Late July

As Summer wears on in Virgina, I have been keeping busy with a number of distractions. First, I have been working at the Federal Emergency Management Agency to support their continuous improvement initiatives. I has been a short-lived assignment that ended on July 31st. After that, I was supposed to go to work for the Army, but that changed. I'll discuss it in another blog entry.

We are still unpacking and slowly moving in. Sometimes it seems like it's taking forever, but we both work and we aren't in any hurry. We are busy at Jazzercise three times a week and have dinner at least once a week with my parents. Work in a little couple time and the weeks disappear. DeAnna is keeping the hardwood floors clean though thanks to the new "dusting slippers" my mom gave her!

We attended our first evening at the Wolftrap. It is an open-air concert location renowned for it's hot performances and steamy nights. Our night was an evening of John Williams music played by the National Symphony Orchestra. To look at this picture, you wouldn't know it was actually an outdoor location...
But if you look at this picture, you can see that it has a respectable "lawn" area for picnic goers and families to lounge on the grass. These folks are sitting on grass that has just been SOAKED by an evening thunderstorm, but they don't seem to mind. It rained and sprinkled most of the evening... where were we? Well, we were just under the enclosure between those two tan posts so we were dry!

Our evening started off in the afternoon when we arrived very early and wandered around the surrounding park. There are a number of smaller stages and performance locations. This is the theater in the park location. We had the stage to ourselves! We also had the theater to ourselves, so our dazzling performance was not appreciated by anyone else besides the squirrels and owls (who did not applaud).

Oh well, As we said, it was John Williams night and the whole second half of the concert was dedicated to his Star Wars themes. Although I did not run into Darth Vader, I managed to hob-nob with an imperial trooper. We had a great dinner out of the rain and a wonderful time enjoying the music and the scene. Later in August, we take my parents to see "Lord of The Rings: The Two Towers" movie at the Wolf Trap with live orchestration. I'm not sure how they are going to do that, but I'm sure it will be interesting... and fun!

August at work is focused on Hawaii again I will make two trips to commands all around Oahu in preparation for a Symposium in September where I will deliver a keynote speech and introduce our new training model. More to come!