Diaries || What's on your mind?

Snow falls, but rarely vertically. The wind sculpts drifts, layering their structure and leaving a record of the winter. Here was a sunny day, where the drift got an ice shell. There, gale-force winds, polishing the surface into hard-packed ridges.

Snow boulders expose their sedimentary layers, the sun and wind and bare ground an archaeologist slowly chipping away, exposing the history of the past winter.

I've been neglecting to post my sunday exercises. So, here's one from a few months ago that I haven't posted before.

If you're interested in doing a bit of just-for-fun prompted writing, stop in channel #writing on irc.slashnet.org either with your favourite IRC client or here at 10AM Pacific time (1PM Eastern time) on Sundays. There are typically three prompts with 10 minutes allotted for each, and you can do whatever you want with them. I usually run them into one story, as I did below.

Well, I finished my stint up north some time ago, flying home after my last run on hallowe'en, and dove straight into my new position in the head office. Now I'm splitting my time between office work and a pilot plant about a 45 minute drive from home.

No fighting. No yelling. No swearing. No drinking.

Well, the "no swearing" rule seems to be enforced only as "no swearing at somebody", because I hear various bilingual swear words constantly. I've probably heard some inuit swear words too, but I wouldn't recognize one of those unless somebody explained it to me.

The other rules are strict. You break them, you're banned from the site (and usually fired). Period.

And yet I'm learning to fight?

So the other day my boss asked me if I could borrow a noise meter to see how noisy our little plant is.

I wandered into the industrial hygienist's office to ask about it, and next thing I knew I was being wired for sound and was agreeing to drive him back into town after he did the measurements my boss asked for.

We were down unexpectedly but now we're back and the site is even upgraded! The wiki will come back later.

New features inside...

I was driving along a gravel road in a dirty pickup, left elbow out the window, wearing boots, jeans, and a work shirt, singing along to a country station on the radio. Suddenly, I thought - good lord I feel like such a hick!

Then I laughed and kept singing.

It's 3AM. I'm hanging around in the MCC (where the computer is) because I'm giving the filters one of their twice daily backflushes, a job which takes a lot of babysitting and is conveniently close to the computer. On filter #5 (of 6) I notice a reddish glow coming from underneath the north door.

I open it on a whim - it is 3AM, I might see a sunrise.

I mentioned earlier that I had been programming the PLC (programmable logic controller) for the plant I'm working at. Just thought I'd go into a bit more detail, because I'm finding it a big change from the type of programming I had done before - which was mostly slinging text around with perl. (Scoop mostly, but sometimes other things too.)

I know I've mentioned that I'm up north for my new job, but I don't think I've said exactly what it is I do here.

The answer is, when things are going well I do SFA, when they're not I scramble to fix them. Kind of like a sysadmin, only with a chemical plant instead of a computer network.