first full fall weekend

Today is ...Sunday? Yeah. Yesterday was the cousin's wedding, up on his old homeplace, outdoors, like ours was. Just last week while cleaning out the old entertainment center th'Mr found the tape of our wedding and we watched it. It's just been six years ago (my, how much thinner we both were). The cousin who got married yesterday was at ours, in the video. I just had a thought: let's one day take that tape up to the homeplace and let cousin & new bride P watch it. Or invite them here (maybe better, since it's VHS and many people don't have that). I'm babbling. Drink coffee now.

Dad (th'Mr Sr) and brother T with wife L & sons was down for the festivities; Dad was here when I got home Friday night but headed back to Indiana from the wedding, so we have the house to ourselves for the rest of the weekend. I see the dr on Monday, so still have two days of weekend left.

Tuesday I'll move into my apartment. It's very small, only two rooms - one of which is the kitchen (new linoleum, full size stove, refrigerator, adequate cupboards) and the other is the "other" room (new carpet, new paint, ceiling fan/light combo, two windows). The bathroom is very small and the shower is just a tiny cube, but hopefully the water heater is large. I'll be renting month to month, at least at first. $400 to move in. $250/mo rent, trash pick-up included but the rest of the utilities are mine - gas (water heater) electric (window a/c & baseboard heat) and water. No furniture. So far my packing includes two sleeping bags, a coffee pot and my craft lamp. And Dad's old microwave; he brought it down for us. (He also bought us a mower, but that's another story).

Losing track of what I wanted to write. Get another cuppa coffee now.

Friday I was back on temporary in the precip again. The powers-that-be decided one foreman's crew would go into the blue box to pull cable, and the other crew (that would be the one I'm on) would go to the FGD side. Normally I don't say a lot. Not to say I don't talk --quite the opposite is true-- but normally I don't argue or bitch a lot about what they want out of us. It's work, work by definition is something they have to pay you to do, therefore it isn't always pleasant. I shut up and do my work. This is different. When my referral says "outage" and someone else's referral says "FGD" then me going to FGD to work is like double-booking. Double-jobbing, to be exact. As if... suppose Pritchard has this little job downtown, in an office building, say, pulling belden cable (nice, easy job), wearing tennis shoes and baseball caps instead of steel toe boots and hard hats, a climate-controlled job instead of a powerhouse. Suppose they come to us one morning and say, "You'll be working on the office building job this weekend, on overtime. They've fallen behind." Oh sure, it's tempting, but it's plain wrong. And it's no different from sending us to the FGD side. FGD, if I haven't already said so, stands for Fossil-Gas Desulphurization. It's what they call "the scrubbers," which is basically the catalytic converter that will knock most of the sulphur dioxide our of the plant's emissions.

So anyway, Friday again I had the easy job of first checking my entire work area (the precipitator) to be sure nothing had tripped (plenty had), resetting tripped breakers, turning on the air conditioners, making sure all the welder six- and eight-packs were running, then sitting in the break trailer waiting to be notified in case anything went wrong. After the boilermakers quit for the day I went around & shut down all the air handler units.

This is not what I had in mind when I raised hell about not going to FGD. What I wanted was for them to stick to the original plan and put one journeyman (not necessarily me) and a foreman in the precip every Friday, in rotation, while the rest of us went into the blue box to pull cable. I'd had it the Friday before, now it was someone else's turn. The one whose turn it was didn't "get" it and was happy to go work on the FGD side (sigh) ...some people you can't teach. Enough about work. Now it's the weekend.

Dad, as predicted, was horrified when he saw the grass and went to Lowe's and bought us a lawnmower. Never mind that neither th'Mr nor I was particularly worried about it, that in fact we were charmed by the fact we've got praying mantis walking around



on the windows, never mind that in a month they'll be slashing the price on new mowers by probably a third, never mind that in a month I'll be able to afford one (at the price they are now, even)... he bought us a mower. And th'Mr mowed. It's as much about the exercise as the grass; if he mows ten minutes a couple times a day he'll have more exercise than if he doesn't.

Shorty with catnip and tall grass:

The new mower, at rest: