another friend of mine, Tom Bolton, a contractor and I started preparing the Savannah house to sell.  Most of the Hash House Harrier friends made it out for quite a few days too, working on the house.  We painted all of the inside and outside of the house.  Had the kitchen tiled and all new appliances.  I placed new sod in the back yard and mulched all around the house.  We had 3 dump truck loads of mulch that we spread over

3 days.  The house looked gorgeous.   Leaving Savannah was a very tough thing to do.  I really enjoyed the house

, the town, neighbors, friends and all of the co-workers at Gulfstream.

 

Dad also helped me move across the country.  He drove the U-Haul and dropped my boat that he was towing for

sale in Windfall.  He got about a 2-1/2 day head start on me, as I continued to work on the house.  I had intended

on catching him on the road.  But, leaving home days later than I had expected and hitting a snow storm in 

Wyoming that closed I-90 for over a day, meant that Dad beat me to Seattle by a day.

 

Starting back to work at Flight Test in Seattle, was almost like I hadn’t left 9 years earlier.  I knew 80 of the

90 people working in the group and slipped right back in.  I have been for the most part working on mechanical

designs, with an occasional weekend working operations on an  airplane.  Most of my work has been on existing

 airplane program improvements and the Large Cargo Freighter, a 747 that looks like Airbus’s super guppy that

is being designed to transport major sections of the 787 from their manufacturers plants around the world to the main assembly plant in Everett WA.  I expect the 787 program to hit us in Flight Test quite heavily over the next couple of years.  This is going to be a very interesting program.  Looks like

                                                                                                      they have plenty of work here for me for the next few years.  Though, as always, two weeks

                                                                                                       to ??? years, is the length of time that a contractor usually expects to be somewhere.

                                 

                                                                                                      The house sold in Savannah in about two months, close to what I was asking for.  I bought a

                                                                                                      house in the Green Lake area of Seattle.  Talk about price shock on housing prices.   It is a

                                                                                                      two bedroom, 1 bath house, 1300 square feet house, 5 city blocks from Green Lake.  I am just

                                                                                                      now getting an architect started on adding a second floor on

                                                                                                      this house and a one office room third floor, with a deck on top

of that.  I should end up with a very nice 360 degree view of the Cascade & Olympic mountains, downtown Seattle and

hopefully a good view of Mt Rainier on the far side of Seattle too.

 

My goal is to have this completed by the end of May, so I can move back into the house and enjoy the summer here. 

Summer in Seattle is incredible.  This is just a beautiful area that time of the year.  The sun and all of the mountains are

usually out.  Weather is usually in the high 70s to low 80s.  Every Wednesday, a group of us from work go hiking on one

of the mountain hikes in the North Cascades about an hour away.  Buddy often goes with me too.