Solomons

Following our time at the Back Creek Inn† bed and breakfast on Solomons, Susan and I have spent the last 4 nights in a run down Days Inn motel closer to the Patuxant River Naval Air Station around the Great Mills area of Maryland*.

The last few days we've been trying to figure out the best area to settle in. Schools are a major factor for us, our middle child has some special needs. So choosing where to live is largely the result of finding the school that can best support his IEP.

We are looking to be in the area long term, so it makes sense to buy a house, especially in this this low interest buyers market. In the near term though, we need a place to rent for a few months while we pull together the equity for a down payment, and research the area.

Yesterday was a busy day, we think we've narrowed in on the school, Dowell Elementary in Southern Calvert. Other good options are Patuxant and Appeal Elementary schools. These schools all have staff historically familiar with the ISLE (Intensive Structured Learning Environment), and as such are familiar with special needs children.

Yesterday we also found a short term rental condominium‡ which feeds into Dowell. This is fortuitous, as it would be excellent to start renting in the same area we plan to buy in. We started with Dan Cannon, the real estate agent helping us with the contract details, and we are hoping to be able to start moving out of the Days Inn (!!!) and into the condo sometime this weekend.

The kids are staying up at my in-laws until we get this detail ironed out. What a treat it would be to get this together in time to run North and Trick or Treat with them tomorrow, and also have them in a new home they can start school from on Monday.

Thanks for your prayers, and happy meditations on this one.

* (not on map)

† (3,P on map above)

‡ (4,N on map above)

Training Day

Sue and I visited my in-laws in Northern Pennsylvania over the weekend. The GPs graciously offered to watch the kids, while we came back down South to get started, and figure out how to get settled. Last night, and tonight we have stayed at a quaint Bed & Breakfast, The Back Creek Inn, near Solomans Island just ten minutes from my new employer.

My first day was today. The company is a small but capable group of about twenty people, about half on site at the Maryland office where I will work. There was a company meeting today, and I was excited to see that my name was already in the project schedule as a resource for existing projects. It's a good feeling to hit the ground running with management that knows just where to apply your talents.

Transporter

Thursday turned ended up as more of a Thriday. It's the artifact of bridging together one super busy day with the next, via a 6 hour timezone transfer.

I think Sue and I were better off not knowing what lay ahead of us when we woke that morning. It wasn't much of a good night's sleep to begin with. Sleeping on a deconstructed cardboard box, packing foam and coats from a forgotten closet, we woke sore and boney. I think the only reason we slept at all was that Wednesday we had spent the entire day getting the 16' PODS trailer loaded, closed, and adieu'd.

Thursday was all about leaving the island, getting the van to leave the island too, and coping with the realization that our house really needed a 20' trailer and so we still had about a thousand pounds of miscellaneous possessions lying around the house to deal with before we left.

Sue and I had our routines down. I was the burly box loader, junk transporter, and Sue was the game-master organizer, packer. We divided our remaining possessions in the ex-home into 3 piles: junk, parcel-post, and give-to-friends.

I spent the better part of the morning turning the family van into a Sanford and Son extra. All the passenger interior seats folded in, I stuffed the vehicle to capacity. Wooden tennis rackets, unmatched athletic equipment, broken tiki torches, gloves without mates, video equipment from the pre-wireless era, world in a blender. Then, all my half cut lumber, particle board, a desk and two sawhorses twined to the roof rack on top, I finally headed off to the dump.

Sweaty, and red dirt glazed, I returned from the Kapolei dump to gather the twenty or so boxes that Susan had labored to assemble for posting. Cumbersome, I leaned into four handcart loads to get the parcels from the van to the counter.

By the time I got back to the house, it was already three o'clock. The timeline had crumbled. Things got messy, and I ended up going straight from the house in my junk clothes to get the van delivered to the pier where it was shipped minutes before they closed. Friends from work shuttled me from the Sand Island Pier back to the airport area.

While that was going on, our friend Ceci Adams chanced by the house, and saw that Sue badly needed help wrapping up and getting to me at the airport. She quickly canceled all her other plans for the evening and made it happen.

Fortunately, it was an evening flight. We had time to rendezvous at the airport and get dinner together before we left. Fifteen hours, two connections, and some cat-naps later we arrived in Baltimore.

Bye Bye Bye

Well, it happened kind of suddenly, but it happened. We are leaving Hawaii at the end of the month and moving to the Patuxant River area of Maryland. I've accepted a position with a company that services and upgrades flight simulators (among other things). I'm looking forward to the change in the job, Sue is excited about returning to the mid-Atlantic, and the kids are stoked that they have a dead-lock on Christmas at Grammies house.