For almost a year, J has been involved in a management training program at work. He’s had lots of meetings, a group project, a mentor, you name it. This weekend he also had an overnight retreat to wrap up the program (although there are a couple of months of work remaining).
That meant that yesterday morning I dropped him off so that he could take the charter motorcoach up to Lake Arrowhead. He and his group headed off for the mountains, and I went to a friend’s house to do some scrapbooking.
My scrapbooking efforts are never-ending. We don’t have children yet, but we do have a lot of photos. There are “daily life” photos from individual events (I’m caught up to 2004) and trips (as of yesterday, I’m working on the Caribbean cruise I took with my parents in 2002).
In addition, there are the historic family photos I inherited, which stretch back to the late 1800s. I refer to them as historic not because they have any larger significance, but to distinguish them from the more recent family photos. My mother pretty much abandoned scrapbooking in 1987–although even she was running behind. The last year that went into a book under her auspices was 1977. I’ve made my way into the early 1980s, so I’m making progress. But without a good work surface, it’s slow. I don’t get to my friend’s house very often–she doesn’t live nearby, and we both have busy schedules, particularly since she had a daughter–but I make a lot more progress at her home than I do at mine.
But then I came home to an empty (and with the weather, very VERY hot) apartment. J and I often go our separate ways during the day, but it’s very unusual for one of us to be away overnight. I think he’s probably been away a bit more than I have, because he and his dad have made a couple of hiking trips that required 1 a.m. departures. Those are rare, though, and their last trip of that sort was probably more than a year ago. I’m glad neither one of us has a job that requires lots of overnight travel.
I’m even more glad that he’ll be home tonight!