Up and Down and Up and Down and...

So this week, I'm working on a small barge.

Now, this isn't a barge like a coal barge that carries (or carried, I don't know how much it still happens) coal down the Ohio River.

This isn't even like the barge that I worked on when they were retrofitting the Webster-Posey Tunnel from Oakland to Alameda.

This is a small barge.

The barge in the Alameda Slough had a conex on it.  And a full sized drill rig.  And three large diameter spuds that kept it in place once it was in position.

I'm on a small barge that uses three small anchors to place itself.

And I'm on it for about 8 hours.

Now, I sometimes have motion sickness.  I've gotten seasick on whale watching trips.  I used to get Doom-sickness with the old FPS games.  I still sometimes have motion sickness symptoms when I play Portal or the new Doom.

I've been okay so far this week.  I know the symptoms and if they start, I stand steady and watch the horizon until they subside.

My issue is that this is the longest I've been on a small craft.  The ferry is less than an hour.  Other things haven't moved as much.  And with this, I'm having to get my land-legs.

I get back to the hotel, I sit at the computer, and everything in my peripheral vision keeps bobbing up and down.

I almost fell on the floor when I stood up from the toilet this afternoon.

At least I feel like I'm rocking myself to sleep without even moving.

Working in a Gold Mine...

So, not really, but that's what a lot of the public in Oroville thinks we're doing.  Lots of people keep asking if they can pan our excavation spoils pile for gold.

It's difficult getting across to people that the whole reason we're working there is to take out dangerous levels of chemicals.  These chemicals are carcinogenic.  Others a simple elemental poisons.  And when I say elemental poisons, I mean two of the most basic: lead and arsenic.

I'll leave you with two quotes.  The first is in relation to pollution, and the second kind of sums up most of the way work has been going for the past two months.  I have actually said the second onsite multiple times.

First:

"Plutonium may give you grief for thousands of years, but arsenic is forever."

-- Pollution, Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett

Second:

"There are four rules you need to remember: Make the plan.  Execute the plan.  Expect the plan to go off the rails.  Throw away the plan."

-- Leonard Snart/Captain Cold, The Flash, "Infantino Street"

But it's just not the same without hearing him say it:

Grand Cycle

So, I guess there are things that happen and you just see them again and again.

People will make mistakes and do whatever they can to cover those mistakes up.  Sometimes it's new people, and sometimes it's the same person who made a mistake a couple years ago.

Stories change slowly over the day, and gradually those stories sound nothing like the stories of the morning.

---

On a related note, apparently I am the calmest and nicest guy around.  Coworkers and subcontractors gauge when things are going bad by when something has managed to damage my calm.

I had a stressful time a couple months back, and a new friend helped me find a way to manage the stress.  He said my calm versus stress level is usually no more than a 2 or 3.  But that day he saw I was up to 11 or 12.  Out of 10.

Then last week I had a bit of an issue.  When I told Jennifer later, about how I had slipped into "my very professional voice," she said, "You mean your dad's office voice?"  I had to acknowledge that.  It's the voice that he used when he was at work, and that I only heard when I got the privilege of calling him at the office, or when I was in trouble.

I have apparently taken that voice as my own for discipline.

I was speaking to a sub, and trying to get across the chain of events their actions had set in motion.  And I was using that voice.  A different sub walked by and later said that I seemed pretty upset.  When asked how upset, he said, "Like about 7 1/2 to 8 1/2 out of ten."

I like to be the guy who everyone gets along with.  [I've always said that I want my tombstone to say "He Made People Smile".  Of course, now I don't want a tombstone, so put a hologram projector in the tree that gets planted for my body to feed.]  But please don't make me use my dad's work voice on you.

Non-Consensual Water Play

So, today work was rained out.  We're at an in-between phase where we're not quite digging in Phase II, and we're still backfilling Phase I.  So yesterday was mostly importing literally tons of material to fill in the hole in the ground we made last year.

Today?  Not so much.  By 8 this morning we had 7/10ths of an inch of rain at the site.  As I write this we are somewhere around 2 1/4 inches.

So today was mostly sitting in the cold office doing paperwork at least after gathering stormwater samples.

Then I hightailed it back to the hotel and enjoyed the pool and hot tub.

Here's hoping that tomorrow the rain tapers off.

Stress Relief

So, back when I was in school studying to be a geologist, my Geologic Structures teacher was giving us assignments.  Mostly they were drawing lines to connect boundaries between rock layers.  Then to better differentiate between the layers, we were supposed to color them.  The best advice she gave us was to have a glass of wine and then draw our lines (connect the dots) and color inside the lines.

Yes, I was a college student learning how to color.

However, the trick with the wine was great because it kept your hand from shaking and gave nice smooth curves.

I've been trying to find things to break up my routine while I'm traveling.  I've been going to San Luis Obispo now every week since the last week of July.  I drive down Sunday afternoon/evening, stay at a hotel during the week, and then drive back home on Friday afternoon.

For those who aren't familiar with the distance, it's 3.5 hours without traffic.  With traffic, it can be anywhere from 4 to 5 hours.  I'm not looking forward to tomorrow's drive home.  One of the worst commutes I ever had was a drive home from a jobsite on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving.

Back when I was with Kleinfelder, I was working at a site in Redwood City for the San Jose office.  At one point, the project manager wanted me to drive the samples to the San Jose office.  I told him that I didn't know where the office was, and that there was no way I was driving that far south and then driving back to PLeasanton to return to company truck, and then driving home to Concord or Pacheco (I forget where home was at that time).  It was a full day's work, and with the drive segments, I didn't get home until after 8:00 that night.

We are all hopeful that tings go well enough tomorrow that we have a half day of work.

Now, on top of this looming drive, I found out on Monday that a good friend and coworker has a sick father.  When she told me, I gave her a hug.  Then she said that he has pancreatic cancer, and I gave her another bigger hug.  Like my mom, his is inoperable, but fortunately discovered early.  The tumor appears to be only the size of a golf ball, and has not spread.  It is early enough that they are still waiting for the biopsy.

So add all of that together with the general background stress of the approaching holidays, high profile work, and being geographically separated from Jennifer, and I needed a distraction.  Reading has been okay, but I'm having trouble focusing and not falling asleep while reading.

So I've been coloring.

I've printed out some outline artwork from Deviantart, and have been coloring some of those.  However, Jennifer and I found a craft store nearby when she came down for a visit, and they had an amazing color-by-numbers book called Color Quest.  It's a not just about coloring by numbers, but it's also an experiment in tessellation.

And so using the cool new app from Google called Photo Scan, I took pictures of my chosen piece of work after each color was completed.

I will say that after the first two colors, I thought it was going to be a snake.

Anyway, it was mindful relaxation, and I fell a bit better.  I might be able to get back to drafting the changed map for the roleplaying game.

Synchronicity

So let's talk about things aligning.

This morning I got up and it was raining.  Not really a big deal, I was prepared.  I had the fender on my bike ready, and just had to gather and don rain gear.

However, about 2/3 to 3/4 of the way to BART, I almost lost control of mu bike as I started to shimmy.  My back tire had gone flat.

Still, things aren't terrible, The rain is minimal, and I make it to BART just in time to get on the train.  Also, the walk could have been so much worse if I'd worn the rain jacket I'd planned to instead of the waxed canvas jacket that Jennifer talked me into.

Then we went one stop, and held at the station for ten minutes because the train ahead of us had door troubles, and we had to single track around it.

The walk from BART to work wasn't too bad.  It only rained on me twice.

So, I'm now sitting at the office waiting for the bike to dry so I can do some work on it.  Also, I'm soaked in sweat from walking in rain gear.

But hey, it could always be worse.

Getting Closure

So I'm in Lodi... again.

I'm here destroying the last of our sampling points.

It's my first day back to work after my mom died.  I decided to come back because I felt that closure of the site would bring me some personal closure.  Lots of things have happened during times I've been working here.

The first time I was here for a subsurface investigation, my grandmother died.

When we were in the midst of the deepest and nastiest part of the remediation, my mom was going through surgery.

But with the closure of the site, I have the chance to close out my feelings.

Back to the Field

So today was the end of the second day back in the field for me.

And this is real fieldwork, not just another site remediation.  We performing a massive subsurface investigation for a relatively small site.  And we've had an army out here doing the work.

There's the crew from my company which including the project manager amounts to six.  Then the drillers have five.  There's a pair of guys performing traffic control.  And then there's the public relations representative.  I'm used to less than half of this for a job.

And then on top of this we don't have an office out here like we've had for the last few remediations, so things were arriving all day on Monday.

[Princess Irulan Moment]

Oh, and did I mention that I'm the site supervisor?  Yeah, all deliveries at the site are looking for me, so I have to leave in the middle of whatever I'm doing and take and/or direct the deliveries.

And in addition to all this I've learned a few things:

Humans are smart and invented things like tables and chairs for a reason.  That reason being working on the ground or while sitting on a cooler and writing on a clipboard on your lap wears your back out really quickly.

I've been doing this for almost twenty years in various capacities and for a surprising number of companies.

It's surprisingly easy to rack up 20,000 steps (or more) just walking around the site.

Anchor Brewing has a series called Zymaster.  Whichever one I had last night was very drinkable.

Restraint

So, today was the first time I'd driven since the second of the month.  And the first drive longer than 15 minutes since... November?  Maybe?

So today, I drove to Lodi for the post-remediation sampling work.  We're signalling soil gas wells, and so I'm on the road at 6:00 Am heading for Lodi.  And the thing that bothered me most about the drive was my seat-belt.

There are no seat-belts on BART.

The closest I come to a seat-belt on my bike is my Chrome bag which goes from left shoulder to right belly, and has a seal-belt style buckle.

Not that I would ever not wear my seat-belt.  It's too ingrained to wear one.

But man, do they pull on your neck when you're to used to wearing one.

Work Slow Down

So, things had apparently been progressing too well this week at work.  I came in this morning and could not connect to our network drives.

Now this is probably only the second time in three years that this has happened at my current company.  Things are much better than they used to be at Kleinfelder.

Kleinfelder had the absolute worst network I've ever experienced.

The way I was told things were set up was that even though the server was in the closet in Pleasanton, the file requests had to travel all the way to HQ down in southern California and then back up to the server.  And then the file traveled back that path to my computer.  It wasn't too bad when opening a file, but when it autosaved (and you wanted this to happen regularly) the computer would freeze for a few seconds.  And then when the network inevitably went down (at least once every couple of weeks), work would essentially stop because you were not to keep any documents on your computer.

Work is progressing to fix our problem today, but I've got flashbacks.

Site Visitor

This week, I've been in San Rafael helping out getting the site characterized for the remediation scheduled for later this year.

Yesterday while I was sitting watching a well be destroyed, I saw something hit my knee.  I was about to brush it off, thinking it was debris being blown around, but I looked closer and saw that it was a ladybug.

I got my phone out and managed to get three pictures of it before it flew away.  The first shot focused more on my pants, so the bug is blurry, and the second I thought it was going to fly away, so it's not very composed.  But the third is almost perfect.  Once again, digital pictures allow for some amazing shots that I never would have taken with a film camera.

I encourage you to right-click on this one and open it in a new tab to see it full size.

Relief is Relative

It says a lot for how hot it has been in Lodi lately that today seems like a relief to be forecast to only reach the mid-80s.

Sunday apparently it was unbearably hot nearing 110, and Monday wasn't much better hitting 106. And that was with a breeze from the west.  Nothing like a hot dry wind blowing across you to make you want to hunker indoors.

Yesterday was a little better being in the high 90s, but the wind was still there.

This morning bike ride to the site was almost pleasant.

Almost.

One. More. Week.

I am nearly done in Lodi.  This is the last week.

After five and a half months, I will get to sleep in my own bed seven nights a week.

And I won't have to deal with the insane temperatures of the valley anymore either.

The Biggest Difference

So on the tail end of the California heat wave, what's the biggest difference I've found between Emeryville and Lodi?

Today both are starting at 55 degrees Fahrenheit.

Emeryville's predicted high: 75

Lodi's predicted high: 95

Enough said.

Smashed Tomatoes

Two weeks ago I sent a couple days in Lodi preparing for last week.

Last week was also spent in Lodi doing digging and drilling.

Jennifer and I took this weekend for some Us Time, and today I am back at work.

I had wondered if I might end up riding my bike in the rain, but the predicted storm hasn't hit land yet, and so it was just riding to work after a bit more than a one week lapse.

At least I can say that I didn't get overly sweaty, but it was a tough ride nonetheless.

Now I get to have a short week this week from having Monday off, and then next week is a nice three day work week.

In the intervening time since my last post, I have passed the halfway mark for the Discworld books.  I can feel the reading accelerating since at this point Pratchett has got his stride and characters set.  And now he begins exploring new characters while putting the main characters into the background.

Additionally, I've been reading the relevant pages from the Annotated Pratchett Files after I finish each book.  Most of the little bits I've already picked up from articles about the author, explanations from the quizbooks, and the occasional news article that ends up revealing the hidden secrets from which Pratchett pulled his ideas, but every now and then there is a note that just makes me smack my forehead.

Travel

So, next week, I'll be in Watsonville helping out with some regular sampling.  So I'll be there Monday through Wednesday.

And today I get to drive to Lodi to submit permits.

At least I'll be away from the Bay Area if BART decides to strike next week.

Haste Makes Waste

So, sometimes things go differently than what you expect.

At MacArthur BART (and most BART stations), it is stated on signs and therefore, predictable what train is on which track.  This morning I came up the stairs and there were two trains waiting at the platform.  On any normal day, from the stairs, Concord/Pittsburg/Bay Point trains are to the right, and Richmond trains are to the left.  The doors to the trains were open, so I rushed into the nearest car, and waited for the doors to close.

As the train took off, I started reading, but I noted that we got to a tunnel before stopping.  I thought I must have not been paying attention, and missed Rockridge.  Then the next station we stopped at was underground.  Neither Rockridge, not Orinda are underground.  Then right before the doors closed, I heard the voice of the operator say, "Richmond."

Damn, wrong train.

So, I got off at Berkeley, thankful that there was a new bike policy in place from July 1 allowing bikes in the commute direction, and rode back to MacArthur where I got on a Concord train, and ended up at work no earlier than I had been getting there.

Telecommunity

So BART is on strike.  And being in negotiations with someone over buying my car, I didn't really have  way to get to Walnut Creek.  I explained my situation with my office manager, and he gave me permission to work from home.  At least this week.

So I've been working in my home office with my work computer.  I've reviewed boring logs, and have been working on reports.  Yesterday was so nice to sit with Jennifer and have lunch together.  And the weather has been so wonderful.

Miles to Go...

So it's been a while since the last post, so once again, we play catch-up.

Last week, I spent three days in Santa Cruz installing soil gas vapor wells around one of the buildings.  Then this week I spent three days sampling those new wells.

Then on Thursday, I got my first crown.  A month ago I had broken one of the tips on my second lower right bicuspid.  I had a filling there and the inner tip had chipped off from the filling when I bit into something.

So I took Thursday off for the crown.  Friday I ended up staying home because I had not slept well due to lingering pain from the work.

Today, after an amazing night's sleep, Jennifer and I went for a bicycle ride.  I suggested we try the Iron Horse Trail.  So we rode to MacArthur BART, and then got off at Walnut Creek BART.  We coasted downhill to the trail near Ygnacio Valley Road, and then rode all the way to the Dublin-Pleasanton BART station.  We took a nice ride back to West Oakland BART and rode home.  With a detour after missing a turn, we ended up doing 27 miles total today.  It was good to be back on the bike for so long.

Another bonus was a set of walkie-talkies that we bought.  It's really difficult sometimes for Jennifer and me to talk to each other when we're on our rides.  So we bought a set that had headphones and vox capabilities.      It was a great experience   We had to learn radio protocols and remember to wait to respond until the radio had completed transmitting, but it made the ride so much nicer.

Tomorrow, we will decide what to do next.

Pea Soup

I got up this morning, and things looked foggy.  And then as I got ready, it just got thicker.

When it was thick enough that the lights of the office building two lots over were just a glowing blur, I decided it would be better to drive to work rather than bike to BART.

And then of course once I got to through the tunnel, it's all clear with the sun lighting up the sky behind Mt. Diablo.

I'll just have to exercise this afternoon.