http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fort_Wayne,_Indiana">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fort_Wayne,_Indiana
Fort Wayne appeared to be a rather nice, middle class town. Except for the abundancy of strip joints of course. It is a city of over 250,000 people but seems to have a small town vibe to it in that I never felt uncomfortable doing work in any area. It is a typical larger midwestern city but it does have a few interesting claims to fame: it is the burial place of Johnny Appleseed, the headquarteres of Vera Bradley (How strange! Indiana?), the former home of Stephen King and Dave Thomas, the founder of Wendy's.
Bill began work on Monday night and was working with the CEO of Prime Retail Services and didn't even know it! It is good to see the bigwigs of a company out in the field working nights with the peons....Bill was very impressed with that. The set itself went very well except for Tuesday night which was mostly spent standing around waiting on the electricians to do their work. They weren't able to test the new game units as the power is on automatic timer -- 8am to 10pm. So someone had to go back to the store afterwards to make sure everything was set up correctly. Bill says it is very physical work, pulling out the old fixtures and setting the new ones up. His arms are full of bruises and cuts from it. He doesn't think that it is something that I would be able to physically do if I would sign on....so we will wait and see on that one. For this project he has to be an employee and not an independent contractor as Target requires the team leads to be employees for some reason. Hopefully he can go back to independent contractor status after he is done with the Targets and on to a new project.
We left early afternoon for the 100 mile trip to Rossford Ohio which is basically a suburb of Toledo. We drove the entire afternoon through rain and wind and mostly on a small two lane highway filled with semis and car haulers. At one point we were almost hit in the passenger front side by the tail end of a semi who changed lanes without? seeing us....that was the closest we have come to an accident in more than 7000 miles but is one experience I don't care to repeat with any sort of frequency.
Monday afternoon and night had been extremely windy, enough to keep Bill from sleeping well and he sleeps through the huge air compressor starting up outside the bedroom in Pickerel. At one point Monday night I began planning how I would get the animals out of the rig if it were to tip over....that's how windy it was. Tonight there is less wind but we have thunder storms going on. Everything is green green and the trees are beginning to leaf out here already. Again we are in the parking lot at the Target....hopefully no one here thinks there is a neon sign with the word "bank" on the side of the rig. Tonight Bill will meet his crew and hopefully they are all ready to work and easy to train. We are debating whether or not I will be doing much merchandising during our 2 or so days here as we don't know which parts of Toledo to avoid. After Thursday night Bill is off until Sunday night when we have to be in Portage Michigan. I am researching ideas for places that we may want to visit in this area on his days off but haven't come up with much of anything as of yet. It is supposed to get to 35 tomorrow night so if it stays that way for the weekend it may preclude anything outdoors.
Happiness Project - I am happy to again see trees blooming and getting new leaves as well as the daffodils and tulips flowering.
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