Away from home

As I recently wrote, I'm working a contract in Chicago, IL. Unfortunately, that's 1000 miles away from home, which is in Loveland, CO. Working away from home isn't anything new for me. My wife, Rhonda, and I decided to embrace this lifestyle in 1998.

I had done some contracting work for a year in 1995-1996, then moved from California to South Dakota for a permanent position. Sadly, the position I was hired for never came about. I was hired to do image processing using IDL for the Landsat 7 satellite, but ended up doing user interfaces. After a year, it was clear there was no change in the horizon. My wife and I decided to move back to CA, but we had a house to sell before that could take place.

I ended up with a couple contracts in the process, one offsite in AZ and one onsite in CA. That allowed us to afford two homes (one in CA which was renting for less than our monthly payment, and the one in SD) and an apartment for me at the onsite contract. The house in SD sold and we moved into the one in CA that we were renting out. Unfortunately, that was still 130 miles from my onsite contract, so I had to stay in a hotel a few nights a week. We've had other similar situations: living in Lompoc, CA and working in Ventura, CA (100 miles) and San Jose, CA (250 miles), and living in Loveland, CO and working in Anchorage, AK (3500 miles) and now Chicago, IL (1000 miles).

The toughest part about being away from each other is the little maintenance things. I feel bad that Rhonda has to mow the lawn, though she doesn't complain about it. We had to have our air-conditioner serviced a couple weeks ago, and my truck needed some maintenance this week. Those are all the things I would normally do, but she's having to manage that now. The worst part was hearing that she got sick last week and I wasn't there to help out with the daily things, such as feeding the cats, taking out the trash, etc.

One thing that is making this easier is newer technology. My wife and I both have cable modems in our respective parts of the world. We recently started using Apple's iChat (similar to AOL) to talk every day. This is saving us a bundle on cell phone usage. iChat is about 90% as good as being on a cell phone. My wife also has a webcam on her end, so I can see her and our cats when we chat. This really makes things a lot better and we'll probably get an iSight camera on my end some time in the future.