General Jackassery

This is in response to a comment left regarding You don’t get it…. Let’s say that I work as a brick layer or carpenter building houses. I work very hard; all of the people I work with say I’m the hardest worker there. But, I’m also extremely intelligent. When I graduated high school I could have gone to college and in fact I was offered scholarships to several schools. I decided not to go because I didn’t feel like it. So instead of using my brain to do something that could benefit mankind, my country, my family and my self, I decided to become a framer. What does that make me?

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Well, Jackie is moved and working on settling in to his new apartment in Alpharetta. He really seems to be enjoying his job over there and I think this is wonderful opportunity for him. The house is pretty empty right now, I only have my chair in the living room and the office is pretty bare now that Jackie’s huge desk is gone. I’m planning on finally putting my whole desk together though, so the office will be complete in another couple of days and the living room will have furniture eventually.

Work has been pretty slow lately, I guess we’re at the end of a fiscal year and ramping into the new one so there’s not really any project money right now and that means we don’t have much to do for the time being. I’m sure it will pick up soon though.

I think I’m back to being 50-50 on going to Colorado for 4 months. The start date for construction out there keeps getting pushed back, the design is on hold because the contractor screwed some things up and the guy I was replacing could be back from Iraq. Just some of the things that could keep me home in the spring. I wouldn’t be too dissappointed though.

I’m thinking really hard about sitting for the PE in April instead of waiting until October of next year. The whole test is a logistical nightmare, but I think I’d like to have it behind me and never have to think about it again. If I can manage that the only objective I’ll have remaining will be my Master’s degree.

There’s a lot going on outside of work that keeps me busy, but happy. Work is boring and not so happy of late, but like I said I’m sure that will change soon enough. Atleast I’m getting to stay home for a while. I haven’t traveled since the middle of October and it’s looking like I won’t travel again for a while.

Well that’s about all I have for now. I did vote and I’ll probably release the who and why at some point, but I don’t feel like messing with it right now.

Well, it’s taken a little while but the weight that I gained over the winter is starting to come back off. I was a little over 5 lbs lighter this morning when I stepped on the scale than I was a week ago. Granted probably half of that is fluid, but it was nice to be back below 265 for the first time since I passed through on the way up this spring.

Anyway, I got my booty out of bed really friggin early this morning and rode my bike to the ice rink, played hockey for an hour and a half and proceeded to ride to work. This afternoon I’ll ride home. By the time all is said and done I should have ridden 40 miles and played hockey all in one day. Assuming I don’t wuss out and get Jackie to come pick me up in his truck. Probably won’t do that.

My average speed going to the Ice complex was over 18 mph for 19 miles and then I slowed down to 17.7 after a total of 27 miles. So, I’m in pretty decent shape still. Cool!

Well, off I go again. I leave for D.C. tomorrow morning at the booty crack of dawn. You know, I’m actually starting to get tired of this. I’m ready to be home for more than one day from time to time. Oh well, it pays the bills.

So I leave at 6:20 tomorrow morning and return at 8:00 Thursday evening. Then Sarah and I are headed to Nashvegas for the weekend. Not sure if we’re leaving Friday night or Saturday morning, but I’m hoping not to miss my hockey game on Sunday afternoon/evening (not sure when it actually is). I guess we might have to come home after church on Sunday (if we go with her Mom). I’ve missed two games in a row and would hate to miss a third.

Anyway, that’s all I have for now, I’ll unleash the big news in a couple more days.

Until then that should be teaser enough. Some of you already know, others are thinking they know and others have no clue, but it’s good.

That’s all for now,

Todder, out!

Why is it that when you’re stressed out and tired the people you have the least amount of patience with are the ones that you love the most. (more…)

Well, it’s been a busy but not so busy week. I’ve been in a class that was utterly worthless, it pretty much killed any chance I had of being productive for the latter half of the week, but I still managed to get a good bit of riding in. Since last wednesday I’ve ridden 250 miles! (Damn, I just realized how much that is.) I told Sarah today that I had been thinking that I wasn’t doing so well on my training because based on average speeds I’m still pretty far below where I was in November. Then I realized that I’m actually riding about 50% more mileage per week than I was last summer and I’m only aout 6% down on average speed so I’m in pretty decent shape. However, there really aren’t any hills in Huntsville that compare to the ones I’ll be climbing on Mt. Cheaha so it’s going to be a very interesting experience.

In other news, Nanook is doing well, his skin infection seems to be healing and while it still itches I think it’s more from the healing process and the scabbing than the infection he had going on.

Well, that’s about all I’m going to say for now. Hope everyone is doing well.

Todder, Out!

It’s been an interesting week since we got back from regionals. I got home on Monday night to find that Nanook had a raging skin infection, we’re talking VERY bad. I don’t really know what caused it, but it was bad enough that when I stepped out on the back porch I was like “jeeze what is that smell!” I noticed that the birds had been on the back porch eating the dog food because there was a ton of bird poo back, so I thought that maybe that was causing it. Finally Nanook sat down and started to scratch and I saw the hair was gone and blood and ooze where running down his chest, as I got closer I realized it was he that smelled and I finally figured out what it smelled like! Rancid meat, it’s a smell I’d only encountered one other time. When I came back from Sewannee after being gone all summer, the power had been shut off and we had left meat in the refrigerator, when I opened the door to the fridge it almost knocked me over. Anyway, that’s what Nanook smelled like, the flesh was literally rotting off. I took him to the vet and he’s going to be okay, but I can’t help but feel sorry for him. He’s had a pretty rough go of it the last couple of months. He’s an AWESOME dog though, he seems to take it all in stride and the only thing that’s important to him is that you love on him a little! I’ve made a promise to the dogs and myself to start spending more time with them. I’m away from home WAY too much.

Anyway, that same evening Sarah calls and says that she’s found a stray cat and she wants to bring it home. She ask me if she should! What can I say I love animals, I told her that if she didn’t think it had a home and if she thought it wouldn’t be able to take care of itself then bring it home if she wanted to! So she did and I took it to the Vet yesterday and the new Cat is doing wondefully. She’s staying at my house until Sarah get’s back in town, she’s already litter trained herself and she doesn’t seem to scratch at anything. She just seems so happy to have a home, a dry, warm place to sleep, and food. I’m trying to talk Sarah into naming her Lilo, I think that would be cute since I have a cat named Stich!

Okay, so things seem to be settling down, there’s a lot of work to do to get the team ready for nationals and there’s a lot of work for me to do to get ready for my bike ride in May, but atleast the burden and the stress of trying to win the regional competition is off our backs and we’re back in the game at the National level. I guess I should say “They.”

Well, that’s all I have for now. Hope all my readers are doing well. Life is good!

Todder, Out!

Today I got on my bike and hit the road with a group of guys from the IM branch (same guys I started riding with last summer) it’s the third time I’ve ridden my bike this week. I’ve also played hockey and run twice for a total of about 2 miles. I’ve started running while the girls are practicing in the mornings becuase I truly believe there is NOTHING on this planet that will make your heart and lungs stronger any faster than running. Anyway, I’ve started pushing pretty hard again to get ready for the ride that I talked about in my last post. So William and I were flying, by the time we hit the neighborhood that we usually ride through we were already at an average speed of over 18 mph. (Normally we would just be approaching 16 mph at that point.) But, alas we had to slow down and wait on Mabry because he just isn’t strong enough to ride at that speed and he refuses to push himself.

There’s the difference: I’m not really strong enough to ride at that speed either, but I’m not going to just let someone ride away from me. Anyway, William and I ended up turning around and waiting on Mabry several times. We added about a mile and half to the distance that we would have ridden because we would turn back and pick Mabry back up. Finally when we were about 4 miles out, we dropped Mabry and William and I were both just too tired to go back and get him. (Funny you drop someone and you’re the one that’s too tired to go back and get him.) Anyway, I guess riding into a 15 mph headwind for 8 to 10 miles will wear you down, especially when you’ve been climbing (we decided to ride the rolling course). By the time all was said and done William and I rode about 21 miles at an average of 17 mph. We should have been closer to about 18 mph but we lost a lot of speed turning around to pick up Mabry.

When we all got back and in the locker room, Mabry said, “You guys are already at speeds that we were riding last summer, I can’t hang with you and I’ll never be able to catch you because I just can’t get enough time on the bike.” That made me feel pretty good. I’ve been away from riding seriously for about 3 months now and within two weeks of riding again I’m already back close to where I was. Today for the first time in a long time I cruised up the little incline on Plummer Rd. at over 20 mph. It’s not a big hill but I had been slowing down to about 13-15 going up it. So I’m starting to get my power back and my endurance is coming back too. Unfortunately the majority of the climbing that I’ll do on the Cheaha Challenge will be in a 25 mile segment. There is a 3.8 mile climb that is an average grade of 8%, that’s after you’ve already ridden 40+ miles and then you get to turn around and go back.

So to make a long story short, I was glad to hear Mabry concede that I’m WAY better than he is right now and he’ll probably never catch me. However, I was saddened by the realization that I can’t use him to help me get stronger. See William and I are the competitive sorts, he know’s that I’m not going to let him ride away from me, and if I do, he know’s that I’ll never let him get too far out that I can’t real him back in when I want to. (Today I let him get out about 150 meters, closed the gap and blew by him within a mile of the finish. ) So the two of us kind of feed off each other, if one of us is feeling a little froggy, the other is going to sit on his wheel and make him work for it. Unfortunately I can’t even Mabry to sit on my wheel. I was telling William today, “You know, I can understand if you can’t stay with me on the hills, but anybody on just about any type of bike should be able to tuck in my slipstream and ride nearly effortlessly at any speed I’m going.” William agreed, although he has said that when I get in a rythm on the flats, I’m very hard to pass. He said that last summer after I pulled him all the way down Jordan LN at over 25 Mph into a 15 mph head wind. He was feeling froggy and decided that he was going to try to pass me and take off. When he broke out of my draft the wind slapped in the face and he literally couldn’t pull hard enough to get around me.

Oh well, I just thought that last little bit was a funny story, I’m really not trying to pat myself on the back. Although it is good to build yourself up a little bit every now and again. Put me next to Rodney and the 50 year old man would smoke me and never look back!

It’s going to be an interesting summer, my goal is to finish the Cheaha Challenge, survive Rodney’s trip to the mountains and Qualify for RAAM (stands for the Race Across America)

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.

Okay, so remember how I thought it was going to me a nice easy pace up until the final design submittal was due? Yeah, not gonna happen. I took off early on Friday afternoon because I already had 106 hours in for the pay period, normal pay period 80 hours, last pay period normal would have been 72 because Monday was a holiday. So I put in about 34 hours of overtime. Anyway, while I was sitting on the tailgate of Mo’s truck waiting on him to get done at the vet I recieved a call from Thad saying that he’d already put us in for overtime this week and next. “Oh hell, why?” “Rodney says that we can’t have the radius curves that we have without superelevating them (banking for non-civil engineer types)” That means that we have to go back in and replace the line work for the road, do further annotation and replace the road cross sections in those areas where we have curves that need superelevation. Anyway, that means quite a bit of work for us since I’ve never done superelevation with InRoads. That means I have to learn more about the software. On top of that I have yet another software package that I need to learn. The software developers for this package are coming on Thursday and Friday to install and teach us how to use this new Range Design software. Since I have one of the three most powerful machines in the building, it’s going on my computer. That means that Thursday and Friday are going to be Range Days while the rest of the week and Sunday will be Pueblo days. Then there’s the hockey game Friday night, after the hockey game I’ll be at Johnson helping to get the mold and the cross-section ready so that we can lay up the Concrete Canoe and the layers for the cross section on Saturday. Probably be there all day an well into the night Saturday and then I’ll be coming into work on Sunday and could conceivably be here all night Sunday night. It’s “B” “E” “A” utiful man! When this is all over what do I have to look forward to? Another week in the office. But atleast the cross-section will be to the point that I won’t have to work on it every night. One day I’ll have free time again. But for now, I’m not complaining, it pays the bills and that’s something that is of incredible importance.

That’s all I have for now. Just realized I hadn’t posted in a while.

Todder, Out!