I Heart New Hampshire

So I’m back from my business trip and I now have a whole new appreciation for those of you who have to travel regularly for your job. Let’s just say I’m not a fan.

On the plus side, though, the training I got was invaluable for the job I do and I got to stay in a really nice hotel. It was more like a small studio apartment and had I not had training all day and then studying in the evenings with my coworkers, it would’ve been great to just kick back for three days and watch movies on the ginormous TV or catch up on my reading.

Who am I kidding? I can’t possibly catch up on everything I’ve wanted to read since before having kids.

Anyway…my training for water mitigation was actually a lot more interesting than it sounds, even if the accommodations for the actual training sucked. We were at a cleaning supply warehouse and literally sat at folding tables with metal folding chairs, on a concrete floor, next to an overhead garage door. Don’t even get me started on how horrible the coffee was…

But…they brought in some great lunches for us. Pizza one day, barbecue the next day, and then chicken strips and sides the next day. Picture a warehouse full of thirty people, twenty-five men and five women. Now picture them running to line up for pulled pork smothered in barbecue sauce.

I’m not going to lie. Two of the girls looked like they were going to get trampled. Three of us were clearly used to living with brothers and/or being outnumbered by men on our jobs. We elbowed and punched our way to the front and I think we scared a few of the more timid dudes. I’m pretty sure several looked at me and thought they were going to lose a hand if they got too close.

I mean…never get between a fat chick and spicy sausage links. It won’t end well for you.

We actually made friends with some of them by the end of the three days, though. I particularly liked the guy at the end of our table who looked all of twenty-years-old and proudly boasted about his special “garden” in his apartment, showing us a picture of the soft purple glow of the grow lights in his apartment window… and then wondered aloud why a customer told his boss he needed to be drug tested.

I can’t say enough about the instructor, though. Just an awesome guy. He’s from New Hampshire, and it occurred to me during the training that I had not ever encountered someone from New Hampshire that I didn’t like.

It’s no secret that here in the South, we can view “northerners” with a certain amount of suspicion. Honestly, I think it’s mostly a cultural thing. We tend to move slower, speak slower, and elevate small talk about absolutely nothing to an art form because it’s “polite”. In my observations, northerners tend to be more direct and to the point. Just get the business over with and move on to the next thing. You can see how this might come off as “cold” or “not friendly” to southerners.

When I started handling Auto claims in New Hampshire years ago, I discovered that New Hampshirites talk fast, but they are also extremely friendly, boisterous, and do actually enjoy small talk. It feels like everyone I ever talked to in New Hampshire had a good sense of humor. Maybe living in a tiny state is like living in a small town or going to a small school. You feel like you know everybody.

Or maybe you’re just naturally happy because you live in a state with four seasons and most of them are absolutely gorgeous!

In any case, our instructor was a proud New Hampshirite and he was everything I’ve stated above and more. In addition to having been in the water remediation business for almost fifty years, he is also a master carpet-layer and an educator. He took a roomful of guys who didn’t look like they enjoyed cracking open a book very often and made them comfortable enough to use mathematical formulas to determine the number of dehumidifiers and air movers needed in a room as well as how to use a mathematical chart to determine humidity ratio and dew point based on the relative humidity and ambient temperature.

Did you get all that???

It took me two hours to get through 110 questions on the test. Kenny finished before I did by about thirty minutes. I really don’t know if that’s a good thing or a bad thing.

Anyway…I think my boys missed me. My seventeen-year-old hasn’t hugged me that tightly since he developed his life-long terror of tornadoes as a six-year-old, cowering with me in the bathroom under the stairs. The Husband Dude wanted to know if I could make a home-cooked meal over the weekend. Apparently Ramen Noodles and chicken nuggets got tiresome. Who knew?

Mr. Luna is still pissed off at me, though. He shows it by sitting on his daddy’s lap and looking smugly over at me as if to say, “This could’ve been you, if you hadn’t left for three days.”

Traitor.

I missed home, but reality always has a way of slapping me in the face. My homecoming included three loads of laundry that needed to be folded and put away, and there’s the pesky little issue with the fact that I haven’t put a Christmas tree up.

I’ve got thirteen people coming to my house Christmas Eve, y’all. I guess I better get ‘er done.

Until next time…Stay weird, my friends. Normal is boring!