a long week in the Northeast

Tom has spent the last week in Baltimore, MD and Philadelphia, PA. Here are some pictures of where he was- the first two are the job site in the Baltimore suburbs, a very nice retirement community named Carroll Lutheran Village... this house is great, with the porch, and the views across the hills- I wanna retire someplace like this!!! The other two pictures were taken on Sunday, his only free day of the trip. Since he had to stay over for the weekend, he at least did something exciting with his time. He called me Sunday afternoon to tell me he was at the top of the Washington Monument... how cool is that??? And the seagull picture just cracked me up!

He's finally on his way home, thank goodness- but, up till the LAST minute, he wasn't sure. (disclaimer- any negative opinions expressed here are solely my own- venting to follow!) For some background: since the retirement community has single-family homes, they need to have a wireless network for part of the system- receivers in the attics of some of the houses that pick up signals from the surrounding area and send them on via antenna to the main system... and one of the receivers just wouldn't work, no matter what he tried to do to it. The company "Network Guy" had been there before Tom was, and he couldn't get it to work- they thought they had a fix for it, so they had Tom work on it again, but Friday when he worked on it, he still couldn't get it to work. So, Tom was talking to his boss this afternoon as he was driving to the airport to catch his flight, and was told... "give me a little time before you turn the car in, we might come up with something." !!!!!! They couldn't have worked out the issues between Friday and today (Tuesday??) ??!!?? Anytime up until he was driving to the airport would have been better, actually...I won't say anything more about it, but I had a few choice words at the ready when he called me and told me this... not just because I want him to come home, but because he was almost at the airport! Make up your minds, people!!! (And, a saying I hold true to: "A crisis on your part does not necessarily constitute an emergency on my part" especially when the crisis is because of poor planning!) [ Rant over.]

But, he is coming home, and will be home around 12:30 am.