A Pleasant Surprise

Today (Monday) was as normal a day as days ever are at the Smid household. Then about 5 PM the phone rang. Seeing it was from someone at Monsanto, I quickly looked forward to talking to our son Matt who began a new job with Monsanto in Belmont ON this morning.

For the last several years he has been working in Monsanto's soybean program in Guelph ON and today he began his new job as a TOM in Monsanto's corn program. TOM stands for Technical Operations Manager. Moving to Belmont (which is near London ON) means Matt will be only an hour away from home.

When I answered the phone Matt said, "Hi, Mom! What's for dinner?" I asked what he would like for dinner and he said that whatever we were having would be fine. So 90 minutes later Matt pulled in, just as dinner was coming out of the oven.

We had a nice dinner together and then went to see Granddaddy at the Village. Daddy was really surprised to see Matt on a Monday night. Usually when our sons come to visit it is on the weekends, so a Monday night was completely "off the radar" as far as Daddy was concerned. We had a good visit and the aides were nice enough to wait about Daddy's bath until we left since "his grandson doesn't come to visit that often". That was really nice.

We had a chuckle with one of the aides. On Daddy's dresser is a picture of our family 13 years ago when we celebrated our 25th wedding anniversary. I asked Donna if she could tell from the picture which one of the young men in the picture was sitting beside his grandfather now. She looked and then picked William in the anniversary photo. That was funny because people always mixed Will and Matt up. I don't think they would do so now, but when they were growing up it happened quite often.

Matt spent the night here and then drove to Belmont to work in the morning. It is an hour's drive from Belmont to Ridgetown and an hour and ten minutes from Belmont to Guelph. Right now Matt doesn't have anywhere to live in London or Belmont, so he will be commuting to either Guelph or Ridgetown every day. Hopefully that means we will see more of him, at least for a while. However, he is hoping to finish up some projects he has on the go in his house in Guelph before he puts it on the market, so he will probably try to spend as much time as possible in Guelph for the time being.