I know, I know. This poor, neglected blog. But it's been such a crazy awful intense time.

The overriding event was the death of my mother, on May 30th, of breast cancer. She went peacefully, with my dad and my aunt (her sister) by her side. The weeks leading up to that were fraught with emotion (she said fraught!), and there was barely time and energy to deal with the necessities, let alone this poor blog.

Also, the host went through a platform migration, that somehow didn't take, and last week I finally took the time to create a support ticket. So obviously it's fixed now.

On the plus side, first communion went off without a hitch. However, same weekend, was also the youngest's first ever ice skating competition, and she was in two events. Saturday morning and Sunday morning. Luckily, first communion was at the 11 am service, and we were done with the Sunday event in time to come home and change. But still, it was a crazy weekend, and my mother was clearly on the decline and missed out on it all, but she saw the videos.

Then, we had two funeral services to plan and attend: one for northern virginia, and one for southern virginia, where we also set up a new family cemetery. So there was lots of organizing amid the grief. Then, the kids were out of school, and husband's work load increased dramatically due to contract awards, and he's been in denver at least half the time since July 1, so I've been doing some single parenting of the monste-erm, girls. At the same time, work re-orged (new word), so I'm not in charge of people any more, just technology, which actually was a relief.

I have a ton of book write-ups to get back to, some grief related pieces in my head that need to get out, some coding stuff to discuss, a new hobby/interest to talk about, possibly some weightloss and knitting news, and... Well, you get the picture. But hey, it's mid-August in DC, and it's hazy, hot, and humid, so at least some things never change.

I’ve been more on twitter (@kaplooeymom) than here. Sorry.

I now lead a staff (I have staff!) of 8 developers migrating a legacy client server application to the web. It’s due at the end of September. So there’s usually not much time at work to think of things to write, let alone write them decently. Although I’d like to.

At home, Julia’s in first grade, and Cailin’s in second grade. Julia ice skates, Cailin plays softball and has swimming lessons. Life is very busy.

Cailin’s first communion is coming up; the very same weekend Julia will be in her first ice skating competition. Oh goody.

We enjoyed the blizzards of 2010, although I still say there wasn’t enough snow.

Time to read work email. I hope to have more soon.

It seems blogger/blogspot is down this morning. None of the blogs (okay, most - I got one to work) I usually read from there are working. From a technical perspective, it will be an interesting read when it's back up and the explanation is posted. From a blogosphere perspective, it will be interesting to see how the overal web society responds to the outage.

Okay, enough geek musings.

I'm taking the baby sweater to visit my grandmother this evening. While she didn't teach me to knit (I actually took a knitting class in elementary school), it has been another thing we share, and it seems I'm the only one in the family who enjoys it as she does. Since she's ninety, and her body's starting to complain, she doesn't get out much - if at all. So we'll marvel at the techniques, and discuss a few things, and continue our bond, while the little gels run around the back yard of my mother's house. (At least, that's the plan.)