SUB Sub sub flooring maybe?

Today the workmen scattered out um.. subflooring type metal structures, I saw them spot welding some of them to the metal frame.  Hope the wind doesn't come up.

Reminds me of an Emmett story.  One summer we had a hail storm that caused considerable damage to my awning.  The awning I had ran the full back of the trailer house I was purchasing.  I put in a claim and got a smallish check to fix the damage.  I asked a friends handy-man husband if he could take the back half of the awning and move it to the front so I would have shade.  Yep.  He worked at it, got it taken down and moved to the front and partially fastened.  He told me the legs were not fastened to the cement pad yet but he would do that the next day. 

The next morning I got up and was half way out the door on my way to work when I realized that the awning over my front door was gone!  It was completely not THERE.  I looked up, nothing.
I walked out into the street and realized that the awning was peeled back lying on top of my roof! 

My neighbors told me later that the wind came up a bit and they hear a hell of noise.  It was my roof peeling up, over, back and down with a bang.  I slept right through it, I just could not figure out who would steal that stupid awning.  The handy-man came over that day, put the awning back and used a nail gun to affix the uprights to the pavement. 

BOOK CASE FULL

That did not take as long to fill as I thought it would.  Just this past week, we picked up one of those folding book case thingies at Freddy's, brought it home, popped the connector dinguses into the slots between the bottom and top and hey, look it's a tall empty book case.  Not for long, I processed the five bags of books donated to me by a long time friend, I added them all to my book collectorz program and I now official have over 2000 books and according to the program the are valued at 8000 dollars.  Hmmm, I think that is a bit on the high side.  Some of these books are older than dirt and well preserved in coffee stains.  But I have always loved the look of books in the house.

One of my favorite memories of young married life was to go visit a retired school teacher who lived near Elk, California.  Her little house sits on a bit of cliff poking out into the Pacific. Inside her house are books....lots of books, books stuffed into risers on stairs, book shelves etc.  Very cosy.  If I ever get my book store opened one of the features will be comfortable chairs, and a good reading light.  

Welding and dreaming

Oh look! He's welding stuff.  There were sparks flying all over the place today.   It is fascinating to watch.  And no, I did not stare
into the welding arc too long, I do wish to avoid retina burn.

Woke up this morning from a "lost" dream.  One of these where you are in a strange city, somewhere in Japan I think and you do NOT know where you are going. 

I was walking around looking for my hotel, it was somewhere nearby I had just gotten turned around.  I went inside another building to ask for a taxi and how much was it? About 360 local, how much is that in dollars, oh 60 dollars an hour.  Um, yeah it might take me that long to find my hotel.

The taxi was all weird looking, very modern, boxy and yellow.  The doors slid up, not swing up, grooves in side allowed the doors to go up like an upright sliding panel.  I may have stumbled onto a design feature here, Detroit!

I'm not even going to the dream interpretation site because it will tell me something boring about feeling lost and needing direction. Duh...

Shopping some more

Today it became apparent that I needed to purchase another folding book case (Blond, please) as I had accumulated three bags worth of books that were decorating the living room floor and soon to be kitty napping places. 

So off we went to Freddy's, but not before checking out South Coast Hospice Thrift Store.  What a neat place!  They have everything!  I have added to my glass candle stick collection.  Time to count them up!  There was not a mate to it rather stands out on its own.  CHTS also has tons of books, I purchased one for a dollar.   We picked up lunch at Burger King, I had the steak burger and it was worth every calorie! 

Weather today Hawaiian Mist, missed Hawaii and hit us.

BRIEF WORD ABOUT FASHION

Most of you are probably aware of a more or less minor fashion trend.  It is that of wearing a different colored T shirt on top of another T shirt,usually by skinny little girls...to keep them warm...and to double up the fabric so chest/breast/nipple stuff does not show through.

I has been my observation however, that some of us are taking that to extremes. In particular very large women who should be shopping for cheap canvas have taken to wearing two T shirts together.  The net effect is that this tends to ENLARGE the arse area quite tragically especially if worn with one side lower on the hip, belly, what-ever-is-sticking-out-the-most area.  Thankfully I don't see a lot of this at work but occasionally a truly magnificent example of the Two T-shirt style ambles through the corridors.

Like the poodle skirt and Mom jeans, this too, shall pass.  Wouldn't it be awful if it stayed?

WE GOT IRON GOIN' UP!

Much fun to watch the crane carefully swing in steel beams.  The guys scamper out with safety harness to tighten bolts.  I'm not sure if these get welded or not.  I'll let you know if we see any sparks fly.  I just hope all this naked iron is grounded.  We don't get a lot of thunder and lightning here but you never know when Mother Nature is having a snit. 

CASSSEROLES TO THE LEFT OF ME...

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Recent discussion in the kitchen:

I'm thinking about making macaroni and cheese.

Well, how would bacon bits taste in that?

Um, the fake bacon bits would break your teeth.

How, about I use those chicken garlic sausages?

Ingredients as follows:

Gather up two cups of bits and pieces of lingering dried pasta from your cupboard.  Bring 4 quarts of salted water to a boil, drop in pasta, cook 8 minutes, drain.

Pour back in the pasta pot, add  1 cup sour cream, half cup shredded Parmesan, 2 ounces shredded Gruyere, 1 cup fresh
mozzarella, half chopped onion, 1 cup sliced mushrooms, half jar capers, salt, pepper, slice four garlic chicken sausages.

Combine well and pour into buttered casserole dish.

Bake for 30 minutes at 350 degrees, top with buttered bread crumbs for another 15 minutes. 

The hubs gives it a thumbs up. I really like the capers.

Couple of interesting things today....

As you can see they painted on water proofing layer and topped that with some sort of board.  Then the orange Hitachi daintily lifted up several bucket loads of fine sand and dumped it into the hole.  Unfortunately one the workman got a neck full of sand and explained in a very loud (insert expletive here) voice not to do that again.  So they got a spotter who hand signaled the Hitachi where where and when to dump.

Later on, maintenance called for one of my co-workers to move her car off the street they were taking a delivery of structural steel and the semi came with a very long trailer and only managed to side swipe one brand new shiny truck, only bent the fender a little bit and the semi actually came out his fender was bent even worse.

They have the elevator shaft partially poured.  I haven't been able to get into good position to take a picture of it. 

Bubble bubble sour dough starter!

I fired up the sour dough starter last night, dumped in two cups of milk and two cups of white flour to the starter and let it rest over night.  It smells SO good!  I made about 7 good sized pancakes, ate three and stored the rest of them for oh maybe a snack.

I also decided to make husband's favorite casserole; stuffing.
This time I had five ears of fresh corn.  I used the Rachel Ray method of corn removal, I put a small bowl upside down in a larger bowl and sliced the kernels off the corn.  I have a good hefty two cups worth of corn.  Chopped onion, wilt in butter in pan, dump in about a generous quart of frozen turkey stock, simmered until warmish.  I tossed the corn into a larger bowl along with the dried bread stuffing, some salt, pepper, other seasonings to taste and a sprinkle of red pepper flakes.  Baked for 60 minutes in 350 degree oven.  Not bad. The corn is surprisingly firm at 60 minutes and tasted pretty good.  Yum!

Today it got almost summery here, weather up to almost 70 degrees.  Enjoy the weekend!

Blog stats ever look at 'em?

I was looking at the dashboard thing on blogger and opened up stats.  There is another area you can look at your audience to see what country the page views are coming from.

I have 38 page views from Iran.   Really.

I pondered what could I have possibly written about that would trigger a page view?  It would have to be something that would be of interest to Iranian viewers and I finally remembered that I had written about a piece of fiction that I was thinking of writing.
One of the pieces regarded something called the Bubble, it was technology from Earth that is a nano-bot product that protects the wearer from EVERYTHING including radiation, poison, force of explosions, etc.  I was trying to explain some of the social and society impacts this would have on various institutions and I mentioned among other things:

Earth’s most historical enemies have been faced with two choices; get along or forget it. I should probably write a sub-story theme about how society has changed due to the Bubble. Long time enemies still exist however the Shiites and Sunni’s have evolved public insulting contests, quite elaborate and beautiful sort of like ceremonial Sumo without the wrestling.

That has to be it, I have never, prior to this, mentioned weapons of mass destruction or other word trigger kind of things.  Weird.

Shukran!  I am also not even sure if I spelled Shiites or Sunni's correctly.

Reminiscing...

This is a Google Earth picture of Kleinschmidt Grade. That thin pencil of dirt road is the grade.   I have never ridden a car over the road and do not wish to do so.  I do remember riding in the car with Dad driving and him pointing out that going up that road was the only way to Paulette Ranch other than by helicopter or a long drive by way of Halfway, Oregon.

You can Google a couple of fairly good You Tube videos of a motorcycle going part way down and another of a very tense family driving down. Gulp.

It was much stepper when I first saw it because the dam had not been built yet and the road went down into the canyon quite a ways.  That is the Snake River you see down there but think lower level, much much lower level.

Today at work I watched a pretty good sized crane rumble into position about the build site and position some good sized pipe.
I was remembering living in Hells' Canyon, especially at Daggett's Trailer Court (Court, Hah!)  Dad had been told that T.K. Jensen was going to move a very big crane from point A to point B and we were all going to go watch the thing creep along.  So we all loaded up and dutifully watched the crane.  Dad always had much admiration for crane operators.   By the time we turned around and went home, a little rain storm had blown along some wind and rain  and all of Mom's freshly hung laundry had collapsed into the very large mud puddle.  I do dimly remember her throwing a fit and falling in it. 

I remember asking Dad if we could possible get a Yuk truck inner tube tire.  He always said something that didn't sound exactly like a promise but we knew it was a long shot.  I think that may have lead to all the men and boys to damn up the creek for a swimming hole. 
You had to know exactly where to dive into the water so you wouldn't knock yourself out on the underwater rocks. 

Hells Canyon was where I learned how to make hand made bound button holes for my doll dresses.  A lady in the "court" taught me how to do them.  I think somewhere about this time Mom got her recipe for raisen spice cake with powdered sugar frosting.  I get a taste for that every once in a while. 

Any other memories surfacing out there?