(no subject)
By this time tomorrow I should be about 3 hours into my 9 hour road trip to Louisiana. That should put us in like Alabama, and will be only the 1st of the next 4 states we will be entering into in the next 3 months. You see, Jason and I are leaving. And we wont be back for awhile.
We moved here to "Metro Atlanta" July of 2006. I immediately got a job at Ippolitios- thanks to some mentally insane mutual friends. For Jason it wasn’t as easy, but he found a solid living at an insurance company eventually. We've moved from the lofts to a regular apartment. We've made some really great friends along the way, took total advantage of what the city had to offer us, and had a really good time with just about everything.
Around Christmas time I started talking to my sister, Mary about her new job. She starts work in September and is done by May. She has a month off for Christmas and almost 4 off for summer. She was planning her backpacking trip across Europe and was trying to decide where she wanted to travel too when she got back off her plane in the states, and Jason and I looked at each other and decided we want in. The 'in' of course being, we wanted to work in nuclear power plants too.
I know, right?!
So as much as I have avoided name-dropping my entire life, just to get what I want, I started throwing my fathers name around like crazy trying to get us set up with a job for a company called Atlantic, that would presumably allow us to scratch that itch we’ve been dying to get to for the last 3 years. To work, and live and travel...comfortably. 4 months later - we're in!
And we leave TOMORROW.
Today will be spent packing everything we might need until the middle of December into 3 small suitcases and at 6am tomorrow we will be locking this door behind us. For a long time.
Our 1st stop will be Louisiana, to visit my family, and drop our beloved turtle (Leonidas <3) off so he doesn’t have to live in a hotel with us. Yeah... please forward all our mail for the next 5 weeks to The Rainbow Hotel and Casino in Vicksburg Mississippi. Its easy to imagine our nights will be spent in a hotel lounge listening to some old lady singing while splayed out atop a piano, but really, from the sound of it after working 6-12 hour shifts a week I predict we will be sound asleep before the clock strikes 10.
After our work is done in Mississippi we are scheduled to arrive in Russellvillle Arkansas (ironically, the birthplace of one of my best friends here in Georgia. I just think that’s weird) There we will be living about the same arrangements, in some hotel/motel somewhere in the area.
Please excuse me for not elaborating on my job, as it sounds to be the exact opposite of what I thought I would be doing with my life. After spending 18 years worth of family dinners, rolling my eyes and being bored to tears while my father talked about his day of work at Pilgrim Nuclear Power Plant, at some point during my employment with this company, he will be running our morning meetings, and will be acting as not just my dad; but as my boss.
Yep. I am transferring from the Restaurant business, to the nuclear power business. I will trade in my apron and slip proof shoes for a haz-mat suit and a respirator. As of now, my job will be to sit in a containment unit with a few other people, and sterilize material that is coming out of a radioactive area and make it safe to be transported into non-radioactive areas.
Its safe.
That was my big concern, but everything that goes on in these plants is government supervised and there are regulations for everything. My dad has worked in this business for the last 28 years of his life. He doesn’t glow. He’s kinda nerdy, but I think that’s just what happens when you grow up in the woods of Maine. I cant blame that on the radiation.
I can however thank the radiation, because with that, and everything else we will be dealing with, we will be very well compensated. So much so that we may plan our own trip through Europe. or maybe Asia, or who knows. By the end of our last outage our options will be unlimited.
So cheers to that, and all the haz-mat suits in-between. If nothing else, that’s going to make the Rainbow Hotel a hell of a lot easier to live in. I wont have a computer for a couple weeks but by then I'm sure there will be a substantial amount of journal entries ready and waiting. Until then, wish me luck!