Belated Graduation Celebration

On May 8, Kristen received her Masters Degree in American Studies from the University of Utah (with a 3.99 GPA!). As anyone close to her knows, this was a long road for Kris, and she worked VERY hard for this - sometimes too hard, in her mama's opinion. She is lucky enough to have found her passion in life, and to have a loving and supportive partner and friend in Sterling. But mostly, it's just been hard work. She's planning to eventually get her PhD, but I do hope she'll notch it back just a bit for just a little while ...


Congratulations, Kris! I'm so immensely proud of you!

Kris and her dad, siblings and nephew and niece. No, I'm not taking this picture. I actually wasn't there. :-( But my heart definitely was.

Much to my dismay, I was in Cyprus on graduation day, and so was not able to attend. So this weekend Kris and Sterling and I went out for a belated celebration.

Marina as Alex the Lion

My great niece Marina is a natural-born ham, so Kara put her in a drama class. The class put on a production of "Enchanted" this past week. Marina's main role was Alex the Lion, but she had a couple of other roles as well (as did everyone in the cast). It was a lot of fun to watch!

Little brother Nash was along for the show, although of course he found many other things much more interesting. Look at that head of hair - and that cute face! I can't believe he's going to be one pretty soon.

Cyprus 2

Luckily, the weather did improve after we were finished with the training sessions and had some free time. Gayle and I "had" to go shopping for some speaker gifts, so we went to the old town area. Ean and Lynne ended up riding in with us and hanging out for a bit, which was a little challenging in that they were two of the speakers we were getting gifts for!



Ean and Lynne


Me, Ean and Gayle

Later that day, I went to lunch with Gayle, Irina (another staff member who was along to provide Russian interpretation) and Vladimir (the manager in our Moscow office) at the High Chapparell, which is decidedly NOT western. They have a fish meza that Vlad really likes. The sample above was some of the tamer offerings. Not really my cup of tea, but the company was great! Especially Vlad's bird calls to the white peacocks after lunch (which I have on video, for possible future blackmail purposes).

The next day we went to visit the village of Agros, which is in the central mountain area of Cyprus. We visited a church and a museum ...

and a rose water crafter, who makes everything imaginable out of rose water - candles, wine, lotion, etc. It happened to be the prime season for roses while we were there.

We also visited a meat smokehouse and a place that makes karidaki and other traditional Cypriot and Greek sweets.

We had lunch - a traditional Cyprus meza - in a local restaurant. Though it was a beautiful day, it was still a bit chilly in the mountains, so half of the group ended up going inside to eat. This is Demos, who runs the destination management company in Cyprus that helped us with the arrangements.

On Friday night we had the Farewell Gala dinner, as some of the participants were going home the next day. We dithered all day about whether to hold it poolside (great ambience) or inside, where it was safer. We ended up having a cocktail hour and group photo by the pool, and the dinner and dance inside.

I left to go home on Sunday, which ended up being a 26 hour travel marathon. And my bag missed my flight in Paris, but I was happy enough that I was on it myself. As of now, I still don't have it - hopefully tonight.

Cyprus

I'm in the home stretch of an event in Cyprus, which is a Mediterranean island off the coast of Turkey. One of Cyprus' claims to fame is that it has something like 325 days of sunshine a year. Unfortunately, after an initial few days of perfect weather (mid-70s, sunshine), we have now had clouds and rain for the past several days. That was okay for the meeting days, but kinda bites for the free time!

Gayle and I outside a local restaurant (and by that, I mean a restaurant frequented by locals - very interesting). Gayle is a recent addition to the International team and to my area specifically. After 10 years of doing this job, I finally have some help!


A group from the UK heading to the bus after arriving at the Larnaca airport.

My "home away from home" for two weeks - the Grand Resort in Limassol, Cyprus. I'm beginning to feel that I want to redecorate my hotel room, I've been here so long.

The sunshiny days ... hopefully they will return.

Our meeting, which included NSP distributors from Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, UK, Canada and Germany! This turned out to be a great group.

On Monday night we went to a restaurant that featured a wonderful meza menu (kind of like tappas style, where they bring out a zillion small portions of different things ... the food was fantastic!) and Greek dancing. As you can see, our group wasn't shy about participating.