First Flurries of the Season

We will not have the project completed before the first snow fall...that was today. Just flurries today, but they are forecasting an 80% probability of some accumulation on Saturday. We really never had any plans based on being finished before the first snow, but we were repeatedly told that completion of the construction, by the end of this year, was achievable. "Our" Mike has stated several times that the pace would accelerate once the foundations are in place. The foundations were completed one month ago (October 15), but the pace does not appear to have accelerated yet. The current pace of effort does not appear to support the end-of-year completion objective. I hope to be proven wrong. We are anxious to put the new facilities to use and I am getting tired of defending the pace of work to our neighbors.

As was the case yesterday, there was no activity today in the backyard. Tuesday, "Our" Mike had told me that "Bobcat" Tom would show up this week to complete the utility line trenching. I guess that means we will see him tomorrow, right?

John returned this morning, as promised and continued work on the boiler system in the basement. He will be back tomorrow morning.

The only other activity today was an email from the solar company. Eric (a new name to us) wrote to say that the Net Metering Agreement (NMA) was approved on October 31. Hence the next payment for the solar system is due (an invoice was attached). According to their web site, Eric is the VP of Business Operations and one of the three founders of the company. The last time we communicated with Betsy about the NMA (on October 13), she had not even submitted the application. At the time, she explained that, since this step was not critical path, she did not want to submit the application too soon. This was to avoid us having to make the next payment any earlier than necessary. While, at the time, I was a little skeptical of her explanation for not submitting the application as she had previously said she would do, I thanked her for her thoughtfulness. When (or why) she finally submitted the application, she never informed us. We are not much closer now to needing this approval than we were a month ago when she gave me her (thoughtful) reasoning for not submitting the application at that time. We were also told originally that we could expect to receive the approval notification directly from the utility, and we should let the solar company know when we received it. According to the email I received today, that was incorrect. I responded to Eric asking for a copy of the approval to be forwarded to us. Once we get it, I will arrange payment. I want to be perfectly clear, I trust this company completely...I have just learned that is prudent to request documentation to validate their representations.