By the time this posts (time delay is kind of awesome, isn’t it?), I will ideally be on my way home after a month living in this damned hotel room. It’s all done except for the last exam, and to pass this course and earn my certification, I need to earn 30 of 125 available […]

As I wind down this class (we finished up our last exercise today -several class hours earlier than it was due- all that’s left is some discussion, and one more exam), I find that while I’m completely and utterly sick of living in a hotel, and can’t wait to see my family again, I’m actually […]

So this afternoon, we lost the old man of the house. Montana came into our lives, in all honesty, because I felt a little guilty about buying a guitar amp. I’d just wrapped up the purchase and put it in the car, and found my family in the pet store nearby the music shop, where […]

I somehow organized a minor “blow-off-steam” happy hour three weeks into a four week class last night by telling a few folks that I’d be at Independent Brewing Company’s taproom Friday afternoon to have a drink or two and dinner from whatever food truck was holding court. I ended up chatting with a couple of […]

As this post gets posted, I’ll be wrapping up my third week of this damned class. Yeah, I know it’s pretty much all I’ve been talking about, but this is the thing that’s been consuming my life for the entire month of August. I haven’t seen my family in two weeks. The recumbent stationary bike […]

I’m a little past half-way through this course. My team and I (the entire curriculum save the exams is group work, and I have a good team; a really good team) have mutually agreed that we’ve hit the wall. We’re getting pretty good at working the system now; we’re routinely finishing our relatively complex group […]

So yeah, still sick. Even worse than last time I posted something, though I do have some good meds for the symptoms. That said, it’s not been a terrible week, for being on the road. I even checked my work email thisThursday morning to clear out the automated cruft, and found that things are moving […]

It’s relatively bog-standard Wednesday evening; a week-and-a-half into my class, and the teams is starting to figure out the basic pattern and rules of engagement, getting along well, doing good work, and developing, at least in our case, weird conspiracy theories about how our grades are determined, and wondering about the oddly ever-present recurring value […]

A little late this year, but I think the kid forgives me (never mind, I fudged the dates!).

It’s Sunday evening, and I’m back at my August home-away-from-home here in northeastern MD quickly making a trip to celebrate the kid’s birthday a few days early. Colleen went all-out putting together a Harry Potter-themed party, with floating candles hanging from the ceiling, turning the front door into Platform 9¾ picking out wands, sorting into […]