This and That
Apr. 14th, 2005 10:52 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
hafoc
Fire Danger
Today I was walking across the oil-and-gasoline-stained asphalt of a local parking lot when I nearly stepped on a cigarette butt. It was still smoking. Hrmm.
Which reminds me that when I came back north from my semiannual Smoke School recertification yesterday, we drove past a forest fire. Not much of one, apparently-- I haven't found any news about it. But we could see the smoke 35 miles before we got about as far north as the fire.
You wouldn't think so, since all that snow just melted-- except for the last bit of the pile the guy plowing my driveway left in the front yard. But this is our fire season. The dead leaves from last year are flash-fire dry. And then we haven't had rain in a couple-three weeks, and not much then.
The DNR fire crews are doing well, but if we get two or three fires going at once, things are going to get interesting around here. In the same sense that World War II was interesting.
Mud
Another fun thing about spring around here is that everything thaws from the top down. Which means that when the gravel roads start to thaw, you've got about six or eight inches of mud over a still-frozen layer still impervious to water. This is sloppy mud, folks.
Couple-three weeks ago now, when the mud was at its height, my co-worker I'll call Terri and I went out to look at some oil and gas sites. These were CPFs, Central Production Facilities, which are a bit more on an industrial scale than the wellheads themseles. Therefore odds are the roads to them were pretty good, by local standards. Still, I decided to take Trukly II instead of one of the state-issue Cavaliers. No big decision, actually, since the only way I can drive one of the Cavs is with my right knee somewhat over the floor-mounted gearshift lever. Which isn't so bad, until you squirm trying to get comfortable and shift the car into neutral while going down the highway at about twenty over the speed limit. I don't know what species the Cav was designed for, but it wasn't human. Munchkins maybe.
Anyhoo, we're out there in Trukly, and staying on the "good" roads. Not the paved main roads, but good gravel roads, which under normal conditions would be fine for any normal car.
These were not normal conditions. We were rocking and banging over the roads. We were slinging clots of mud in all directions. All we needed was a slow-motion camera and Bob Seager singing "Like A Rock" and we'd have one of those Macho Working Guy truck commercials.
Couple days later, when I finally washed the truck, I found one of the wheels was severely out of balance. I figured I'd loosened one of the wheel weights with baja-ing around in all that mud, and blew it completely off with the pressure spray. But I had in the back of my mind it might be mud stuck in one of the wheels, on the inside where I couldn't see it.
Another co-worker of mine confirmed, as we drove to Alpena, that the right rear was hopping pretty badly. We found a car wash. I tried to blow the mud out with the pressure wand, but it wasn't moving. So I crawled right under the truck (on wet concrete in near-freezing weather) to put the nozzle right against the mud. That moved it, what looked like about five pounds of it.
Man, that mud was deep.
PDAs
I said somewhere that I didn't get PDAs. Why spend that much money for a handheld when you could get a laptop?
Well, I still don't get the EXPENSIVE PDAs. Especially in my life, the thing is going into harm's way. Doesn't make sense to spend a fortune for some combined cell phone/ pda/ camera thing when there's a good chance you'll get into some conditions on the job that will destroy it before its time.
I did, however, get a great deal on a Palm Tungsten E. Probably because the E2 just came out, I could actually afford the thing.
Well, I grok PDAs now. This isn't a computer, it's my pocket planner shrunken down, plus an MP3 player, a game machine, a portable library (containing at present three books (one of which is audio) and an encyclopedia. It can also become a photo album once I throw a few selected favorite pictures onto it.
Gah, I'm becoming such a geek. I blame Teffie. :D
Today I was walking across the oil-and-gasoline-stained asphalt of a local parking lot when I nearly stepped on a cigarette butt. It was still smoking. Hrmm.
Which reminds me that when I came back north from my semiannual Smoke School recertification yesterday, we drove past a forest fire. Not much of one, apparently-- I haven't found any news about it. But we could see the smoke 35 miles before we got about as far north as the fire.
You wouldn't think so, since all that snow just melted-- except for the last bit of the pile the guy plowing my driveway left in the front yard. But this is our fire season. The dead leaves from last year are flash-fire dry. And then we haven't had rain in a couple-three weeks, and not much then.
The DNR fire crews are doing well, but if we get two or three fires going at once, things are going to get interesting around here. In the same sense that World War II was interesting.
Mud
Another fun thing about spring around here is that everything thaws from the top down. Which means that when the gravel roads start to thaw, you've got about six or eight inches of mud over a still-frozen layer still impervious to water. This is sloppy mud, folks.
Couple-three weeks ago now, when the mud was at its height, my co-worker I'll call Terri and I went out to look at some oil and gas sites. These were CPFs, Central Production Facilities, which are a bit more on an industrial scale than the wellheads themseles. Therefore odds are the roads to them were pretty good, by local standards. Still, I decided to take Trukly II instead of one of the state-issue Cavaliers. No big decision, actually, since the only way I can drive one of the Cavs is with my right knee somewhat over the floor-mounted gearshift lever. Which isn't so bad, until you squirm trying to get comfortable and shift the car into neutral while going down the highway at about twenty over the speed limit. I don't know what species the Cav was designed for, but it wasn't human. Munchkins maybe.
Anyhoo, we're out there in Trukly, and staying on the "good" roads. Not the paved main roads, but good gravel roads, which under normal conditions would be fine for any normal car.
These were not normal conditions. We were rocking and banging over the roads. We were slinging clots of mud in all directions. All we needed was a slow-motion camera and Bob Seager singing "Like A Rock" and we'd have one of those Macho Working Guy truck commercials.
Couple days later, when I finally washed the truck, I found one of the wheels was severely out of balance. I figured I'd loosened one of the wheel weights with baja-ing around in all that mud, and blew it completely off with the pressure spray. But I had in the back of my mind it might be mud stuck in one of the wheels, on the inside where I couldn't see it.
Another co-worker of mine confirmed, as we drove to Alpena, that the right rear was hopping pretty badly. We found a car wash. I tried to blow the mud out with the pressure wand, but it wasn't moving. So I crawled right under the truck (on wet concrete in near-freezing weather) to put the nozzle right against the mud. That moved it, what looked like about five pounds of it.
Man, that mud was deep.
PDAs
I said somewhere that I didn't get PDAs. Why spend that much money for a handheld when you could get a laptop?
Well, I still don't get the EXPENSIVE PDAs. Especially in my life, the thing is going into harm's way. Doesn't make sense to spend a fortune for some combined cell phone/ pda/ camera thing when there's a good chance you'll get into some conditions on the job that will destroy it before its time.
I did, however, get a great deal on a Palm Tungsten E. Probably because the E2 just came out, I could actually afford the thing.
Well, I grok PDAs now. This isn't a computer, it's my pocket planner shrunken down, plus an MP3 player, a game machine, a portable library (containing at present three books (one of which is audio) and an encyclopedia. It can also become a photo album once I throw a few selected favorite pictures onto it.
Gah, I'm becoming such a geek. I blame Teffie. :D
