Moonlighting

I've always been a little of an event planner. (See Prom, All that Jazz, Disco Birthday Extravaganza, etc.) This week, stars, planets, comets, galaxies, space shuttles, and aliens collied and threw up in my inbox. I find myself the coordinator of more simultaneous events than I could have imagined. It's amazing my head hasn't exploded. The email chains on some of the events have reached in the low 30's. Besides taking care of 8 college math books that are behind deadline, I am or have been helping plan some of these activities:

• Peggy's pizza/candlestick bowl-o-thon
• Boston Celtics season ticket distribution
• Saturday's "Great Boston Adventure" (blogs forthcoming)
• Clayton's six day trip (blogs forthcoming)
• Registering our five girl team for a marathon relay in Rhode Island in October

This doesn't include emails from the ward list serve, blog comments, BNB emails, email "chats" with my sister Alaina, or any other number of back and forth. As much as I love email, it's keepin' me moving lately.

Perhaps the largest scale event planned this week however, was the exceptionally rash, impromptu, spontaneous decision to go to Ireland. IRELAND.

If you know me well (how often do I use this phrase? Sheesh, I'm pretty predictable huh?), you know I can find great deals. Anywhere. At anytime. Especially on travel. So that's the back story. I found a pretty fantastic deal on a flight, hotel, and car for four people in the off-season of western Ireland, known to UKers as "holiday Ireland." We had to act fast, so I shot out some feelers and those feelers turned into solid commitments, and within 45-minutes of finding the deal, we were sold on traveling.

We will be staying at the Adare Manor in Shannon, Ireland's leading hotel resort and one of the 500 best hotels in the world. We have a 2-bedroom townhouse with living room, dining room, full kitchen and washer/dryer. I think I'll be taking more food to Ireland than clothing. We'll probably run the wheels off our car--I'm looking forward to driving on the wrong side of the car on the wrong side of the road. We may take a day trip to England or Scotland or some other passport stamp-worthy location.

I, of course, can't get Garth Brooks' song, "Ireland" out of my head. I had to download it and it's kind of been on repeat. Ireland, I'm coming home. I can see your rolling fields of green, and fences made of stone...

February seems like an awfully long time from now. Good thing all the holidays are in between to keep my brain occupied!

So that's it. What I've been working on this week. This moonlighting thing is tough! It's kind of making me a stress ball. Sadly, I love to have my hands in the pots... and someone's gotta do it...