Category: The Cielem’el Survival & Growth Journal

I can almost see downtown Los Angeles through the brown greenish haze of smog poisoning the earth. Man being down here is depressing for me. I’ll be glad when I can get my rv tonight and get out of LA.

I remember staying here with Artie, here at this particular high-end Marriott. God, everything about L.A. reminds me Artie, he showed me everything I know about this entire area.

Who knew there were still so many tears to be cried? Seven years ago today, and here I am at the Garden of Reflection with Artie and bawling my eyes out like the motorcycle accident was last night. I’ve been here most of the morning, but I think I’ll call Paul and JoJo to see if they want to get […]

Rubi died on Sunday. My fish were dead when I got home too. But, I’ll tell the story as optimistically as I can. I was driving back from my parents’ place last weekend, towing my small pop-up camper with my Rubicon. I got caught in a snowstorm in Nevada, but had otherwise had an uneventful journey with Mizzou and Seoul. […]

I committed two social faux pas tonight, one amusing, and one not so amusing. Wait, no, three. I had three memorable social slips tonight, two probably excusable, one questionable. I am reasonably sure that none of the individuals involved read my blog on anywhere close to a regular basis, so I can probably tell all three stories to amuse (or […]

I’m back in Chicago for CSCMP. I’m not sure what it will be like this year. Last year was the first conference I’ve missed since college, and I look so different now, no one is going to recognize me. I remember a few years ago at this same conference, when I arrived and went to get my badge the Sunday […]

Wow, I am ridiculously crippled by a lack of internet connection in my work. I’m trapped at the camper place while they’re putting a new hitch on the Jeep so Rubi can pull my new camper (it’s a tiny little pop-up pseudo-off-roading camper called a Cobalt). First my computer couldn’t find their wireless, and now it can’t connect, and I’m […]

I am completely wiped out. I couldn’t even stay for all of the Champions competition tonight, and even though I’d promised lots of people I would be at the dancing tonight, I left at 10:30PM and am about to go to bed. Tomorrow I have the drive home, then laundry and fish-tank cleaning and so on. Quite a holiday I […]

Today is my niece’s birthday, Hannah turns ten years old today. I knew before my brother ever started having kids that I would never be able to keep up with birthdays and coming up with cool gifts more than once a year for each kid (Christmas is bad enough), and I’ve always known that when it came to birthdays, I […]

Traveling since 5AM and got to my doctor’s appt just in time today. No new news, I’m in trouble for not having gotten a mammogram, I suppose, but those things miss more than they find and I’m in pain without getting squeezed in a shelf so when no one called me to schedule it, I conveniently left it slip my […]

I got home Sunday, worked my tail off all week, and didn’t do a darn thing yesterday. Caught up on So You Think You Can Dance (as usual, the person I thought should win got second place), watched a movie, and that’s it. Soooooo tired. Today all I did was clean house, dishes, laundry, packing, and now I’m off to […]

So I had a meeting in Faribault (seriously! We have a client in Faribault, Minnesota who joined our benchmarking consortium the week before my vacation, literally). I had been on the fence about going over to see my parents for a few days afterward, or just hustle my bum back to California. But there was really no decision, of course […]

So Mom & Dad and the Eric Millers left early and I went back to my room for a nap but I couldn’t snooze because it smelled so bad so I left and went to the Mall of America to get my nails done and pick up a puzzle book and my perfume. That place hasn’t changed a bit. To […]

There isn’t a whole lot else to report on the family vacation. Mostly we just played with the kids, played on the boat, had meals, and that just pretty much ate up the time out there. No one’s cell phones worked, and there was no internet service, so we were really out there in the boondocks eight miles past the […]

I wasn’t feeling particularly well this morning, and I didn’t get up until 9AM (which, you have to remember, is 7AM out in CA). I was having my first cup of tea and texting with Johnny about getting together this afternoon when Mom came and said Eric wanted to take a little boat ride and the kids wanted me to […]