Life has been too busy to blog much lately, but it’s all good stuff! And I really do want to keep this blog alive, so I’m making time to blather on tonight.

First of all at work, now that I have a full staff, they are absolutely hitting on all cylinders. Angie, my marketing person, just churns out work like you wouldn’t believe. I can’t believe how many balls she successfully keeps in the air! And the more we work together the more we find that we have similar taste and views in marketing, so we run into those moments where one of us starts outlining an idea and the other one interrupts, wide eyed, to say “I was just thinking that!!!” It is very cool! And she has a wonderful, can-do, upbeat attitude that is just a joy!

The new business development guy, Matt, is still wowing me. I cut him loose on the telephones a few days ago and he had at least one appointment every day for the next two weeks already! And he and Angie seem to be settling into a fun working relationship, which can only be a positive.

Then today, my dear friend and colleague Tara, who has been positively DROWNING in work and frustrated beyond tears by our boss’s refusal to allow her to hire help, finally got permission to promote her best person and hire a new one from outside to backfill. So she is in the best mood I’ve seen in months. She had not only suffered from needing help, but had felt discounted and disrespected by his previous reluctance to act on her request. Her suffering had really torn at my heart and I am about as happy today as I was the day I got to hire Matt!!

Away from work, a friend of mine who is an awesome pianist and singer and composer contacted me a couple of days and said a nationally known singer/composer of our mutual acquaintance has encouraged her to put together a portfolio of original compositions to shop around. She started working on it and found that lyrics are stumping her, so she asked ME if I might be able to provide her with some poems to use as lyrics. I am so honored and thrilled! By rights I should be writing poetry right now for that project instead of blogging, I suppose.

But one of the reasons I’m blogging right now is that as I write, I am watching Game 3 of the American League Championship Series on TV. Which is another thing I consider the good stuff going on in my life. When Bob and I were first dating and in our early married years, we used to watch baseball together a lot, and we especially always watched the playoffs and World Series. Bob has never lost his interest in baseball, but in recent years I’ve been busy with other things and sort of lost track of that interest. But with Matt joining my staff fresh out of playing college baseball, I dropped back into a game or two early on in the playoffs just to sort of refresh my memory and enable myself to make intelligent conversation. Darn if I didn’t get to see the Tigers upset the hated Yankees, then celebrate with their Detroit fans in a heartwarming demonstration worthy of a Disney movie. I was hooked, and I’ve been following Detroit ever since. They appear to be on course to sweep the Oakland Athletics, and if they do, I’ll be glued to the World Series games as a temporary Tigers fan. It’s really been fun to pick up that old interest and immerse myself in the postseason like this!

Let’s see, what’s some of the other good stuff going on? My son has been working on his adjustment to 7th grade and, like about half of his class, was behind on work. (I know it was like half his class because the teachers had a list of “opportunity seekers” posted, which meant people who were behind on work.) Today, Sam’s name was erased from the opportunity seekers list! He is caught up on everything and assured me he feels it will be much easier to keep up now that he has gotten caught up. And I believe him, because I have seen that he is working really hard.

Apart from his academic performance, though, I’m just so pleased with how things are going with him emotionally. He was diagnosed with clinical depression near the end of third grade and we have struggled these last three plus years with getting things stabilized and keeping them there. But lately, I feel like his personality is back to the one I knew when he was a little boy of 5 and 6 and 7, before the depression started. He has a great sense of humor and wants to do the right thing and is really a lot of fun to be around!

He is off to a Boy Scout campout this weekend, so Bob and I get a little quality time together. Ooh la la! And tomorrow we’re going to what was scheduled to be our semi-monthly euchre club, but this time has morphed into a Buckeye football party that will end with the euchre game after the football game. I think that is going to be a lot of fun, and kind of a rare day of grown-up fun for us without having to be parental. The only downside is that it will challenge my weight-loss efforts, which have been clipping along successfully. As of Monday I was down four pounds in three weeks, which for me is a phenomenal success. (I mean, a phenomenally successful rate of loss. There are still another ten or so pounds that need to come off along with that first four.)

Well, this is a lot of potentially boring “what’s new in my world” blogging, but I’m going to leave it here. If you want to read a great humorous blog that is a lot funnier and more entertaining than mine will ever be, I urge you to check out Stephanie Lessing’s blog at http://stephanielessing.typepad.com/ . She is the author of She’s Got Issues and Miss Understanding, two wildly funny chick lit books. (I don’t normally read chick lit – but I actually started reading her blog first and figured if it made me laugh out loud most days, then her books had to be good. I was right!)

OK, I’m about to bring up my song-lyric efforts and see if it is possible to write poetry while watching a baseball game. I’ll keep you posted!