I'm sitting in the dining room on a Monday morning, watching birds at the feeder in a quiet house and enjoying the last day of a long weekend.  Yep, that's right!  For the first time in four years, I have a weekend off without using vacation to buy it.  One of our older drivers got in some trouble that had apparently been a long time coming, and his route was offered to me, so I've given up the beautiful weekend route along Virginia's Shenandoah Valley in exchange for a route in the beautiful, but much colder, mountains of northeastern Pennsylvania.

Here's a statue in memory of the soldiers who fought for the Confederacy.  This stands in Luray, VA, in front of one of the stores on my old route. (iPhone cameras are not good tools for low light photography, but they stand in fairly well, when they are all you have.)

The best part of the switch is I'll be working Tuesdays and Fridays with an extra day thrown in, more than likely, every other Wednesday, so I'll have weekends off for the foreseeable future.

Here's a mural in honoring the hard working, blue collar men from the Pennsylvania mountains.

Many of these towns are situated on large rivers and supported flourishing coal mining and steel mill operations in years gone by.

Our trailer broke on this past Friday's route, so my first weekend didn't start 'til about noon on Saturday, but it was a nice relaxing weekend with the family, anyway, and we actually were able to attend church together again.  It was nice to simply be around when my wife and the kids were around.  For the last several years, that had been a luxury reserved for the summer and holidays.  All in all, it was a nice, quiet weekend, a perfect way to start my reintegration into my family's world.