19 September--Day One

Kathi and I were at the Day's Inn in Tempe last night.  Luckily, the hotel's lack of hot water in the shower and toilet that didn't want to flush were not harbingers for the rest of the day.  We had a light breakfast at Einstein Brother's Bagels and went to the airport.  Sad, very sad, goodbyes for the next 5 months.

The flight went uneventfully (anything else is not OK); the logistics of getting my bags and finding the pickup point for the hotel shuttle bus went perfectly and without any grief.  Some of the others had bags considerably larger than mine and a few had smaller ones.  Aboard the bus, most of the people were Raytheon folks, most of them newbies (FNGs, pronounced fingees in these parts; don't ask what the initials stand for in polite company).  Shuttle Bob was probably assigned to shepherd us through this part of the process.  He's a very voluble and friendly guy, a perfect choice for our greeter.  The others are a friendly mixture and each has qualities it will be interesting to learn more about over the next 5 months.  One is a young woman from Sandpoint, Idaho who's worked as a river guide on the Lower Salmon and hope to work the Middle Fork next year.  So that's an obvious affinity.  Another guy will be working in hazardous materials.  [Note: I later find out that this includes even the smallest drops of fuel and they must be dug out of the snow and dirt and bagged.]  That's nice to know that NSF takes that sort of environmental care very carefully.  A returning woman from the kitchen staff was talking about wanting to start serving a vegan hummus with Guinness but didn't know whether Guinness is indeed vegan (I googled it and it isn't; it contains isinglass, a byproduct of fish scales that's used to floculate the yeast from the brew).  The few non-Raytheon people were sort of at a loss to know what this was all about.

The Red Lion Hotel is a very nice suburban high rise, complete with Sleep Number mattresses and free Wi-Fi, making possible this posting.  Hard to know exactly where this is in relation to Denver or the RPSC complex.  For that matter, it's hard to even know what city it might be in if you didn't know what was on your ticket; it's architecturally indistinguishable from every other Red Lion and from every other late 90s or early 21st Century hotel. 

Dinner with the group at 1830 (reader: you'll have to get used to 24 hour time telling) and shuttle to the RPSC complex at 0700.


First dinner at the Red Lion in Denver