General Jackassery

That’s a lot of pages, only about 230 were drawings and the rest are specifications and general paperwork that goes along with a design package. I was responsible directly and indirectly for about 200 of the drawings and literally had my hands on every single drawing in the package because as we found out that the .pdf files that we sent out were not to scale I went back and cleaned some of the Electrical and Electronic Security Sytems drawings. Right now I’m starting to work on a Design Cost Analysis for some road upgrades out at Pueblo and in doing that I’m going back and looking at the phases that this design went through. I need to know how many hours I spent working on each individual iteration of the design so that I can come up with a good guess as to how long this other design is going to take.

It’s pretty neat to look back and see how things progressed, this Design started at 35% as one package with 65 sheets in it. If finished with three packages and 230 sheets, not including specs. I remember when I was younger looking at design packages and thinking that I’d never be able to do something like that. But I’ve learned over the course of this design that it’s really not that hard, you just have to do a little at a time adding details and notes and cross-sections and profiles until before you know it you have a design that is actually constructable. What’s neat to me is that the life of a design is much life the life of a person, you start out with nothing and you slowly start building a little at a time until 27 years later you have a very complex individual that’s composed of a lot more than 814 pages. From one cell you have a mountain of information, memories and experiences stored in you.

Anyway, I just think that’s pretty cool.

You know, I’ve been saying for too long that I was going to get back into cycling hardcore to try to drop a few lbs by the time we leave for regionals. So last week I told myself that I had a holiday on Monday and I was going to use that to go on a decent ride that would maybe catapult me back into the swing of things. Well I rode yesterday and today, a grand total of 41 miles over the two days, the wind chill just standing still was 36 degrees now, take the wind speed up to 18-25 mph and your windchill drops into the teens. Needless to say that’s pretty cold when you’re on the bike for an hour. Yesterday wasn’t that much better, but atleast I was dry. Oh well, what doesn’t kill you can only make you stronger and I certain need that. The good news is, today was about as miserable as I will ever allow myself to be on the bike. It took nearly an hour for me to regain feeling in my toes, I either have to get more cold weather gear (NOT!) or use the trainer on days when I know it’s going to be super cold. And I’m sure there will be a few more of those over the next couple of months.

Okay, that’s all for now.

Ever feel like you’re missing a huge part of the picture and that part of the picture is bomb that’s about to be dropped on your head. I haven’t been able to get that thought out of my mind the last couple of days. Don’t know why, but I have this constant feeling that I’m missing something important. Kind of scary! Oh well, not much I can do about it, just go on and hope for the best.

Okay, so I have a few minutes to update my faithful two readers on my life. I’m about 99.9% done with this design and it has to be done today because it has to go out the door on Monday and I won’t be here Monday and I’m not working this weekend. So that’s good news. The bad news is that I could have about 25% more work to do if Rodney decides to convince Thad that we have to change the layout of the intersection for our road. That would suck! But, I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it.

In other news things in my life seem to be progressing nicely. I’ll be really glad when the academic year is over so I can have friends again for a little while and so I can have a girlfriend that has just a little more time on her hands. Right now she’s buried under the concrete canoe competition and while I’m not opposed to her doing that (wouldn’t matter if I was) I’ll be glad when it’s all over. I think she will be glad too.

Mom’s coming over this weekend, we’re going to figure out what I need to do to make my kitchen look nicer and I’m probably going to tile it. I already have the tile, it’s just a matter of laying it out and getting it done. I think any kind of ceramic tile will look nicer than the vinyl that’s down there now, but I think what I’m putting down will be very nice looking. It helps to know that I’ve got enough tile to do the kitchen, the half bath and the laundry room, all the grout, the thinset morter and the admixture for the mortar to lay the tile on top of the vinyl all for less than $500 and on top of that if I went to a normal tile store to buy this stuff and had someone install it for me it would have cost over $3000. Sometimes it’s nice to be good with you hands. That should be a nice little investment in the house.

So that’s mostly what’s going on in my life right now. Hope everthing is going well for everyone else.

Todder, Out

There only several things that I would be willing to lay down my life for: family, several very close friends and my country. Ryan Baskin is one of those friends that I would do anything that he ask me to do because I trust him so much that I know he would never ask me to do anything that didn’t have to be done. He’s one of a very few people that I trust completely and with my life. So it’s with great sadness that I learned of the death of Ryan’s father last Friday morning. Ryan’s dad was a wonderful man. He was probably the most intelligent man I’ve ever met, but he was also one of the most down to earth people I’ve ever met too. As one of his friends described him he was as comfortable talking to an Astrophysicist as he was a garbage collector and those people were as comfortable talking to him. In talking with one of my friends on Friday I told him that I wasn’t sure where Mr. Baskin would go. I wasn’t sure what his beliefs were and for that reason alone I didn’t know if he would go to heaven, though I know for a fact that he deserved the best.

I realized while sitting at the funeral service on Monday afternoon that you tell how a person was by the people they surround themselves with. If you never met Mr. Baskin you could know him through his friends as a very caring, loving, intelligent and extremely humorous man! In my opinion if those were his only good attributes (they weren’t) that should be enough to get him through the doors to heaven. Mr. Baskin’s daughter said that he would never be idolized by Marvel comics as a hero, but he was her hero. To her knowledge there was no one on this planet that had a bad thing to say about him and she can think of no better way to define a hero than that. I think that’s truth. If you can walk through life and never make an enemy you’ve accomplished a lot.

Over the course of the weekend I realized that the saying, “The clock of life is wound but once and no man knows when his will stop,” is so important to think about. Life is short! I spent a lot of time this weekend putting out fires that I had started myself. Accidental yes, but regardless of cause the damage was done.