Saturday, January 05, 2008

Back From New Hampshire

I spent the last two days taking my Indonesian friend to Concord, New Hampshire, where she will be attending classes at the Franklin Pierce Law Institute shortly.

As a sign of how little I have been paying attention to the news lately, I didn't realize that we were arriving in New Hampshire just as the primary race there was heating up. But once I got off I-93 at exit 14 and saw the multitude of signs for the various presidential candidates for both parties, I understood what was going on. Probably the saddest sight I saw was a man standing on a street corner at the intersection of Loudon and Main Street holding aloft a Dennis Kucinich sign. Talk about an exercise in futility.

The bad news was that my friend did not yet have a place to stay for the semester. To keep costs down, she shared a room with my wife, kids, and I on Thursday and Friday night, but she would need to reserve a motel room for next week while she looked for housing. Unfortunately, because of the primary election coming up on Tuesday, motel room availability in Concord was minimal for the weekend and virtually non-existent on Monday and Tuesday. I called one motel last night to try and book tonight and tomorrow night for my friend, and while I was on the phone with the clerk, she put me on hold for a moment. I was starting to get worried when she got back on the phone with me and informed me that they just had a cancellation and that a room with a single King-sized bed was now available up to Wednesday. I made the reservation so that my friend would have a place to stay at least until Wednesday morning while she set up housing arrangements.

Leaving Concord this morning shortly after 10 a.m., I had to bring my wife to her nursing home job in upper Manhattan. Her shift was scheduled to start at 3 p.m. I was reasonably confident I could make it, and I probably would have gotten her to work on time, except for the unavoidable fact that by 1:30 we were all quite hungry and needed to eat. Consequently, my wife ended up being 22 minutes late. Oh well, still not bad considering where we started from. I told my wife that at least for today, she would have the longest commute to work of anyone at the nursing home.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

What a hassle. I'm glad you got lucky with the hotel.

Tommykey said...

On an even better note Gordo, my friend e-mailed me last night and told me she found a place to stay that she will share with several other students at the school, and that she was due to move in today.

She's a bright lady and I know she wil do fine.