July for Patrick

July was a whirlwind month for Patrick for work because the project he's been kept on at Peace Corps to work on for two years (DOVE) is finally becoming a reality.  He finished training all of the country desk liaisons at HQ on DOVE in late June, then he trained the local DC recruiting office.  Then it was off to Chicago to train that recruiting office for five days.

Patti and her Dad took the kids up to Connecticut for the week (more on that in another post) so Patrick was able to focus on training all day, and working most nights in the hotel.  The isolation and quiet was the only thing that got him through the week, but daily calls home to talk to Patti and Will were just what the doctor ordered.  Patrick left just enough time to himself, though, to catch up on some of his Chicago favorites.

The Bean.

Scalped tickets for the Cubs game during the first inning.  20 rows behind home plate for $20 - left plenty of cash for beer and hot dogs...

Another night, he caught the Metra to the suburbs to get together with Brian (right), one of his college roomies, and Brian (center), their good friend.  Left just enough time to swap stories, have a beer and appetizer, and then train it back to the city for a few more hours of work in the hotel.  He even took the L from the office to O'Hare for the flight home.

Patrick trained his old office the week after returning from Chicago and that went equally well.  So 75 people trained (so far) in 14 days over the past five weeks.  His team shut down new applications to the Peace Corps for two weeks so that our new application and IT system can come online.  Now it's time to bring up the new system and get our current applicants migrated over at the right statuses without losing anyone.

The girls were pretty happy to see Dada, but not as happy as Will who ran across Patti's parents backyard and jumped into Patrick's arms after the week apart.  Patrick showed him all of his plane, airport and train pictures and videos and Will told him all about his week of fun.  The week of hard work definitely paid off but it was so nice to be home with the family.

Derecho

On Friday night we got slammed by a derecho:  a straight, massive, windstorm associated with a fast-moving band of severe thunderstorms.  The sky was red with cloud-to-cloud lightning before we got hit by an 80-mph gust of wind.  Everything in the yard went for a ride, including Patrick's scooter and our neighborhood's transformer was one of many to blow.


Over two million people in the DC area lost power, more than a dozen people died, and we were tremendously fortunate not to suffer any losses.  Whole trees came down all over our neighborhood and Silver Spring took a major hit.


Here's one block up our side street:

And here is Will's favorite park, under trees...

To make matters worse, we lost power from Friday evening to late Monday.  The average temp on those days was 97 degrees so the house became a sauna.  Patti took the kids to Connecticut on Monday so they didn't have to suffer in stifling heat.  She was just arriving in Connecticut when the power finally came back on.