Arizona

posted 13 November

My little sister Jeanne and her family live in the Tucson area, so it was a bit of a no-brainer when an opportunity arose to travel down thataways to do some software contract work.

Anytime the Company is willing to pay you to travel in the vicinity of friends or family, it's worth taking it.  After all, what are you going to do on weekends, anyway? Stay indoors and play video games? Watch shows on cable TV? Catch up on your reading?

It has been a long time since we'd visited Jeanne and Brendon and Brason and Braelyn, so a trip was overdue. It would've been nice to bring along the entire family, but since the rest of the family is otherwise engaged (teaching school, attending school, trying to finish school, etc.) it fell to my lot to travel alone.

My flight was on a Sunday afternoon, and due to the time difference, my arrival in Tucson was at midnight. The job is actually up in Oro Valley, about an hour north of Jeanne's place, so there was a bit of a drive after all that flying.

The work itself is nothing special: writing tests to make sure the batteries behave themselves. (They are rechargeable batteries that help start the airplane engines and also serve as backups for cases where there is power loss.)  Less said about that, the better.

Turns out the work demanded 6-day weeks, so I didn't get a chance to hang out with the Holt family til Sunday, but it was lots of fun. Their church has coffee and pastries before service, and then classes after worship, which is a bit of a switch from the way we do things up in Michigan; but it was very nice and I met a lot of very nice people. Then I got to help take Communion to a lovely couple living in a trailer park, do some laundry at Jeanne's, and then go to their Sunday Evening Bible study group!

The only down side to the whole thing was that I miss my Sunday School kids, but our Children's Minister made sure that someone (Mr. Tim!) was covering for me. And Mary said she'd help out when she's there on the every-other-Sunday when she comes home from school.

I sure do miss home, though.