Hello from the Seattle Airport
Drafted: Friday
Afternoon, April 11, 2014 (first post of this trip – and only one
{grin})
Posted: Monday April 14, 2014 from home.
I often mention that this blog is really a travelogue. I only post when there is travel related
stuff to talk about. The readers that we
have certainly do not want to read about a lot of minutia taking place in our
lives {big grin}.
I have been in the Seattle area since last Sunday. I taught Shaft Alignment and Mechanical
Drives courses this week on the early shift (6:00 AM – 2:30) at Boeing. Normally these are my fun classes to teach,
but I had 3 out of 5 of the students who kicked back, put their feet on the
table and went to sleep! No attempt to
hide the fact that they were sleeping. I
finally got a Boeing person to read the riot act to them. Since they are technically our customer, I
did not feel like I should really come down on them, but I gave them plenty of
comments to let them know I was not a happy camper. In all my years of teaching and presenting
seminars (over 45 years) I have never had that many really rude students. The two that did not sleep apologized to me
about the terrible behavior of the other students. I know that it really affected my
attitude. I tried my best to give them a
good session, but I could tell that I was not at my peak.
If you follow my blog, you will recall that the last few
months of 2013, I was in the Seattle area a large percentage of the time. Then the spigot turned off. Boeing made some demands of NTT for course
revision and that resulted in no classes being presented for the first three
months. In addition the other instructor,
who was also an interim manager of the group, returned to an instructor only
position and has priority over the schedule.
Where that leaves me is anybody's guess.
I really got tired of all the travel last year, but I would
like to do a class a month or so. Like
so many things, it seems to be feast or famine.
As usual, I stayed at the Holiday Inn in Kent. Unfortunately they are converting to a Ramada
property next week. I detest Ramada
Inns!. The location of the hotel is
ideal for our classes, but I will find another Holiday Inn that will work.
During the hiatus, I
started a major shop project – the rebuild of my '59 BC-150 International
truck. I am having a ball working in the
shop!!! I have been averaging maybe 25-30 hours a week – not bad for an old
fart {grin}. I have been trying to
document the project at: http://beltguy.com/bc150/bc150.htm I am having some problems with the
website. It works but some of the
thumbnail pictures do not display. The
thumbnails that don’t display will produce the larger version. The software I am using (MS Frontpage) is no
longer supported by GoDaddy and that causes all kinds of problems. I will begin converting to WordPress format in
the near future, In the meantime, you
can get a feeling of the size of the project.
While our blog has been rather sparse the past few months,
our travel plans suggest that we will be on the road a bit more over the next
few months. Stay tuned.
Per my usual track record, I did not finish this post in the
airport – thus the delay in posting.
That is all for this trip.
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