"We're all going on a summer holiday"

[mutleydog]

Just a fun question....

I known quite a few of us had our holidays not that long ago, so......

How was your summer?

I had a FAB time out in Greece.....just as I remembered it....weather beautiful....sea so blue....great food....cheap booze....geeze...why did I ever come back?!! :D

Also nearly had a corony on the bus when two mormon missionary sisters sat in front of me (facing me) :eek: ....had the awful paranoid feeling that they knew I used to be a mormon or something....crazy I know....but quite funny after they got off when my gf and I just looked at eachother! We couldn't take the chance with them there, else we would have taken quite a giggle.....had the urge to totally whinde them up, but just knew i couldn't keep a straight face!! :D

[silverfox]

Just a fun question....

I known quite a few of us had our holidays not that long ago, so......

How was your summer?

I had a FAB time out in Greece.....just as I remembered it....weather beautiful....sea so blue....great food....cheap booze....geeze...why did I ever come back?!! :D

Also nearly had a corony on the bus when two mormon missionary sisters sat in front of me (facing me) :eek: ....had the awful paranoid feeling that they knew I used to be a mormon or something....crazy I know....but quite funny after they got off when my gf and I just looked at eachother! We couldn't take the chance with them there, else we would have taken quite a giggle.....had the urge to totally whinde them up, but just knew i couldn't keep a straight face!! :D

The vacation sounds amazing! Unfortunately we didn't go on vacation this year. Or I should say our vacation consisted of home improvements/decorating. We had too many family emergencies to get away.

In spite of that we had a fantastic summer with friends and family. I hate to see winter set in. (pout) I need a winter home in Florida or California. Anyone from there got a spare room?

[free thinker]

Hey Mutley

Sounds like a great break.

Funny about the mishies.

I did not get away this summer. Too much pressing business. I will be getting away soon though. Gotta do it!

free thinker

[tgio]

We, my DH and I quit the church this summer. It wasn't exactly a vacation but it sure does feel good.

[lunaverse]

So here's what happened to me this summer.

Early July or maybe June I decided to look into deprogramming from Mormonism, and found no one seems to provide this as a service, so I started doing it myself by researching.

I read the double-bind stuff by Marion Stricker.

Right in the midst of this, the small internet company I worked for was bought by a larger competitor based in Salt Lake City, my birthplace. Using my spidey senses, I detected that at least 60-70% of the Big Wigs were LDS, based on their bios and pics on their website.

They flew us down to Utah on short notice to meet everyone. The second leg of our flight went from Boise to SLC, and was nearly over when I started paying attention. The woman in front of me was talking about being blessed with good weather, and I suddenly looked around, and realized I was surrounded by Mormons. My spidey senses began to blare loudly. My good friend and co-worker was a couple of rows back, and as we walked off the plane, I used head-nodding and lip-synced, "Mormon," "Mormon", as I identified those around us who were easy to spot.

We arrived at the hotel, and we were surrounded by round, short-haired women. I've lived in Seattle for a couple of years, so my first thought was, "Is there some kind of lesbian convention in Salt Lake?!" It was then that I realized -- Middle-aged Mormon women look like middle-aged lesbians. :O It turned out to be a stamping convention.

Having been out of Mo'ism for enough years, I found this painful and disturbing. Most of these women were into scrapbooking because it was one of few interests they are allowed to pursue. They weren't readily allowed to get a degree in an intellectually challenging field, like math or science. They weren't readily allowed to get jobs outside the home. They weren't readily allowed to write serious books, run for office, become activists, or start businesses outside the crafting and beauty industries. Due to their culture and their "feminine nature", they found themselves getting increasingly excited about... stamping.

Not that there's anything wrong with stamping, if that's what you're into after being exposed to a wide range of possibilities. The issue I have is that quilting, sewing, tole painting, and scrapbooking are one of the few hobbies these women have ever been permitted to engage in, at least not without drastic social consequences -- consequences I've experienced first hand for working in the computer industry and being a geek in general.

We toured the company, and I noticed NOT ONE WOMAN in their 1) development team, 2) system admin and computer engineering team, or 3) web design and graphical arts. Upper management sported two women, one who was the wife of the founder, and the other who was head of HR.

The only women I saw were secretaries and HR. They brought us coffee, ironically.

We returned with employee handbooks in tow, and I noticed the mildly sexist and very stringent dress code. We figured we'd ingore it, because we worked 800 miles away.

Nextly, they laid off nearly half the company WITH NO NOTICE or severence pay.

Then our workloads doubled. Not only did we have to fill in for the missing bodies, but now we had to educate our new masters about how everything worked.

They wanted to keep the aquistion a secret from our customers and vendors. So we weren't allowed to tell anyone. Then they proceeded to make massive changes that our customers couldn't help but notice because of how much it disrupted business. I was placed in a position of trying to explain these things to understandably angry clients. At first I tried lying by omission, but it reached the point where I and my remaining co-workers had to outright lie to people.

They canceled a relationship with a service vendor with little more than one week notice. We were this vendor's largest customer, which meant they would have to lay off more than half of *their* people, with less than a week's notice.

Then they told us that, no matter how many years we'd worked for the previous employer, our benefits would start all over as if we were new employees.

THEN they laid off our one and only system administrator with no notice, and no severence.

Both companies were profitable prior to the aquistion, so we were not in a cash-flow emergency. It was all about the bottom line to show investors how quickly they could improve profits, less than one month after aquisition.

Not only were all of these practices unkind, inhumane, and unethical, but they were poor business decisions. I found that they did not seem to care one whit for our smaller customers, and in fact, the promise of downtime and reduced quality of service caused by their hasty transition, negatively affected ALL of our customers. We lost one of our larger accounts right off the bat.

It really felt good to quit. I wrote a terribly honest and scathing resignation letter, and walked out with as much notice as they'd given my friends and co-workers.

As the only person remaining to do my job function, calls came in with no one to answer them. They were forced to announce the aquisition the next day.

It was the most major thing I've ever done out of principle. I had no job lined up, but I did have several very good references, including the former vendor mentioned above and my boss... who they had laid off.

I then had a nice 6-week long vacation where I wasn't allowed to spend any money. :)

So that's what I did this summer! :D

Luna

[david]

Living in dreary Seattle, I make a point of going to Mexico every year around February. It's the only way to make it thru to spring! Usually I stay here during the summer, since summer in the Pacific NW is glorious. Sunny but not too hot, not very humid, and typically clear sunshine from July thru Sept.

But I did take a weeklong trip to NYC and upstate NY a couple of weeks ago. NYC is truly one of the great cities of the world and though visiting a city isn't everyone's idea of vacation, I find it energizes me. Plus I have a special interest in urban design and architecture. At one point I actually burst out in spontaneous laughter I was so happy!

Upstate NY was very nice too. I drove a rental car to Buffalo and made my way back, visiting Rochester, Syracuse, the Catskills, and sites along the Erie Canal--which has a fascinating story and is one of the world's great public works projects.

As it happens I also made a stop in Palmyra NY which is just a few miles off the NY thruway. Couldn't resist! I'd like to write about that experience sometime too but it will have to wait.

[lunaverse]

Sweet, you live in the Emerald City, too?

I LOVE it here. :D Yay Seattle! I'm in the Greenwood area. You?

Luna

[miss taken]

I stayed at the beautiful hotel Capodimonte right there in Sorrento, overlooking the med and the bay of Naples, with Vesuvius a few miles in the distance.

We went to Pompeii, Herculaneum, didn't get to the others, because hubbie and son are not as into history as I am, and they had just about had enough!!!

Swam in a cascading pool pretty much every day (though they wouldn't allow lilo's the kiljoys!!). Didn't bother using the hire car, because the Italians are mad, when it comes to driving.

Walked around the historic harbour down in Sorrento (we were more up on the cliffs which are pretty spectacular).

Took a boat ride (there was no way in HELL I was going to drive) around the coast to Amalfi, which looks like a little Switzerland, and toured their Cathedral.

We only went for a week, as we were peak season, and it was extremely expensive. Not long enough.

Anyone going to that area, I would recommend the Circumvesuviana,(train) which goes all the way around Vesuvius. A couple of Euros as opposed to very expensive tours with the tour companies!!! Don't go on it after dark though!!!!

Got chatting to a French University Lecturer who got lost with us one day, and he was kind enough to tell us the best places in Sorrento (and cheapest!!) to eat.

Wonderful trip.
The rest of the summer was spent in a nice heated pop up pool in our back garden with my son!!! (and the neighbourhood kids). Lilo's out the lot.

Great summer!!!

Mary

[david]

Sweet, you live in the Emerald City, too?

I LOVE it here. :D Yay Seattle! I'm in the Greenwood area. You?

Luna
I'm in West Seattle. It'd be nice to meet up sometime. BTW did you listen to the NPR piece about the exmo potluck?--I had no idea there was such a group here.

[lunaverse]

I'm in West Seattle. It'd be nice to meet up sometime. BTW did you listen to the NPR piece about the exmo potluck?--I had no idea there was such a group here.

I went to one group. I don't think it's the same as the group featured on NPR. The potluck I attended had about 12 people. :)

It was really cool to go and talk face to face with fellow exers.

I think next time they're planning to go to a casino. :D Tom Murphy regularly attends. He's the ECC teacher who nearly got exed for writing about the DNA that disproves the Hebrew lineage of the native americans.

They have a Yahoo group. Right here in this forum, click "Support Groups" and scroll to "Washington".

Luna