Monday's Weekend Recap....

We have had a busy weekend, but a good weekend!  I'll go back to Friday first.  I need to explain something that has now been announced to the press and public so I am free to talk/write about it.

The Polk Museum of Art is now the Polk Museum of Art at Florida Southern College.  We have affiliated with Florida Southern College and are now (will become) an academic museum.  We are maintaining our independence as a private 501(c)(3) corporation, but have partnered with another non-profit which is only one block from the Museum.  I've mentioned FSC several times in my blogs. It is a Methodist college and has 12 Frank Lloyd Wright designed buildings making up the original main campus. We are so blessed that they thought this was a good idea when approached over a year ago. Our Board and theirs have been hard at work, along with attorneys, to make this happen.

The college has many more resources than our museum. We will benefit by being able to tap into purchasing power, fund-raising power, interns, and a much larger audience, as we saw on Friday night at the opening reception and announcement of the affiliation.  We normally have 120 people at openings. Friday there were over 300!  This photo is from the museum's Facebook page...

Part of the affiliation legalities includes the merging of our financial and human resource areas.  Well, I am the finance and human resource department at the museum.  The college has eight people in their finance department and a separate human resources department.  Guess whose job is being eliminated?  Yes.  Mine.  Luckily, I have achieved my 20-years there and am retirement age, so my retirement has been announced and I am working hard to help get all the financial business smoothly merged with FSC.  Their software is so much more sophisticated than ours.  It is a process and has involved many meetings between the museum and the college folks.  I was just over there on Friday to oversee getting our first payroll done by them.  What normally takes me 20 minutes took over two hours, but we got it done, it worked and it will be easy-peasy going forward.  The financial offices there look out at the Frank Lloyd Wright-designed water dome.  Isn't this lovely!!

This has brought my stress levels up a bit, with our fiscal year changing to a May 31 end (shortened from June 30), it is month-end, and now year-end for me with the audit beginning and a lot more merging of resources to be done before my last day on July 31.  They have also "hired" me as a contractor to be available if needed through the calendar year end.  I have been blessed with three job offers from colleagues which I have basically turned down by saying to give me a couple of months of retirement before I make a decision. It does make me feel good, though, to know my work has been noticed and respected.  I really, really, really don't want to work anymore.  Really!

I mentioned last week that I skipped the opening reception because we had dinner plans with old friends we hadn't seen in several years.  We drove down to Valrico and were welcomed with hugs. We caught up with what's been going on and then they drove us to an Italian restaurant they discovered and love. Allegria Italian Ristorante was wonderful.  We will go again for sure. Nino is Italian and Cheryl is German (just like Joe and me!).  Back to their beautiful home after dinner, Cheryl had Italian cream cake for dessert, with coffee.  We sat at the table and talked for another two hours. We agreed we shouldn't let so much time go by before getting together again. They have lots of grandkids down there and are busy with family all the time, but agreed to come to Lakeland next.  We have known them for so many years....

Cheryl is one of 10 children of my step-grandfather.  Grandpa John was my maternal grandmother's 3rd husband.  Technically, Cheryl is my step-aunt, but we formed a friendship and have just considered ourselves friends.  They are in their early 70s now.  Time goes much too fast.

Saturday allowed us to sleep late (ahhhhh) and then a co-worker stopped by to see our new house and to talk with Joe about a business matter with some work she does on the side.  She is ready to move here when she turns 55 in two years!  Mas Verde really is a lovely community.

When she left, we had grocery shopping to do at Sam's Club and Publix. Got that done and then the rain came. It poured....that old cats and dogs thing. We settled in and watched a couple of movies.

Sunday also allowed us to sleep in.  Got up around 8:30 and had breakfast and read the newspaper with a couple cups of coffee.  Nice and leisurely, the way weekend mornings should be.

I baked a cake for Jeff's birthday.  He arrived at 8:15 pm.  Joe picked up Italian subs for our dinner.  I made homemade ice cream to have with the cake. Yummy!!  Of course, I also got the laundry done.

Back to work today. Busy, as mentioned above. I do have Thursday and Friday off to spend with Jeff and Joey and Darlene (and the grand pups).  They arrive on Tuesday for the week.

Thanks for your visit!  Peace & hugs.