NJRID Convention...and I meet Niece #3

I forgot to write about Convention last weekend! I loved it and had a wonderful time.

The Convention was held in Jamesburg, at a hotel. Several of my coworkers and I went. A couple commuted back and forth, but I wanted to stay at the hotel, and asked around. Male Coworker was the only one without a roommate at that point, so I asked him if he wanted to be roomies, and he said yes. No, Darrel did not have an issue with this. Why? Male Coworker is gay. I told Darrel that Male Coworker and I were rooming together and he just shrugged and said okay. Male coworker actually asked me a few days before the Convention if Darrel had a problem with it, and I told him no, there are some things in life that Darrel is actually pretty laid back about. He seemed relieved- I think he was worried Darrel would have a problem.

It all worked out very well. We're both very neat people who share the same taste in music and generally are not party animals...although he did hang out chatting with I have no idea who (in another room) until 3am Saturday night/Sunday morning! For the record, I was in bed with the light out by around 11:30pm both nights.

I went to some pretty good workshops. One that I found utterly fascinating (even if I'm not sure how much it will affect my interpreting) was on profanity, its history, and how different cultures use it. For example, virtually every culture ever has had profanity- the types of words that are profane, though, differ. In modern American culture, the f-bomb is one of the most profane words; to the Puritans, anything religiously-based was the worst thing you could say. Certain linguistic things simply fascinate me, so I was totally into this workshop.

There were a couple of others that focused on interpreting in the schools, and ethical decision-making that were also quite good. I still have to go over my notes for those and type up a report for my coworkers. We pretty evenly divided which workshops we were all going to, so I think we covered almost all of them between us.

I left Sunday morning, right after breakfast. There was still one more workshop session, but I was driving down to Exit 4 off the Turnpike to meet my new niece! (I apologize in advance for the pinkish cast to the pictures- my camera is dying! That's a rant for another day, though.)

This is me, holding Abby for the first time.

This is Little Brother. I can't believe my Baby Brother has a baby of his own!

This is Sister-In-Law.

And here is Abby, giving me Stink-eye.

She's such a tiny little thing! She looks completely lost in the carseat that we used for Frank when he was first born! She really is beautiful, though. As I told Little Brother, "She's the most beautiful girl baby I've ever seen. I've seen only one baby overall who I thought was cuter at birth, but I may be a tiny bit biased." ;)