Well, It’s Been a While…

I just opened up my blog to check the date of my last blog posting. It was almost a month ago on September 3. I’ve been a little MIA on this platform, something I’ve dedicated myself to since 2011 by making the commitment to posting a minimum of once a week.

For the last several weeks, I’ve broken that promise to myself.

Believe me when I say my absence was not intentional, it’s just that I didn’t know what to say or what to write about over the course of the last month. I’ve been preoccupied with the deaths of people we cared for, along with getting back into the swing of high school for my daughter, and college life for me. As well, my husband has a new job, and my son is back in Pennsylvania in college. Honestly, there’s been a lot going on, which I will try to recount for you.

The past two weekends, we’ve done a little traveling, visiting family and friends for birthdays. It’s been wonderful to catch up with relatives and spend some nice time with them. We’ve been to New Jersey and Connecticut, and last weekend to Delaware. We got to visit Chesapeake City for the first time, and I’ll share those photos in another post.

In August, I received the honor of being named a Faculty Fellow for the 2019-2021 school years along with two other colleagues. We will be creating programming for faculty development in our newly established Center for Teaching and Learning on Stevenson University’s campus. It’s a great way for the faculty to help each other out with ideas, workshops, and mentoring. I’m looking forward to being involved in this new initiative on campus.

Last week, I finally finished my fourth novel, Little Milestones, and am preparing for its launch at Stevenson University on October 29 as we kick off—for the third year straight—National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo). I started writing my novel last year during NaNoWriMo, and now I have a finished project. I am a testament to the perseverance of committing to writing a story…and completing it. If I can do it, so can others.

Simultaneously, Leeanne, Chip and I have also spent the past several months working on the second edition of our textbook, Event Planning: Communicating Theory & Practice. Yesterday, we sent our edited and new files to our publisher, Kendall-Hunt. We added two new chapters on event hospitality and event tourism, which helps to round out the book in offering strong content for students wanting to learn more about the field of event planning.

I guess I’ve been a little busy lately, but it does make me sad to think I’ve neglected poor little Steph’s Scribe.

I’ve missed being here, and I promise to do better.

XxOo