SEP-B-2

 

RE-ENTRY AND FILM PROCESSING, MAIL CLEARING AND DERWOOD PROGRESS, AS THE NEW GWU FALL SEMESTER BEGINS AND A NEW DOCTORAL DEGREE PROGRAM IS INISTIATED

 

SEP 17-18, 2003

 

            This process should be easy, right?  I have done it often before, and know the drill on re-entry.  I have a carefully programmed sequence of events, which usually involves turning in the film for processing, which returns for sorting about the twenty four hours later when I have cleared the mail, email and phone messages.  I have a careful list of “To Do” items from unpacking, laundry, haircut, and planning the next itinerary items, which are usually immediately following my return since they are what the return was scheduled to fit.

 

            None of that is happening.  I cannot do any of the above, since I have about the same density of population in Washington DC as I had in Alaska upon my return, and for a reason not unfamiliar to the Alaskans—threats of impending weather disaster.  The big news as I left Anchorage, is that I would be flying back into the path of Hurricane Isabel, a Category II tropical storm, that would be coming right up the Chesapeake after making landfall at Kill Devil Hills, and raking through the Maryland and Virginia area on its way north.  There has been plenty of advance warning, so that all stores are sold out of flashlights batteries and plywood and duct tape. 

 

            I have run around and down the sequence of events—picking up the tubs of mail and checking on Derwood, then getting my haircut and moving on to get the books and reading and reports due on my weekend first graduate seminar for the ELDP program.

 

            I got a call from the project manager on the Derwood redo, and noted that the upstairs bathrooms had been “demo-ed” to about the same point they were upon my departure.  Glenn explained that there was another delay in the building permits since the people in the permits office said that their was a new attic being built and they needed permits and fees for that—after all, I would need to be adding a staircase to reach the new attic.  Glenn found the fellow who was holding it up and went to show him that the attic existed and so did the stairs, and all that was being done up there was the cedar paneling and construction of a closet.  With that the last delays in the overall permit was cleared and as of September 10, the permit was posted in the window at the kitchen as well as on the mailbox in front of the house.

 

            In order to not be behind the already lagging schedule, Glenn had had the subcontractor for the excavation dig the footings even the day before the permits were coming through but after the permit office had acknowledged their misunderstanding and approval of the go-ahead.  So, the footings had been put in in both re-rod and cement just before I returned and the foundation should be ready for the coming of the bricklayers on an unusual overtime Saturday schedule.  All of that is pending any interfering events—like a Category II Hurricane bearing down on a direct line of fire for a direct hit here at Ground Zero.  This had caused all of Washington to go into a big Tizzy, even more like the hysteria of the threat of snow in February.  This year, however, the “Threat” of snow materialized as an “Actual Snowstorm” that closed the city for a week, and since no one wanted to be accused of not forewarning the public, every police and fire station is set up here with plywood nailed shut windows and sandbagged doorways, an example to all homeowners to follow suit.

 

            So, my usual re-entry process is complicated this time.  Not only do I have to get re-acquainted with those I thought I was so close to that I would not need to start all over from the beginning, but I am on “weather wait” which has suspended the usual coping mechanisms for an efficient re-entry process.  School is back in session, as I have been out after the Labor Day holiday, and I know that this brings with it the “back-to school” process for both faculty and students—and I am one of each.  I will be entering a new degree program called the Executive Leadership Doctoral Program in the School of Education and Human Development—and I had received an assigned reading list of several books as I left the lower forty eight.  This was too little time to get the books and start the readings but I would have three days on re-entry to get immersed in this process.  I had protected this time---and it seems that other events will make that difficult or impossible for me—so I may have to literally “go in cold” to the first graduate seminar as we are all supposed to be discussing our pre-formulated opinions of books we have read and written reactions we have previously submitted.  I have come in cold on graduate programs before and somehow got my feet under me, so I will try again.

 

            And on the subject of getting my feet under me---I have to run!  In only a month I will be doing the first of two marathons in a ten day period—and all of that will follow another couple of trips—the first two domestic and the third a return to the Himalayas—an inaugural trip to Sikkim, this time.  So, I must get some miles started up and long if not fast.

 

            So, I must be hitting the ground running---even if that run is going to have to be around the wind-whipped target zone of a major damaging Category II Hurricane bearing down fast!

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