It’s been a long road. After all this time, Cristina is finally going to graduate. She attended a two year degree school called E.C.P.I. She majored in criminal Justice and was able to maintain a 3.7 grade average. We are very proud of her and of course, glad she will be able to start a career. I was a little worried about her wanting to be a police officer, so I was glad when she decided to focus on becoming a dispatcher instead.

Anyway, that’s all beside the point. The main thing now is to give her a great graduation party. She deserves to have a good time she will remember after all her hard work. We were struggling to come up with a party idea. I looked online and found a great website for party planning. There was a wealth of information about how to plan a party and how to give it a theme. There were many food tips and even gift ideas.

Using some of the information I found, I was able to clarify my own ideas. We are now ready to throw the party worthy of praise from the party gods! I am sure that Cristina will be satisfied with all the plans we made and will have a night to remember!

One thing I don’t like to do is to open our garage door. I don’t know what is wrong with it, but every time it opens, it makes a horrendous screeching sound! Although it has been looked at several times by various people, no one can figure out what is wrong with it.

This problem has occurred ever since we bought the house. I did contact the builder and they said they would look at it, but as of yet, they never have. Problems like this always seem to get put on the back burner, but I guess I should have been more insistent about the situation. Oh well maybe one day….

 Summer will be here sooner than we know it. I have a couple of week’s vacation that I have to use up before they are lost, and the kids will be out of school for summer. All this adds up to a trip. Since my mom is retired and living down in Florida, this will be a great time to visit her. Mom used to fly up to see us every Christmas, but the trip is getting too hard for her. It will be nice to go see her face when she sees us coming!

We visited Florida once before, the kids were a lot younger then. The best thing they remember about that trip was our visit to Universal Studios Orlando The kids had a great time that year. When I informed the kids that we were going to visit grandma, they were excited but also wanted to know if that meant we could go to the theme park as well.

Kyle remembers the islands of adventure rides the best. He really enjoyed going around to all the little islands. There are a lot of rollercoaster’s there and I think Kyle rode them all. He is also looking forward to the new Simpson ride, but I’m thinking that’s in the other section. With Sarah being more of a movie lover, she enjoyed the universal studios part of the park a lot more. She especially enjoyed the “Jaws” boat adventure.

I am certainly not the one to ride a lot of roller coasters. I do enjoy some of the smaller rides. I’ve always been a music lover so I am looking forward to the Mardi gras celebration. We will probably get a multi day pass so there will be time for everyone to do their favorite things. I’m sure that grandma will enjoy it as well; I know she rode a mean rollercoaster in her day!

There is a good size pond out behind our house. We have some resident ducks that live there the year round. Several of the people surrounding the pond have taken to feeding them on a regular basis. Not wanting to be left out of the fun, I decided to feed them as well.

They are pretty tame now and when they see you coming they will race over to get their treats. Usually, I will feed them bread. One day I had no bread and was wondering what I could give them. Looking thru the refrigerator, I found some leftover green beans from the night before. The ducks went wild for the beans. They gobbled them down as fast as I could throw them out.

I could tell they really enjoyed the beans. Now it would be an expense to feed them beans every day so I guess its back to “A bread and water diet” for them, but every now and then I’ll give them my own special treat!

Since a lot of the work we do is time sensitive, it can lead to work overloads and deadlines to meet. With this in mind, we had an unusual announcement at our work today. The president of our company asked for everyone to attend the stress management seminar that is scheduled for next week. He feels that it would be beneficial for the entire office. I must agree that this could be a good idea.

Wanting to get a sneak peek at what we would be hearing about, I went to the website of a company called The Stress Institute. That’s where I learned about Dr. K Hall who founded the company. She has a lot of ideas about how to relieve workplace related stress which can improve your overall life. I am looking forward to being informed about these ideas and putting them into practice. With our busiest period coming up soon, I’ll sure be happy to have a little less stress!