Miracles of modern technology

In case I haven't mentioned it, I live out here amongst the idiocy of rural life*, but I work in the city, in Providence specifically. They make me park about six miles from my office which gives me a couple of nice walks each day. My path takes me through a whole lot of vacant land resulting from the relocation of a stretch of interstate highway, which has been gradually undergoing transformation.

The latest project is what I believe to be a new electrical substation. For some reason it has to be on piles, a lot of them. Watching this procedure has been fabulous entertainment. First a big crane, a really humongous auger, and the pile driver, in pieces, showed up about 400 yards away from the site. They set up the pile driver over a period of a few days, attaching and raising the boom and then attaching the driving apparatus. They flew the flag of the company from the top of the boom, which is a good 40 feet high, I would say. The body of the machine is on tank tracks and obviously has to weigh mass quantities of tons in order to counterweight the boom.

After mucking around the site with backhoes and loaders for a week or so, they finally drove the big boys over there. The piles arrived on flat bed trucks, I'd guess 25 foot long  slabs of reinforced concrete. The crane was for getting them off the truck -- it turns out the pile driver does its own hoisting.

First they drill holes in the ground with the augur. The pile driver has two cables running from the top of the boom which get attached to u-bolts in the pile, one near the top and the other just above the center. Then the operator hauls the pile toward the vertical, runs the driving apparatus up the boom,  and maneuvers the top of the pile into a box in the apparatus, which is an astonishingly deft feat. Rather scarily, men on the ground then push the bottom of the pile -- it's obviously perfectly balanced on the lower u-bolt -- into a fitting that holds it in place. The machine then crawls to position the pile over the appropriate augur hole and starts pounding. In the old days they worked by repeatedly dropping a weight on the top of the pile -- you probably have an image of those big weights going up and down -- but now it uses a hydraulic ram.

This machine has got to cost half a million bucks. It's not what we think of as high tech but in fact it's the culmination of probably centuries of development, since the steam engine first came into use. I haven't researched the history but obviously there has been continual refinement of materials and machinery. The kind of construction that's happening by my daily walk would not have been possible 100 years ago and probably would not have been an economically viable choice until the postwar years. What we have now is an incremental improvement since then, as far as I know, but still, this is an astonishing capability that humans have given themselves, to pound 25 feet of reinforced concrete into the ground in about 20 minutes.

I got to observe all the stages of the operation on a day when my power at home had been knocked out by a windstorm. It happens a lot here, since the power lines run through the woods, so I get to think about our state of interdependence quite a lot. When you think about it, if you were to pull one thread from the fabric of civilization, you could get the whole thing to unravel. It's astonishing that it doesn't happen, actually.

Cold

I was plowing my driveway the other day. As I came around a bend, I saw a big coyote running through the woods along the hillside above me. It was evidently following a scent, direct and determined, and it paid no attention to me and my tractor. The six inches of snow on the ground meant nothing to it. It turned down the hill and ran right in front of me, maybe 20 yards away, and headed off to the south.

My neighbor has a little dog who roams. She comes by my place pretty often. So I sent my neighbor an e-mail mentioning the coyote. He didn't respond, so I don't know if he was grateful for the tip or if he was resentful because he thought I was criticizing his dog parenting style.

Anyway, last night the temperature hit 11 below Fahrenheit and right now, at 10:00 am, it's still below zero. I could barely keep the house livable. So it's kind of amazing that the critters can make it through this weather but obviously they can. Sometimes it just gets this cold. They don't get the weather forecast so they can't prepare ahead of time. I imagine the coyotes have a den somewhere and can huddle together, but I do wonder about the deer.

Anyway, I have to step outside now to grab some firewood. I expect I'll survive.

It's not as if they can "predict" the weather

Actually they usually do a pretty good job of late but not this time. A snowstorm that was supposed to blow harmlessly out to sea wound up dumping 10" of wet, sticky glue on Friday. The scene was surreal. The shit piled up on the tree branches until I just heard the sound of breaking wood all around me in the forest.

Since I didn't have warning, I hadn't put the snowplow on my tractor so I had to wrestle with it with my feet deep in slop and sleet falling soaking my jacket. Naturally the plow didn't want to seat properly on the apparatus so I spent half an hour pounding on it with a BFH* until I finally got it to lock on. Then when I did go to plow the snow was so gluey it  just stuck to the blade and wouldn't dump. I had to keep pushing plow loads to the side, the job took me an hour and a half and the driveway is still kind of a mess, though passable. The beech trees were all hanging over the middle of the road so they dumped their load on me as I passed underneath, and it went right down the back of my neck.

Oh yeah, among the innumerable limbs that came down in my driveway was one huge piece of oak that I couldn't move by hand. And neither of my chainsaws would start, for some reason. I did finally manage to push it out of the way with the tractor but I couldn't get it far enough off the road to get the brush out of the way so I had to cut the small stuff apart with loppers.

I should also mention that of course, the power went out. Actually according to the electric company's web site, 100% of the town was blacked out, which is no surprise since all the lines run under trees and the trees were raining branches.  I didn't really eat dinner and I just had to spend the evening reading by flashlight. The power came back on at about 4:30 am, so I do give them credit for working through the night.

The good news is that I had a deadline at work on Friday, and it so happens I completed it on Thursday, fully expecting to come in the next day. Which obviously I did not. But I have today to rest my back.

*That's a Big Fucking Hammer, as every carpenter and mechanic knows. The solution to many a problem.

The Un-Winter

After the last couple of winters, I guess we deserve it, but it's still a bit unnerving. While folks to our south had a pretty serious snowstorm last weekend, we only got 6 inches and that's the only plowable snow we've had all winter. We haven't had any unusually cold weather -- seasonal normal is the coldest it's been -- and mostly we've been weirdly warm.

For me this means I can do activities that are usually shut down in mid-winter. With no snow on the ground, I've kept on processing firewood. I'm planning to spread some compost on the garden and the ground may even thaw enough this week for me to do some landscaping.

There is a lesson here about us blinkered creatures, however. As much as I welcome the relief from winter, I know it's bad news in the long run. The hemlock trees will die if there isn't any deep cold to kill the woolly adelgids. Other exotic pests and invasive plants will multiply as well. Change isn't necessarily bad but if it comes too fast the individual species and the ecosystem as a whole can't adapt. There's no telling what's going to happen exactly but you can't help but worry. And yet a part of me keeps rooting for mild weather. This probably helps explain the political paralysis over the crisis.

Oh well.

Tried a different way of doing things . . .

I have always plowed my driveway with my compact tractor. That has meant removing the loader before the first snowfall and installing the plow. That's not too hard, but getting the loader back on in the spring is a hassle and meanwhile I don't have the use of the loader. Even worse is that the tractor-plow setup just can't handle a very deep snowfall, and we had a lot of those the past two winters.

Last winter I ended up having to hire a neighbor to clear out the driveway once the snowbanks on either side got too high for my little tractor to break. He has a tracked skid loader, and he wound up giving me a boulevard as wide as the Champs Elysee in about 90 minutes of work. So I figured, what the heck, maybe I can clear the driveway with the loader.

Here we didn't get the world historic gotterdamerung experienced by our federal capital. The six inches or so we did get seemed ideal for trying my experiment.

The answer is, you can do it, but it's tedious. You have to keep going back and forth, scooping up snow and dumping it. And the result is kind of uneven. It's hard to get the loader positioned correctly to pick up the snow close to the ground, without digging into the surface, so I ended up with patchy areas of remaining snow and skinned ground. Deeper snow would be much more tedious, of course, because I'd have to dump the bucket much more often.

So, I'm calling this a failure. A kid loader would work better because it automatically aligns the bucket to horizontal, which I have to do by hand. Maybe with practice I'd get better. My neighbor's machine has tracks, which would help a lot in deep snow, and a larger capacity. So, I think I'll invest in a plow truck.

Abnormal Psychology

Since I'm sure everyone who reads this is a football fan, you already know that the New England Patriots won their playoff game yesterday and will travel to Denver for the conference championship on Sunday. A major contribution to the victory came from future hall of fame tight end Rob Gronkowski. Gronk is a fan favorite not only because of his freakish athleticism, but also because of his amiable, slightly goofy persona.

What no-one associated with the Patriots will ever talk about -- and if you ask, they'll pretend not to hear the question -- is that Gronk was once one of a pair of bookends. His opposite number at the position was almost equally big, strong, fast and skilled Aaron Hernandez, and when both of them were on the field no defense in the NFL could match up.

That the Pats managed to survive an $8 million a year hit to the salary cap while said Mr. Hernandez was residing in the Souza-Baranowski Correctional Center in Shirley, Massachusetts, a maximum security prison. He will only emerge feet first, which means that as a young man he will experience maybe 60 years of timeless existence in which the days of the week and seasons of the year are unmarked. This is because he murdered a man named Odin Lloyd, the fiancee of his girlfriend's sister. By his girlfriend I mean the mother of his baby, who lived in his house.

One would think that someone like Lloyd, virtually a member of the family, would get some consideration. But apparently he did something that Hernandez perceived as a slight, although the prosecutors never did establish a motive. It seemed to have something to do with an incident in a bar a couple of nights previously -- Lloyd was talking with the wrong people or something like that.

It wasn't what one would call the perfect crime. Hernandez rented a car -- something he apparently liked to do although he could have afforded anything he wanted -- and called up a couple of his friends from his hometown of Bristol, Connecticut. Small time hoodlums, car thief-drug dealer type guys. They picked up Lloyd, and drove him to an industrial park near Hernandez's house, their location revealed on his cell phone GPS throughout the journey. Then Hernandez shot Lloyd 6 times, the shots heard by security guards.

It's amazing how strong the code of Omerta was with this group. The accomplices obviously had every reason in the world to flip, but they didn't. They'll go on trial later this year. Hernandez had his girlfriend dispose of the murder weapon. Compelled to testify, she claimed she didn't know what was in the box and couldn't remember what she did with it. This despite that she won't see a dime of his money once it's gone to lawyers and lawsuits.

Speculation is that the motive may have concerned Lloyd speaking indiscreetly about a double murder the year before, for which Hernandez will go on trial in a couple of months. Since they prosecutors already have him on ice, they apparently just want to close the case convincingly for the sake of the survivors. The allegation is that a guy spilled a drink on Hernandez in a bar. He considered the apology insufficient, so he followed the guy out, pulled up to his car at a red light, and fired into the vehicle killing two total strangers and injuring two others. Assuming this story is true, does that seem like an overreaction?

The human brain is an extraordinarily complicated machine. A little bit of miswiring can have very strange results. If you were rich and famous, with the chance to get a whole lot richer in the coming years, would you go around murdering both strangers and friends for no particular reason? I didn't think so. Now, he may have been bumped on the head a few too many times in his professional endeavors. It is also alleged that he was a dust head, i.e. a smoker of phencylidine which for some unknown reason is abbreviated PCP. That can drive people nuts. However, research finds that PCP is not strongly associated with violence -- reports of violent acts are largely limited to people with a pre-existing tendency to violence. Since Hernandez also shot a guy in the face while he was at the University of Florida that would seem to apply. (The guy refused to press charges, probably because the incident had to do with drug dealing.)

It seems Hernandez never left behind the small time criminal milieu he grew up in, and that his self image as a strong and manly man was insufficiently served even by being a star in the National Football League. How sad is that?

Mid Non-Winter Musings

Well, despite some normally cold temperatures as I alluded to last time, winter as we know it has yet to show up. Today is a rainy day, and we've had no snow to speak of at all. I'm sure it will happen eventually but it's not yet in the forecast.

So I've been working on getting my mother set up with benefits and services she will need in order to either stay in her house, or if that really isn't feasible relocate and somehow afford assisted living. She had savings at one time but they evaporated during my father's long final illness. The state takes everything, as you probably know, before they'll start paying.

My mother still does have her house and some valuable possessions, so despite the reverse mortgage she could cash out with enough to get her into some sort of an acceptable setting, I think. But what about the many people who don't even have that? Growing old in poverty must be really awful. And of course it makes me worry a bit about myself, even though I am still working and saving and do own my home. But looking at the situation now from my family's experience, I realize that you really have to be wealthy to feel secure.

It's no wonder that people are anxious nowadays. We're all expecting to live for a long time and we haven't organized society to make that work for most folks. We seem to be the denial champions here in the U.S.A.