My "exciting" life - Day 1334 (Year 4, Day 239)

Williamsburg, VA

Another 2 weeks have passed since my last post.  Hard to believe; it feels like I just posted a few days ago!  How do we keep time from flying by?

Obviously, not much exciting has happened as it's been work, work, work.  Mitch has had quite a number of days off due to the rain and very muddy conditions (very thankfully, not more snow or ice).  At least this gave him an opportunity to catch up on a number of back burner projects he's been meaning to accomplish, and I also gave him some work for my company (A-Z Admin Solutions: www.AZAdminSolutions.com, in case anyone's interested!).  We both agree that it would be wonderful if I could hire him full time, but alas, the workload isn't enough right now to warrant that.  Although, admittedly, a huge project has come in that I don't have (1) the desire, or (2) the time to complete myself and have hired a really awesome subcontractor to help me with.

My "excitement" of the week has been discovering a bald eagle!!  Very sadly, I don't have a camera that could zoom in close enough to get a good shot, although I was able to clearly identify it using binoculars and various bird identification tools.  Here's the best I could do photographically zoomed (it is really majestic when it's flying):



One thing I do find disappointing is our lack of seeing wildlife.  For example, this campground is divided into the front and back sections.  There are loads of deer in the back section (we're in the front) and I have yet to see a single one.  Mitch said he saw baby bears in Asheville (I didn't) but other than many different kinds of bugs, we haven't experienced much.

Regarding synagogue services, we have not gone for quite a while.  I guess we both sort of decided that it just wasn't worth the 25 mile schlep.

This past weekend, as seems to always be the case, the weather was miserable.  We ended up on Sunday just running a bunch of shopping errands (including a trip to Michaels to buy a replacement clock mechanism) and then spent the remainder of the day watching downloaded movies.

Regarding next steps for travel:  it was suggested to Mitch that our next assignment will be in Salt Lake City, Utah.  On one hand, this sounded really exciting as we haven't been out west before.  On the other hand, it's a 5000 mile round trip.  Three out of four parts of our cursed Ford 6.0L engine have been replaced to date but we were warned the last part (the head gasket, the most expensive of all) is due to blow at any given time.  Since the trip would take us 50% of the way through "fly over country" -- the Midwest with nothing but farmland and tiny cities hundreds of miles apart (kind of like our travels in the Dakotas), and then the rest of the way through the mountains and steep grades (towing 20K pounds), we decided we didn't really want to take the risk of this kind of travel at this point.  Mitch asked his supervisor to please keep us on the east coast, which he agreed to.  We will most likely be here until some time (end?) of March but it's unclear where we'd be going next.  So far, it seems like the highest possibilities are either NJ, or Asheville or Raleigh, NC.  Will keep you posted....