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By Amber, on February 26, 2012, at 10:30 pm  Waikiki rush hour Every Friday my coworkers and I provide our boss with a status summary for our projects. If the length of my status update for last week’s activities were proportionate to the effort the week required, my boss would still be reading what I submitted at 4:47 on Friday. What is for certain is that I’m still recovering from it. Every other week I work four days instead of five, and I have been so busy that I think last week was the first time I was glad to be there on a Friday — late for a Friday, even!
Some friendly folks from my Toastmasters district, including my home club’s VP of Membership, trekked out to my office in West Houston to put on a demo meeting for about 20 of my colleagues. There is a lot of enthusiasm for starting a club at my company, and I’m so excited to be part of that. I’m on the fence about volunteering for an officer role — I’m willing, but I don’t want to overextend myself to the point where I can’t do justice to my commitments. Meanwhile, I’m trying to coordinate judging for my home club’s speech contest this week.
Last week I spent two days with some customers, doing a mini dry-run for the three-day school I’m coordinating for April. There is a lot of work to do still, but I feel good about the team I’ve assembled. In April I’ll be putting on my own school in Chicago and attending one or two other schools in San Antonio. If I’m not smarter by May, it will be because I’m brain-dead.
By Amber, on February 19, 2012, at 10:00 pm 
Since we both had to work on Valentine’s Day this year, we decided our gift to ourselves would be a fancy weekend in a hotel right here in downtown Houston! It turned to be a perfect weekend to stay in one place, with incredible thunderstorms passing through on Friday and Saturday.
We checked into the Four Seasons on Friday evening and headed downstairs to dinner at Quattro. Truffled fries, veal cheek bolognese, lava cake, oh my! I was glad we didn’t have to drive home because I was so full from the amazing food.
Saturday we started with an amazing room service breakfast and spent the rest of the day in the spa, enjoying massages and having the fourth-floor outdoor whirlpool to ourselves. We finished the day with another room service meal. You can get 24-hr room service at the Four Seasons (required to earn a five-diamond rating from AAA), which is awesome — not that I can stay awake late enough to need it after a spa day. What is it about relaxing all day that makes me so tired?
I was probably most excited for brunch today, which was even better than I’d imagined. There was a breakfast station (eggs, bacon, french toast, etc), a dessert station and a savory area (it requires you to walk into the kitchen, which is interesting) that appeared to have some of everything offered throughout the hotel: seafood, Italian, sushi, meats, cheese & charcuterie. I usually like to keep to traditional breakfast foods before noon, but I had to try some grilled chicken, pasta and bacon-wrapped quail.
I would pretty much like to live at the Four Seasons now, please. The room was elegant, quiet and comfortable, and the service throughout the hotel was befitting of royalty. I wish the spa had a little more going on as far as relaxation areas, but that’s all I would change.
It was finally sunny and pleasant today, so after we brunched and checked, we wandered over to Discovery Green to walk around and sit in a butterfly garden. If the weather were always like this, I would never want to live anywhere else! Finally we made our way back to the hotel to get our car, but not until we wandered through the new downtown Phoenicia Foods and picked up a little something to take home.
It was an indulgent weekend, but we won’t be able to do this kind of thing when Mark is in school, so we’re enjoying the flexibility now. Hopefully we can squeeze in one more weekend like this before then!
By Amber, on February 12, 2012, at 10:18 pm So asks the king cake:
That’s the first king cake I’ve bought that included a bean. Maybe we’ll plant it.
It’s been yet another week of blog neglect because there just aren’t enough hours in the day. Right now part of my job includes being an event planner, which is interesting and kind of fun, but my head is swimming in hotel and food rates! I have a feeling this week will fly, because I have so much to do and so little idea how. Most of what I’m doing is not engineering, but the problem-solving required appeals to that side of me.
Mark and I both have to work on Valentine’s Day and I’ll be speaking at Toastmasters, so we’ll have some steaks at home on Tuesday and we’ve got something fun planned for the weekend. But between now and then…king cake!
By Amber, on February 5, 2012, at 9:39 pm You know what? I just don’t want to. I am not lacking obligations this year, and it’s barely February. Phew, that’s a load off.
Lots of stuff going on around here. My job is wearing me out and I’ve been missing my afternoon naps, so I sleep like a baby but I dream about work. This new job is more challenging than any I’ve ever had and I love that, but I find myself needing a lot more recuperation on the weekends than ever before. As for Mark’s job, he’s counting down until he leaves it this summer to start a full-time master’s program. This program is essentially the reason we moved to Houston, so it’s exciting for him to finally get started. For a couple years we’ll just be INKs instead of DINKs! (Dear anybody, would you like to sponsor my wardrobe during this time?)
What else…I decided I needed more to do at work (ha), so I’m trying to get a corporate Toastmasters club started. The feeler I put out through the training coordinator got a very positive response, so I’m working on setting up the demo meeting. At some point I will surely ask myself what the heck I was thinking, but for now I’m excited.
Remember the aluminum prints I ordered on Cyber Monday? Yeah, me neither. They’ve been sitting on the dining room table for a couple months and I keep forgetting they exist, but I finally hung them this weekend. The shot that is my least favorite ended up looking the best because of the way the light catches it. The image almost seems to jump out of the picture. I’m glad we ended up with the aluminum prints because the windowless bathroom they’re in was so dreary. Hard to capture that effect in a photo (had to turn off the flash for the first because they reflect so much light), but here they are anyway!
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