So I booked my hotel reservations at this nice resort on Kauai that I've been to for meals, they have one of the best brunches on the island, but never to stay. Check the place out - Sheraton Kauai. I get a buffet breakfast every day, which I plan to eat late so I can combine my breakfast and lunch together, and there's a free Mai Tai Happy Hour at sunset. Too bad I don't really drink anymore, although I may have drink a few cocktails just for old time's sake. I've swum at this beach before and it's beautiful. And yeah! There's a decent fitness center so I can work out. There's also internet access, so I will be blogging from the hotel when I get there.

Something strange is happening at my job. I came into work today and there was an invite from the director for our group for a department luncheon. The rumor mill started up and people started gossiping about how some key people in our division left, and that the luncheon which has since been rescheduled till Thursday will be an announcement of these resignations.

The rumor is that the resignations will cause our group to be split up. Nobody knows what's really going on and I'm bummed that we have to wait until Thursday. I hate when your higher-ups do that. If the news is that earth shattering and important, why not just tell us? Even my immediate boss didn't know that the heck was going on. She's not even going to be there because she's going to be in an HR training that day.

One thing I didn't mention last week was that there was layoffs in my division that I found out about when I came back from vacation. There was a woman there who'd been there for years and started a Pain Management program. The program was cut so they laid her off. When I found this out, I realized how grateful I should be just to have my job. The program I was originally hired for was terminated last year, and thankfully there will another program to replace it. Plus I decided my job needed to evolve so I could work on my presentation skills and my bosses agreed and now I'm probably going to have give perhaps 8 presentations this year.

I'm excited about this new development. I gave my first presentation last year and despite my nervousness, it went really well and the group I presented to was very appreciative. With practice, I think I could become very comfortable giving presentations and not have it be the nerve-wracking experience it usually is for me.

I worked on a project last year where I had to facilitate conference call meetings with hospital folks from UCSF Hospital, Cedars-Sinai Hospital in LA, and Childrens Hospital in San Diego. I arranged conference calls with the hospitals folks and the CEO of this quality measurement vendor we were working with from Massachusetts. Those meetings went very well and really gave me a confidence boost. The medical director of quality from Childrens Hospital in San Diego was such a nice guy, and an expert in the field of quality measurement for childrens hospitals. I called him after the meeting and thanked him for his participation, and he was very appreciative.

I am thankful that I was able to evolve my job in a way that I liked and that my bosses liked. I'm also writing a weekly newsletter, which is more of a weekly news briefing. It's my job to see what news stories are relevant to the field of qualtiy measurement and then do a write up with the appropriate weblinks. I like how I get to decide what I think people should read. My boss was excited by my first newsletter and now wants to send it out to the regional medical directors in the company as well as the senior medical quality director and other people she thinks might be interested.

I'm also writing up a ton of research white papers, which I actually like doing. Besides the weekly newsletter, we're also thinking of expanding the quarterly news briefing I was doing into a monthly one because there is just so much news.

I did a ton of writing last week already. I wrote up two one-page briefs for a couple of programs that were needed for meetings one of which was for an external client. Then I wrote and developed a powerpoint presentation for an executive briefing, and also started work on the presentation for our external advisory board meeting in February.

Check this out - Bomb Found at Starbucks. I know that Starbucks. I've written there before going to the movies. And when I was coming home from Whole Paycheck (Whole Foods) tonight I saw the newspeople interviewing people in front of the place. Little did I know it was because there was a bomb squad earlier there today. How trippy is that?

I'm having an emotional evening. I am taking a trip back to Kauai to see my uncle who is sick because my aunt told me I had better come and see him now before things get worse. It's so weird trying to plan my trip because I realized tonight that I have no home to go home to. I've usually stayed with my grandmother on the island, but now that she's dead and her house is gone I really don't have a place to stay.

I could stay with my aunt, but I haven't stayed there since highschool and I don't know if I would feel all that comfortable with them because my uncle is sick and bedridden. I've never stayed anywhere else except in my grandmother's house when I visited, although once I stayed in a hotel with a friend because we were both attending a co-worker's wedding and my friend wanted to stay in a hotel. That turned out to be a good thing because my co-worker had all these activities planned for the guests who were flying in for the wedding, so we ended up hanging with the rest of the wedding guests for the whole trip.

I did end up spending one night at home only because my grandmother had a fit that I was on the island and not staying with her to visit.

I had no idea how much it costs to actually stay in a nice hotel on Kauai. Oh well. I think I am going to stay at a resort in Poipu that has its own private beach and the best brunch on the Island, not to mention lots of tennis courts and a workout center. It's going to cost a pretty penny but a friend of mine told me tonight, it would be a nice treat for myself and would make my visit not so emotional to hang with my aunt and uncle and my two cousins who live at home for four days.

Then I'm off to Honolulu to stay with my brother four a couple of days. I've stayed at his house before, which is conveniently located just a 10-minute walk from Waikiki.

What an awful feeling not to have your childhood home there anymore for you stay at. My friend said it happened to her age 20, so I guess I'm lucky it didn't happen to me any sooner.