I predicted previously that the next few weeks would be as sucktastic as the two prior weeks, but it hasn't been as bad as I thought. Still some bad shit. Or irritating shit, anyway.
Tuesday flight to Philly. We get fogged in, can't leave the local airport. This eventually turns an 8-hour trip into 19 hours, because the delay put the flight crew into a mandatory rest period so there was no one to fly the plane. Okay, A), they were just sitting there on the runway for almost two hours, so I don't know why you need to rest from that, B) those things are 99.6% autopilot, and C) I've flown enough combat missions in various sims that I could probably crash land relatively close to the airport.
Get to the hotel at 1:30am. Grab 5 hours sleep and head down for breakfast. Bunch of really old folks, wheelchairs, walkers, etc. No problem. Then we see the staff lady pushing a cart. Oh, housekeeping is here a bit early. Er, no. Noticed that she's wearing nurse garb, and that cart is for medication and other nurse-ly stuff. Uhhh, what? Apparently this is a hotel / nursing home. I guess? It's a national chain but this local franchise is renting rooms to, I don't know, a local nursing outfit. One of the strangest things I've encountered in a hotel, and I've been doing this crap for 22 years.
But we got to the customer to take down an old machine and build a new one, and they have been great. And the OEM tech I'm working with is also top-notch. Really green, but super-eager to learn and digs right in to the work. Fantastic start. One-of-a-kind machine, an updated version of the one I installed around 1999. Really hoping this goes well, but you never know with custom equipment.
And then we poke around outside the place and see that they have three really large fields of solar panels on the property. Gotta be at least 250kW of panels, possibly much more than that. And they told me they also put in a crap-load of geothermal. Kind of a wet dream of mine, getting that sort of energy self-sufficiency at our place. I need to talk to these guys once we get the machine up and running, see what their experience has been like.