumb down in order to get us all uniformed. Which really hurts our staff. We are taking tools away that make their jobs easier. It doesn't make a lot of sense. But hey, it will save CHI 20 million dollars by 2009. This new role has me busier than ever. Yesterday I had 4 meetings and 2 of them were almost 2 hours long. So I don't have a lot down time anymore to sluff off.
So I am going back to Labor day weekend to start off. The day before we were leaving for WI, Eric convinced me I deserved a new car. Stew Hansen's were having great deals with the life time power tran warranty on the Dodge mini-vans. The only reason I was willing to at least look, is because we no longer pay daycare for Chase, since he is in school. We checked out the '07 Dodge Grand Caravan. I took it for a test drive. I liked it, but I didn't feel really comfortable behind the wheel. It seemed off. I told Eric if we are going to buy a new and have a payment for 5 years, I need to love it, not just like it.
So the sales guy says, "A few '08's have just come in, you can check those out if you like. " I looked at it and liked it immediately. It is more boxy and tougher looking. At first I didn't realize it was a mini-van, plus it was black. I took it for a ride and loved it. It has the stow n' go, it has the shifter on the dash, the pedals can move forward or back, so I don't have to move the seat if I don't want too. The windows on the sliding doors roll down and a power lift gate. I kept saying, we don't need this. Eric said you have never had a brand new car in your life. You deserve to have one. Plus the warranty on the motor and tranny were too good to pass up. So this is going to be our family car for the next 10 years. We want to get our money's worth.
Friday night we headed to Lake Winnebago, and it was the fastest 7 hours. We said it must be the new car! My mom and my nieces came up on Saturday. The kids rode bikes and played. I set up the swimming pool. They played in that for a long time. Grandma cooked an awesome steak dinner Saturday night. The meat was so tender and the onions and mushrooms were delicious.
Sunday afternoon we packed up and headed to Milwaukee. My brother bought a house and they were just moving in. I bought them a Bocci Ball set to play in their backyard. So we played that for a long time. Chase and Anthony thought it was great to play with a bunch of new toys they hadn't seen.
Sunday night we went my aunt's house. Cheryl had knee replacement surgery at the beginning of August. She was able to walk around, but still had a lot of pain. She had my mom and I help her with one of her exercises. We would have to push down on her knee to make it go straight. It felt really strange and I kept worrying about pushing to hard. I could see how much pain she was in when we would do it. But she was diligent about doing it every hour. Since we had to lay low, we decided to play Trivial Pursuit. We started the game at 9pm and quit at 1am. No one had won yet. It was myself, Eric, my mom and Cheryl playing. Even though there wasn't a winner, we had a lot of fun.
Monday was Labor Day. We headed over to the local CBS TV station to see my friend Sara and say hi to her brother. Michael her brother, has had Muscular Dystrophy for 27 of his 29 years of life. He was being honored on the telethon and Sara was there volunteering for the day. After visiting Sara, we went to my dad's work to say hi. I didn't expect him to work Labor Day, so this too was a short visit. We got on road around 1pm. Traffic was bad most of the way home, which I hadn't thought about. So it took us an extra hour in travel time. We were just glad to be back. It is always such a whirl wind tour when we go back home to WI.
So I am going back to Labor day weekend to start off. The day before we were leaving for WI, Eric convinced me I deserved a new car. Stew Hansen's were having great deals with the life time power tran warranty on the Dodge mini-vans. The only reason I was willing to at least look, is because we no longer pay daycare for Chase, since he is in school. We checked out the '07 Dodge Grand Caravan. I took it for a test drive. I liked it, but I didn't feel really comfortable behind the wheel. It seemed off. I told Eric if we are going to buy a new and have a payment for 5 years, I need to love it, not just like it.
So the sales guy says, "A few '08's have just come in, you can check those out if you like. " I looked at it and liked it immediately. It is more boxy and tougher looking. At first I didn't realize it was a mini-van, plus it was black. I took it for a ride and loved it. It has the stow n' go, it has the shifter on the dash, the pedals can move forward or back, so I don't have to move the seat if I don't want too. The windows on the sliding doors roll down and a power lift gate. I kept saying, we don't need this. Eric said you have never had a brand new car in your life. You deserve to have one. Plus the warranty on the motor and tranny were too good to pass up. So this is going to be our family car for the next 10 years. We want to get our money's worth.
Friday night we headed to Lake Winnebago, and it was the fastest 7 hours. We said it must be the new car! My mom and my nieces came up on Saturday. The kids rode bikes and played. I set up the swimming pool. They played in that for a long time. Grandma cooked an awesome steak dinner Saturday night. The meat was so tender and the onions and mushrooms were delicious.
Sunday afternoon we packed up and headed to Milwaukee. My brother bought a house and they were just moving in. I bought them a Bocci Ball set to play in their backyard. So we played that for a long time. Chase and Anthony thought it was great to play with a bunch of new toys they hadn't seen.
Sunday night we went my aunt's house. Cheryl had knee replacement surgery at the beginning of August. She was able to walk around, but still had a lot of pain. She had my mom and I help her with one of her exercises. We would have to push down on her knee to make it go straight. It felt really strange and I kept worrying about pushing to hard. I could see how much pain she was in when we would do it. But she was diligent about doing it every hour. Since we had to lay low, we decided to play Trivial Pursuit. We started the game at 9pm and quit at 1am. No one had won yet. It was myself, Eric, my mom and Cheryl playing. Even though there wasn't a winner, we had a lot of fun.
Monday was Labor Day. We headed over to the local CBS TV station to see my friend Sara and say hi to her brother. Michael her brother, has had Muscular Dystrophy for 27 of his 29 years of life. He was being honored on the telethon and Sara was there volunteering for the day. After visiting Sara, we went to my dad's work to say hi. I didn't expect him to work Labor Day, so this too was a short visit. We got on road around 1pm. Traffic was bad most of the way home, which I hadn't thought about. So it took us an extra hour in travel time. We were just glad to be back. It is always such a whirl wind tour when we go back home to WI.
posted by Rachel | 6:32 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]
<< Home