Denver

We have been in Denver for a month. It is a nice place. Office is only mile away from the studio. We are working on a project to build a plant convert the weapon grade polonium into a fuel rode for nuclear power plants use to generate electricity. The French has one of such plant and we are going to build two. One is located in SC and the other one is in Russia.

Since we are use French design, some documents are written in French. I have to learn how to read French. I told my lead that there is no problem to learn French since I learn English by reading technical stuff. As a mater of fact, I use the equation to understand the French. I have to spend lots of time to understand French if there are no mathematical equations. So I listed a spread sheet to have French and English for my reference. It helped a lot since my memories are not like 40 years ago.

In the office, there are most temporary engineers to do the works. In our section, there are 6 engineers, 5 are temporary. One of them has been here for more than year. There is another old guy (may be ~ 70 years old) in next section. Two weeks ago, few engineers had business trip to SC. They could not find him in the Atlanta airport. Later, the airport security people found him. He disoriented due to his low sugar level and fall down in the airport. They sent him back to Denver hospital had quite few stitches and he is back to work yesterday. He looks OK. But, he said that he has some problem with his legs. It is very sad that he has to work at that age. Daddy and I worked very hard when we were young and we do not have to work at old ages. When getting old, the health is getting bad to worse. That is why there is a retirement and social security system.

Our boss is very nice and most time is hand off. He knows that we can help him to do the job since he is a MIT graduate and knows very well in the field. It is nice to have a boss knows technically.

We are staying in a very small studio with two cooking tops and a small refrigerator. I still can manage to do some cooking during weekdays. We had dumplings too. Daddy now helps to wash dishes every time we have supper at studio. We also found a nice swimming pool just like Rockville’s about 6 miles away. We go swimming twice a week. One of co-worker told us that here is cheap movie theater. The cost is $1.00/ticket. It is only $0.50/ticket on Thursday. We have found the place and going to watch a movie this week.

Our medical insurance is covered by COBRA. The premium is about $750/mo which is much higher. The good thing is that we will be 65 next year so we have to spend about $10,000 total. Not that bad if we have job.

Next long weekend (every other Friday is off day); we are going to Washougal, WA on 9/15/05 and come back to Denver on 9/18/05. We are going to take our friends couple out for nice dinner since they helped me lot in moving out of the Richland. It was nice I made Bechtel to pay the moving. Moving is a big hassle. Doris knows it all well. But it is much nicer let company to do it. They packed everything and moved back to Maryland. My friend Mrs. Ling helped me to open the door for mover to move all stuffs into the basement. Daddy went back to Maryland few weeks ago and took a quick look at the stuff and opened few boxes and found everything is in good order. We moved our desk top computer ourselves to Denver. Our place is too small for printer and scanner. So we only unpacked the computer, monitor and keyboard. There is no place to put a chair in front of the screen and I only use the computer for few minutes.

Last weekend, Daddy drove 1700 miles to National parks. We went to dinosaur National park in CO first. But they do not have any dinosaur bones. So we went to UT to see the dinosaur bones in the stone. They built a building to cover the part of the mountain where the dinosaur bones are located. It is very nice place. We would like to take Vince and Adda to see this place later on.

I like Zion National park most. Daddy went both Zion and Bryce national park before when he was in Los Vegas. But he did not take shuttle to see the best part of those places. In Zion, we saw two climbers on the vertical cliff. They slept against the wall vertically that night to rest. It can not climb into the top by one day. The tour guide told us that the sand rocks are difficult to climb. But it is very safe to climb since every climber knows what they are doing. However, the day before, there was an accident for a hiker. He was off the trail and fall into the bottom of the cliff. Of course, he did not survive. It is very sad.

I picked up three big rocks. One is from the Rocky mountain, other is from the Green River at dinosaur place and third one is from Zion. They are in different colors: Grey, Red, and black.

We took lots of pictures but I did not take the cable with me and daddy did not find the cable from packed boxed. We went Wal-Mart and dumped all pictures on a CD. Hope I can mail you some tonight.