A Great Week...

What a great week. I have just returned from Washington DC. The purpose of the trip was to perform for a Convocation of the Executive Teams from around the country for the hospital system I work for. The performance went exactly how I was hoping it would, and it was very touching to watch the slides of special moment from the 3 days as I sang. I truly enjoyed getting to know some of the folks from the hospital I work at and their spouses...I would never had gotten to know them any other way because they exist in a totally different world than I do.

One observation: the Sisters (nuns) imbibe! At one point, I thought I was beamed into "Sister Act" when I walked into the sports bar at the hotel, and there's a nun sitting at a bar table in there with a bunch of guys having beers. LOL!!! Talk about surreal!

One of the mornings, I took a couple of hours off from the sessions and took in the Holocaust Museum, WWII Memorial, the Korean War Memorial, and the Vietnam Memorial. It was extremely intense and inspiring. The Holocaust Museum was one of the most sobering experiences of my life. The sheer terror that these people were put through completely disgusted me. I will say that I was so impressed with the museum itself. The way they designed it was that it is on three levels, and you start on the top floor and you chronologically experience the history. There are artifacts including the uniforms they had to wear, actual letters written, and tons of pictures. To look at the pictures of these faces and seeing the promise of the future in their eyes--and then to know what they went through rips my heart out. I am so glad I was able to go and take it all in.

The flight up was perfect. It was a clear day and I was able to see the beautiful sights from the air on the entire trip. The flight back was another story. We had the hardest landing just short of crashing that I have ever had! It felt like we were going way too fast and way too high, and evidently I was right...he slammed that plane down on the tarmac so hard that we all let out an "Oh, God!" or an "Oh, shit!" depending upon where your mind was at that moment. Since I had a Sister (nun) sitting immediately in front of me, I chose the former. I'm thankful we were safe, especially since if the thing would have crashed, our hospital system would have been screwed, because every senior executive was on it! (Not a good thing...isn't there a rule that the President and Vice President are not allowed to travel together? Perhaps that should apply to corporate execs, too.)

So it was a good week indeed. If you would like to see pictures from my trip, just click on the Flickr badge, which is the last thing on the list on right hand column of this page.