DC Bound

I'm once again finding the time to post to my blog while on a flight. This time I'm headed to Washington DC for a week long meeting. It's far too much time to be away from home and the office but it's for one of the federal grants we received and it's a mandatory meeting. I'm not the Project Director on this particular grant - I'm the Principle Investigator but the PD was on a cruise so I stepped in. The grant is for the implementation of a Recovery Oriented System of Care which I am very interested in so I am hopeful to learn a lot and make it a productive week. It's been a heavy travel year for work this year - more so than usual. I typically travel 3-4 times per year, mostly between Seattle and DC with the occasional in state travel and odd ball place elsewhere in the country thrown in once in awhile just to keep it interesting. But because of the multiple federal grants we received recently at work the next several years will involve more travel than usual.

Travel for work is not my favorite thing to do. Don't get me wrong, I love to travel - I'd just assume pick the destination and have Kent join me! It's also challenging to be away from home and the dogs for such a long time. In addition I've got two upcoming trips that require that I leave on Sunday which means giving up one of my weekend days in addition to the lost evenings. One bright spot is the fact between the work travel and personal travel I've managed to rack up over 50,000 miles and will achieve gold status on Delta Airlines for the first time. As Kent can attest - I love me my status! Remember the first class upgrade to Europe!

It was a busy weekend in which we manage to get a lot done before I had to head out of town. We went to dinner with our friend Bill and a friend of his and her children on Friday night, the Husky game (worst loss I've ever witnessed) and dinner again and then Sunday we got a lot of chores done around the house and enjoyed Halloween.

One of the big chores I managed to get done was putting in slightly larger size dog doors for Toby and Maggie. We had existing pet doors before we got Toby for our former cat Gloves which were always a bit small but worked for Toby but Maggie is slightly larger and although she could go in and out, it just did not look comfortable so we invested in the next size up. Looks like it is much easier for her to use. Speaking of pet doors, we had an interesting situation occur the other night related to our pet doors. About 3:30 in the morning Toby started barking slightly which is very unusual. So despite the fact that Kent installed an alarm system we tend to get up and check things out if the dog barks. So I get up and check things out and everything seems normal and then all hell broke loose! I had left the dogs in the bedroom with Kent with the door closed while I checked out the house. The second I opened the door both dogs came darting out and ran into the office. Immediately things were not right! They jumped up on a chair that we have in there and were sniffing around like crazy. For a second I channeled a bit of my Mother and thought there must be a ghost in the room - they were definitely on to something and there was clearly nothing there! I finally round them both up and got them directed back to the bedroom when they both darted for the guest bedroom. This is really the point when all hell broke loose and I made Kent come join me because I was freaking out! Oh to have been a fly on the wall - I'm sure it was hilarious! It went something like this - "Kent, get in here the dogs are acting really weird." "What are they doing?" he asks. "Looking under the bed, kinda growling, and sniffing." "That is weird" Kent says as he walks over both of us in our underwear!
"Did you look under the bed?" "NO" I'm not looking under there!" I said. At that moment a big orange cat comes tearing out from under the bed with both dogs right on it's tail, there were screams to be heard and there is still disagreement on where the screams actually came from! It was hilarious! We've always worried about an animal coming in the dog doors at night - thankfully it was only a cat. We've decided to close it at night!

Well we are getting ready to land in DC so I'll sign off now. Have a great week!

Jim




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