It was a wonderful morning to wake up to. It had snowed about 5 inches and the sky was bright blue. It was also the first weekend after I was officially acknowledged as the new manager of an awesome team of 10 plucky developers at Lawson Products. I was trusted to lead Lawson IT’s brightest and most deserving of success, fun and rewards and I will do everything in my power to navigate us there.

So in very good spirits we shoveled snow, drove Sabrina to her appointment at the hair salon (very cute cut), went to Borders (to add to my collection of team building and leadership literature), stopped by Panera (first time this year, hmmm), got a few household goods at Linen ‘n Things and ended a most comfortable day at home by the fire, sipping tea and reading a good book.

Tuesdays I always go to volleyball and today I had lots of fun. Because I got to know the people better and I got better at volleyball myself. My sister Andrea also came with me to watch. There is an odd number of people so Andrea has to throw the ball to me and I have to set or pass the ball back to her. In the beginning we practice techniques and then during the last 10-15 minutes we have time to play some real games. Now I just hope that mom doesn’t ever want her training pants back.

We have finally finished the book that we had started to read when we were still in Germany over Christmas. I had just not had much time to read to the kids these last few days.

Boy was this a different book! Main story was about one day in a 14 year old girl’s life, her birthday to be exact. She had been abandoned as a baby and was still ’searching’ for her birth mother. Going through the different stations of her life in her mind and meeting people from these periods along the way, she ultimately realizes that the ‘mother’ she had been searching
for had long been by her side: The retired school teacher who had adopted her five years earlier.

I was amazed to see the kids stay really interested in the story, though there was no action, no ‘heroes’ no fantastic beasts as with most of the other stories I read with the kids. Instead there was fear, isolation, abuse, even crime - but also resilience, strength and love. There was also a lot more to talk about afterwards…

Still the next time we’ll probably choose a lighter topic, just to keep a balance. However this type of thought-provoking youth literature is going to be a frequent visitor of our reading repertory now.

Another nice feature that Wordpress offers: Just send an email to a dedicated POP3 account and the text will automatically be added to the blog. Well, it works, as this post proves.

While modifying the style sheet that was used to create this blog, I saw for the first time what a friend in Germany had already made me aware of: Style sheets are not only for fonts any more. Geez, there are virtually no tables anymore to lay out your page. Everything is done through absolute positioning and custom styles. Now I just have to learn A LOT more about tags and their attributes, so far I could get away with a fairly limited set. FUN FUN FUN

I’ll use the photo album pages as a guinea pig because here I really have to think of a style sheet on my own and not just slightly change an existing one. Keep the finger’s crossed …