Hello from St Louis, MO ** Times Two

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It has been crazy the past three weeks.  NTT assignments have been sparse, but I ended up with three in a row!  The first is was in Baltimore for a public Mechanical Drives class, then last week I taught Mechanical drives at Pfizer and this week was Shaft Alignment. 

The classes at Pfizer were scheduled to be fairly large 15-20 students.  That does not present a problem for the class work, but when we set up the trainers, it gets a bit crowded.  However, as is often the case at on-site classes, the attendance is generally less than scheduled for various reasons.  Both weeks turned out to have 10-12 students and that is just right.

These students were great.  Most of the students from the first class attended the second class.  I got to know many of them fairly well and that always makes the class more fun to teach.  In addition, there were some very sharp students and we really dug into the details of the alignment trainers – a couple of which have been a bit difficult to work with.

I flew home between the two St Louis sessions, which was good, but that just means more airport time – not my favorite activity.  The flights have been more enjoyable.  I have had my Bose noise cancelling ear buds for quite some time (really makes it fun to “drown” out the noise and listen to my music).  Now I have added a Kindle application on my new laptop and have been reading biographies of folks I think are interesting.   My new laptop is smaller than my previous ones, and converts into a tablet.  That makes it much easier to set up the screen in the cramped seating of today’s planes.

The weather last week was great – generally a light coat was needed in the early morning and early evening. It rained one day last week with lots of rolling thunder while we were in class but when I was outside the weather was great.  This week it has been cooler with a bit more rain.

NTT has changed their meal reimbursement plan from a set per diem to a receipt based meal plan.  They have increased the allowance, but each meal must be documented with a receipt.  As a result, I have changed from getting something in the fast food category to going to a sit down (better quality) meal.  At first I thought the change was going to be a pain, but it is kind of fun to eat better meals.  They even allow one drink for the evening meal.

Tomorrow I fly home.

That is all for these two trips.