Our big news this week is that we will be volunteering at Assateague Island National Seashore. We will work April 4 through June 22. We will get one bedroom in a house, sharing the common living area with other park employees. This posting will be a little different. We will work 5 days / 40 hours a week. In addition to receiving housing, we are being paid $100 / week each.
The obstacle we had to overcome was internet access. The park is remote, with no cell phone service and extremely limited internet access. The only possibility for us to have our own internet connection is through a satellite dish. This is an amazingly expensive option. The contract is expensive. We pay extra if we use more than 10 GB/month. (That’s about 3 standard definition movies.) And we will not complete the 2-year contract, which means we will pay a hefty early termination fee. A significant chunk of our income will be dedicated to our internet access. Getting a dish installed required permission from the head of maintenance and the park chief.
In April and May, we will be working Mon – Fri with weekends off. We are told the park is booked solid with two school groups every day (one in the morning / one in the afternoon). As the school year winds down, we will transition to working weekends. We will be off May 4 – 6 so we can attend Elizabeth’s first communion.
But wait … there’s more. I manage our neighborhood website. We hired a consultant who recommended we use GoDaddy to host the site. It’s been nothing but a hassle. So I did a search for a better host provider and came up with SiteGround. The new provider is about twice the cost of GoDaddy ($100/year to $200/year), but they have a lot of satisfied customers. I expected months of delays while the board had lengthy discussions, reviews, and requests for additional information. Surprisingly, I got immediate approval. I will start the website move Monday. Hopefully it will go smoothly, solve our issues with GoDaddy, and not introduce new issues.
The weather this week has been lousy. I got only one bike ride in. But we’ve had plenty of activities. The Super Bowl was so good we actually stayed up and watched the entire game. We started a 6-week series at Church titled “Discovering Christ”. The series is on Thursday evenings and includes dinner, so we moved our dinner out night to Wednesday. We had the best Gyros in Columbia. Unfortunately, Columbia doesn’t have a Greek town. The Gyros are nowhere near the best in Baltimore. But they’re decent Gyros. Last night was a neighborhood Chinese New Year party. We have a neighborhood concert tonight. It’s a kind of Bluesy Jazz for Valentine’s day. It should be fun. Sunday we’ll go to an afternoon piano recital in Baltimore. The concert title highlighted Scarlatti, which isn’t very interesting. Fortunately, the pianist will also play Debussy, Schubert, and Liszt. We’re looking forward to a good time.
I hope this finds everybody doing well.