It's been a while but I'm back

The past two months have been interesting, stressful, challenging, frustrating, frantic and finally over. The property in Rhode Island sold and we can move on with our new lives in Arizona now. I used to joke before moving out here that even if I had to live in a refrigerator box under an I-10 overpass I was moving to AZ. It came damn close to that before the closing on the house in RI.
But now things are back on track and going well for both me and Dan.
Dan was working out of Oakland, California when he first started working for Southwest. That meant he left here on Wednesday for Oakland. That night he stayed in a hotel there and if he didn't get a trip he stayed there for up to 4 more nights that week. Since he was based in Oakland he had to pay for that room himself as well as food. Of course if he got a trip and flew SWA put him up where ever he was on layover every night. So there was some costly weeks during that time when he was on standby and not flying. Well as of November 1, he's based in Phoenix. So now when his work week was like this one, he gets to be at home for 4 days awaiting a call that didn't come and still gettting paid for standby for 4 days and being able to sleep, eat and do what ever he wants and still be at home. Not a bad job huh???
For those of you that know what we did before moving here what really sucks is he's getting damn near the same pay doing that as putting in 10 hour (or more) days running school buses.
For me.. well i'm still running school buses. But I'll know for sure this week that i'm offically taking over as general manager where I'm working. Everything is in place for that. I'm just waiting for the official letter offering me the position. That letter should have gone out in friday"s mail. So after less then 6 months here we will both be doing better then we were back in Rhode Island. I think we are both shocked and excited about all this. It is all happening a lot faster then we thought it would. I'm looking forward to getting to go to Los Angeles for my monthly GM meetings. I'm pretty excited actually. We didn't hold them in any places I was as excited about going to when I was at Dattco or Laidlaw. And I get to fly to them too. My operation is the only one Durham has in Arizona. At least right now. There's a few things that might happen here in the next year. So when it's official that I'm the GM I'll post that this week. Hey, my birthday is next monday. So that's not a bad birthday present for myself too!!

The weather here has been terific. 80's during the day and down in the 50's at night. last night we went out with some friends for sushi and ate outside. It's really nice that you can still be doing that in November. Today we had lunch and sat outside again. That pic of Dan is from today.

I did buy myself another present already too. I wanted a new cowboy hat. what do you think? Hell i'm in Arizona. I'm starting to fit in. The other pic is where our pool is going. Construction starts tomorrow. We'll have a pool, hottub and barbeque in the back yard. Won't be room for much more but we'll be able to use the back yard and really enjoy it when it's all done. We also bought some new furniture this week. As I said we are getting our lives together here now. So there's gonna be a lot more that I can take photos of and post on here soon. Hope all of you that are reading this are doing well too and keeping up with us.

To satisfy some of the reqests for pictures here are some more. The bottom three are all taken within a few miles from where my office is. The bottom photo you can see my expedition. I had just left the office about 3 miles behind the vehicle. This is what the area looked like before all the houses started getting built in Surprise when it was basically all farm land. Now there's signs like this one all over the place. Well not just in Surprise but most of the west side of the valley. You have to figure where my own house is just a couple of years ago they'd be picking cotton where our developement is since i live in Cottonfield Ranch.
The top photo shows one of the other crops in the area too. Roses !!! yeah I sneeze if I have the windows down around them. I guess they cut them back and sell the rose bushes. They don't seem to do anything with the petals or cut the flowers. This is just one of several fields of Roses in the area. They sure do make it more colorful.
And i can't resist not putting in a train photo. This is the train that goes by my office. There's several customers around here. The largest one is Amerigas. That's a story in itself. Morton Salt mines the salt out of the ground here. I guess 100's of feet below ground. you can see the salt coming out of the ground and piled up. Next door is Amerigas. The finished salt mines are then used to store gas underground. Sure is comforting knowing I"m working on top of all that gas.

The top photo is one of the 100's of cotton fields here. As you can see it's cotton pickin' time.

the second and third i took yesterday on the north side of Phoenix near Paridise Valley. One is just looking north at one of the peaks that are all over the area. The other one is near sunset looking toward the airport and downtown area. It was a typical dusty day here.

Veterans Day 2005

To all my current buds serving in the military and my veteran friends.... thanks for serving and happy Veteran's Day. This photo was taken today at the ceremony we had at work to honor the employees that are Veterans.