Tag Archives: abattylife

I’m Back! What’s Been Happening?

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Hello dear friends. I am sorry I was away so long. The past few weeks have been a frenzy of working 24/7 to get Heavenly Mountain Resort open, traveling to Chicago for a conference, traveling to San Francisco for meetings and now hosting my in-laws for Thanksgiving.

But it’s all slowing down, and for that I’m thankful.

Right now I’m sitting in Tamarack Lodge at the top of Heavenly waiting for our big apres ski event to kick off. I could definitely think of worse places to write a blog post. Here’s a photo I snapped on my way up the Gondola.

While I was on my little break, I thought of you guys. At first I thought “I might like this not blogging thing.” Afterall, it is quite a lot to keep up a personal blog on top of Heavenly’s blog. But I found I felt quite the opposite. As things happened I kept thinking “this would be a good blog post” and “I wonder what Batty readers would say about this?”

I realized that this blog is very much apart of my life now. And then I felt warm and fuzzy. :)

So here’s a quick update on what’s been going on:

– I became a godmother! My best friend Julia gave birth to a precious baby boy named Liam. And I’m lucky enough to be his God mother. Such an honor.

– I’m about to become an aunt! My sister is due to give birth to a baby girl any moment. I can’t wait to meet the little angel.

– Luke turns 30 on Sunday! I’m making him an orange, chocolate cheesecake and his family is here to celebrate. Man I love that guy.

– Heavenly now has 64,000+ Facebook fans. My pet project. When I started last year we had 8,000.

– It looks like we’re going to get our house! The first bank accepted our offer and we’re just waiting on the other one. We could move in by Christmas.

– I have become obsessed with looking at home decor. We own nothing but our bed and have to furnish a three bedroom home soon. Send me home decor and furniture links please.

– We’re hosting our first Thanksgiving tomorrow. I had to work on Thursday, so Saturday it is. Wish us luck.

– I bowled five strikes in a row. But our team is still in last place in our bowling league. This is apparently a VERY competitive league.

– We had our first powder day. It felt soooo good to be out there again.

That’s about it. What’s new with you? How was Thanksgiving?

 

Seasonal Affective Disorder – AKA I hate clouds

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Something about cloudy weather brings my whole mood down. It seems the clouds have been chasing me the past two weeks and their gloomy existence has been seeping into my day to day life.

Here’s what it looks like right now. There’s a snow storm moving in (you heard that right SNOW!).

Ever since getting home from the midwest, I’ve felt down … tired … I guess you could say depressed. We had such a wonderful time seeing our family and friends that it’s hard not to feel deflated. Plus, I’m still on east coast time, so my sleep has been all sorts of crazy. I’ve been wide away at 5am every morning.

When I got back to work yesterday, things were a bit insane. I had 800 emails to sift through, four hours of meetings and bad news regarding the health of a colleague and the departure of another. It seemed like everything had gone to heck the five days I was out and I felt guilty for not being around to help.

Then to top everything off, it looks like we’re going to have to pull our offer on the short sale house we fell in love with. It’s been about two months since we put in our offer and unfortunately with our lease ending soon, we are being forced to sign another 6 month lease. We just can’t risk having to pay both a mortgage and rent.

*Sigh*

Here’s hoping for sunshine soon!

Home Sweet Home

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Ahhh…it’s so nice to be home. Even though the weather has been terrible since we landed – grey, rainy, cold, damp – my heart still feels full and happy being back in the midwest.

Our week started off busy. Lunch at Bob Evans with my grandpa, who made me giggle with his no-hold-back comments (like when my aunt asked him if he tipped the waitress more than 15% and he said “you gotta be kiddin’ me! She doesn’t deserve that much!”). I guess when you’re 90 years old, you’ve earned the right to tip what you want!

From there we attened the wedding of our friends Kelly and Schmidtty in Columbus. It was such a fun wedding! I danced almost every song with my girlfriends from OU and Chicago, while Luke chummed it up with their boyfriends. I may or may not have sent him on a mission to find out when those guys were proposing. Come on guys … we want more weddings to attend!!

Then I went straight to my best friend’s baby shower. She is so funny. I was giggling at her almost the whole time. We played a game where you had to match candy bar names up with events related to a baby. One event was “the moment you lay eyes on your baby” and the answer was “tear jerker,” except Julia had picked “pay day.” Her response to the funny looks was “well I’m planning to have a professional athlete!!” lol. Man I’m glad she’s my best friend.

The past few days we’ve finally had a chance to chill out when we got to Luke’s parent’s house in Indiana. Right now I’m sitting in their den, on the couch, with a soft quilt over me, still in my PJ’s with a cup of green and orange tea next to me. It’s raining lightly outside, making it pefect weather for watching all the brightly colored birds eat from Luke’s mom’s many bird feeders. So far I’ve seen a cardinal, a finch, a bluebird and many hummingbirds.

It’s very quiet here in the countryside of Indiana. I slept 12 hours last night. :)

Tomorrow we’ll head back to Ohio to spend our last few days here with my family. In true Cron (my maiden name) fashion, those days will be jam packed with lots of fun stuff. Dinner at the farmer’s market with my brother and his wife on Thursday, golf with my dad on Friday, wine and games at home with the whole family (sister gets in from SF) on Friday night, my sister’s baby shower on Saturday morning, apple picking on Saturday day and finally a big party at my parent’s house on Saturday night.

I’m trying to remind myself to take lots of pictures while I’m home. It’s funny. In Tahoe, all my pictures are of scenery – mountains, lakes, waterfalls, flowers, sunsets and in the midwest, all my pictures are of people – family, friends, pets. I wish there was a way to combine those two things. Such is life.

I hope you’re having a fantastic week wherever you are!

Public Speaking is Scary and Exciting

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Phew! What a crazy week. Sorry I was MIA last week, I was in Colorado for a summit with all of my colleagues in Vail Resorts sales and marketing. It was a really fun week filled with BBQ on a ranch, an awards ceremony and plenty of team-building activities.

Part of the week also involved a presentation give by yours truly in front of about 200 of my peers. EEK!

About two months ago I was selected to lead a special project within a program we have called “Vail Resorts Vision.” Basically people from around the company come together to work on a business challenge that is outside their normal focus.

After two months of meetings, planning, research and building our presentation, “Team Tahoe” as we called ourselves took the stage. Right before kicking off our presentation I was pretty nervous….like sweating under my clothes nervous (gross I know).

It didn’t help that the video in our presentation introducing our team didn’t work – despite the fact that I tested it literally seconds before going on the stage. What is it with public speaking and technical difficulties??

After some awkward apologies, I finally got the video to work. Based on the laughs, I think it was worth the wait.

The Tahoe Bunch from Heavenly Mountain on Vimeo.

From there things went really smoothly. I even tried to work in a few lame jokes that my very polite colleagues laughed at. Thanks for that guys.

When it was all over I had an amazing sense of accomplishment. This is super dorky, but it’s an awesome feeling when you take on a big challenge at work, put in a lot of hours on it and finish the project on a high note. I guess you could say I was sort of…. proud of myself?

It’s that feeling that makes me love my job. As many times as I’ve thought – not having to work all day every day would be great – I also know that a lot of my self-esteem, confidence and identity is created through my 9-5. I’m not sure I could ever give that up.