Wednesday, August 25, 2004
Today I would like to say a few words about “black eyes”. I know…I know…Hawley, what the hell have you done to yourself now. Before you jump to any unwarranted conclusions, let me just say…OK fine…I have a black eye…so what…shut up.
Anyway! Having had reason to contemplate black eyes lately, I have come to the conclusion that there is no “good” way to get a black eye. Regardless of the circumstances, almost without exception, everyone who sees you will immediately draw the same conclusion…Whoa…Dude…Who kicked your ass? You could have gotten it while racing through a minefield to catch a nun holding an orphan who was falling into a pile of broken glass and medical waste and everyone will still assume you got drunk in a bar and someone went to town on your face with a pool cue. No one ever says “Wow…he must have been working on a violent math problem” or “he must have bumped his eye on his microscope while searching for a cure for cancer”. The real irony is that I have only seen one black eye from fighting in my whole life and that guy was a jug head! Let's face it, I haven't been in many fights in my life but it seems to me that it’s hard enough just to make contact with the other person let alone the orbit of the eye.
If there is one good thing about my situation, it's that mine occurred on the first of nine days off in a row. It has had time to go from a swollen purple mass to a fading black shadow under the eye. I have to go to work tomorrow so I can look forward to running into a whole new batch of morons who will make some crack about fighting. It’ll go something like this…”How’d you get the shiner…Rocky?” “I bumped it on your wife’s pelvic bone, jackass. Now shut up and fly the damn plane!” …‘Chris Hawley, please report to the chief pilots office’
OK, so the real story goes like this. I was in this biker bar in Yuma workin’ on a math problem related to my cancer research when the fat Billy Bob drops this nun from the bar onto a pile …(just kidding)
Of course it happened while working on the house. We were having a garage door installed on Tuesday and I had to get some drywall up before they installed it. Now, if you have never worked with drywall, it is a very heavy material. It's crushed Gypsum between two sheets of paper. Gupsum is like a rock hense the brand name SheetRock. I can manhandle a 4’x8’ sheet of ½” plywood but, the same size of drywall requires a bit of help. Now imagine trying to lift this to a ten-foot ceiling. Ordinarily, I would rent a drywall lift for the day, but I was only putting up four pieces. And, after all, I had Lorna to help. (Insert laughter here) After some unsuccessful experimentation, I developed a way to lift the sheet to the ceiling with rope. When dry walling a ceiling, you need to hold the panel to the ceiling with supports. I built three “T” supports by attaching a 4 foot 1”x4” to the end of a ten foot 2”x2” to do the job. They worked great EXCEPT … The second panel we lifted into place was 4’x12’ and went up smoothly until I started installing the T supports. After installing a T at each end, I positioned the middle T. When I pushed up on the middle, it loosened one of the other Ts. I had my back to the T that let go but Lorna, my dedicated helper, was holding the ropes that held the drywall in place and she saw the T starting to fall and, of course, called “Look Out”.
Now, this brings up one of life’s little conundrums. When an object is heading toward a person and collision is eminent, we are faced with the choice to do nothing and let them get hit in a relatively benign fashion, or call out and draw the most vulnerable part of the body to the collision. Let’s face it. (No pun intended) When someone hollers out, we have an uncontrollable response to look. Something is falling and we all yell “Heads Up”. How stupid is that? It’s like yelling “Hey, there’s a train coming, everybody get on the track to get a good view.” Of course, there’s usually little time to consciously make the decision. It’s reflex. “Quick…Chris…Catch that wood with your left eye”…good job.
Lorna called out, I turned, and was hit by the worst part of the T. The 2” edge of the ten-foot support hit me across the left edge of my eye. By the time I bent down with my hands holding my face, it had already started to swell. I looked up to ask Lorna if I was bleeding and she said “Whoa!” In an hour, it was swollen above and below the eye and was turning from red to purple. The next day Lorna woke up and said “Oh Boy!” It was full on Black by then. It is interesting how you can get hit in one spot and you get black and blue somewhere else. Bump your knee and your ear turns blue!
To her credit, I have to be thankful that Lorna resisted her normal urge to come to my aid. The only thing worse than getting clobbered by the wooden support would have been getting clobbered and then having Lorna let go of the ropes and having the 12’ section of drywall come crashing down on me. Somebody call the Darwin awards!
Anyway! Having had reason to contemplate black eyes lately, I have come to the conclusion that there is no “good” way to get a black eye. Regardless of the circumstances, almost without exception, everyone who sees you will immediately draw the same conclusion…Whoa…Dude…Who kicked your ass? You could have gotten it while racing through a minefield to catch a nun holding an orphan who was falling into a pile of broken glass and medical waste and everyone will still assume you got drunk in a bar and someone went to town on your face with a pool cue. No one ever says “Wow…he must have been working on a violent math problem” or “he must have bumped his eye on his microscope while searching for a cure for cancer”. The real irony is that I have only seen one black eye from fighting in my whole life and that guy was a jug head! Let's face it, I haven't been in many fights in my life but it seems to me that it’s hard enough just to make contact with the other person let alone the orbit of the eye.
If there is one good thing about my situation, it's that mine occurred on the first of nine days off in a row. It has had time to go from a swollen purple mass to a fading black shadow under the eye. I have to go to work tomorrow so I can look forward to running into a whole new batch of morons who will make some crack about fighting. It’ll go something like this…”How’d you get the shiner…Rocky?” “I bumped it on your wife’s pelvic bone, jackass. Now shut up and fly the damn plane!” …‘Chris Hawley, please report to the chief pilots office’
OK, so the real story goes like this. I was in this biker bar in Yuma workin’ on a math problem related to my cancer research when the fat Billy Bob drops this nun from the bar onto a pile …(just kidding)
Of course it happened while working on the house. We were having a garage door installed on Tuesday and I had to get some drywall up before they installed it. Now, if you have never worked with drywall, it is a very heavy material. It's crushed Gypsum between two sheets of paper. Gupsum is like a rock hense the brand name SheetRock. I can manhandle a 4’x8’ sheet of ½” plywood but, the same size of drywall requires a bit of help. Now imagine trying to lift this to a ten-foot ceiling. Ordinarily, I would rent a drywall lift for the day, but I was only putting up four pieces. And, after all, I had Lorna to help. (Insert laughter here) After some unsuccessful experimentation, I developed a way to lift the sheet to the ceiling with rope. When dry walling a ceiling, you need to hold the panel to the ceiling with supports. I built three “T” supports by attaching a 4 foot 1”x4” to the end of a ten foot 2”x2” to do the job. They worked great EXCEPT … The second panel we lifted into place was 4’x12’ and went up smoothly until I started installing the T supports. After installing a T at each end, I positioned the middle T. When I pushed up on the middle, it loosened one of the other Ts. I had my back to the T that let go but Lorna, my dedicated helper, was holding the ropes that held the drywall in place and she saw the T starting to fall and, of course, called “Look Out”.
Now, this brings up one of life’s little conundrums. When an object is heading toward a person and collision is eminent, we are faced with the choice to do nothing and let them get hit in a relatively benign fashion, or call out and draw the most vulnerable part of the body to the collision. Let’s face it. (No pun intended) When someone hollers out, we have an uncontrollable response to look. Something is falling and we all yell “Heads Up”. How stupid is that? It’s like yelling “Hey, there’s a train coming, everybody get on the track to get a good view.” Of course, there’s usually little time to consciously make the decision. It’s reflex. “Quick…Chris…Catch that wood with your left eye”…good job.
Lorna called out, I turned, and was hit by the worst part of the T. The 2” edge of the ten-foot support hit me across the left edge of my eye. By the time I bent down with my hands holding my face, it had already started to swell. I looked up to ask Lorna if I was bleeding and she said “Whoa!” In an hour, it was swollen above and below the eye and was turning from red to purple. The next day Lorna woke up and said “Oh Boy!” It was full on Black by then. It is interesting how you can get hit in one spot and you get black and blue somewhere else. Bump your knee and your ear turns blue!
To her credit, I have to be thankful that Lorna resisted her normal urge to come to my aid. The only thing worse than getting clobbered by the wooden support would have been getting clobbered and then having Lorna let go of the ropes and having the 12’ section of drywall come crashing down on me. Somebody call the Darwin awards!
// posted by Chris @ Wednesday, August 25, 2004
Friday, August 13, 2004
An ill wind arisen!
Yesterday it was 99 degrees at 2pm. I almost had to put on a sweater! It seems that the summer heat is threatening to break. Of course we're trading it for mid-summer thunder storms. What the locals here laughingly call "the Monsoons". When I was a Geography major,(no laughing please) I understood Monsoon to mean the southwestern flow from the Indian Ocean onto the India land mass. This wind flow causes huge storms that flood thousands of square miles. Now, I don't know where the "Phoenicians" get their delusions of grandeur from but, the flood waters must have passed our house by. I think Death Valley gets more rain than we do. We do get a lot of dust, though.
Our house has two evaporative coolers (sometimes known as swamp coolers) and an air conditioner. The swamp coolers rely on low humidity to cool air. In June, we had humidity around 8% and the coolers worked great. It was 105 outside and the air coming out of the cooler was around 75. Now with the "monsoon" (whatever) the humidity is around 30-40% and coolers don't cut it. The A/C is working fine. The only problem is that it is much harder to work outside due to the humidity.
The kind of thunderstorms we get are called Air Mass Thunderstorms and they can be very violent. They produce a phenomena called a gust front. When the rain and cool air falls down from a thunderstorm, it hits the ground and shoots out in front of the storm. Where we live, the gust front picks up a bunch of dust and the result is a wall of dust that races along the desert dropping visibility to nothing. Everything that is not sealed up gets filled with this dust. It is a major pain.
Now, where these facts all come together is that we live about four miles from a stock yard. It is about three miles long and holds about 10 million cows, plus or minus 3. When the wind is blowing from the southwest, it can reach our house and the airport. Yikes! Sometimes, on a really hot day, we get dust devils out in the desert. They are the biggest dust devils I have ever seen. They get over 1,000 feet tall and they spin very fast. I have seen five and six at a time while driving. The problem is when you drive toward town, you have to go by the stock yard and from time to time I have been driving when a dust devil crosses the road right in front of me. Now, the dust devil doesn't care what it's spinning over. Dirt, Cactus, Stock Yard. It's all the same to the devil. It just picks it up and swirls it. So, if the timing is just right, and you haven't remembered to hit the re-circulate button on the a/c. You don't go through a dust devil, oh no, you get the joy of knowing the inside of...you guessed it...a "Crap Devil". One time I was working out under the carport with my table saw and one of these "Demons of Dung" caught me in the open. Hello Sally, that sucked! Now just imagine if a 35,000 foot air mass thunderstorm starts poring it's 50 mph down draft on the desert and passes over the stock yard. Good-bye gust front, hello Crap Front!
One of the first projects we started on was to enclose our carport into a garage. I put up two walls in two days. Complete with windows and side door. Dad helped with the wiring and siding and then he freaked me out for not getting a building permit. So, while the project went on hold for the last month due to the heat, I took advantage of the time to go to the county and act like I was planning to build, and I got a permit. I thought it would be funny to call them up the day after I got the permit and say "OK, I'm ready for the inspection!" We have our garage door coming next week and then we can start using the a/c I installed in the garage. I am franticly studying up on drywall installation. No more Crap Devils for me!
Yesterday it was 99 degrees at 2pm. I almost had to put on a sweater! It seems that the summer heat is threatening to break. Of course we're trading it for mid-summer thunder storms. What the locals here laughingly call "the Monsoons". When I was a Geography major,(no laughing please) I understood Monsoon to mean the southwestern flow from the Indian Ocean onto the India land mass. This wind flow causes huge storms that flood thousands of square miles. Now, I don't know where the "Phoenicians" get their delusions of grandeur from but, the flood waters must have passed our house by. I think Death Valley gets more rain than we do. We do get a lot of dust, though.
Our house has two evaporative coolers (sometimes known as swamp coolers) and an air conditioner. The swamp coolers rely on low humidity to cool air. In June, we had humidity around 8% and the coolers worked great. It was 105 outside and the air coming out of the cooler was around 75. Now with the "monsoon" (whatever) the humidity is around 30-40% and coolers don't cut it. The A/C is working fine. The only problem is that it is much harder to work outside due to the humidity.
The kind of thunderstorms we get are called Air Mass Thunderstorms and they can be very violent. They produce a phenomena called a gust front. When the rain and cool air falls down from a thunderstorm, it hits the ground and shoots out in front of the storm. Where we live, the gust front picks up a bunch of dust and the result is a wall of dust that races along the desert dropping visibility to nothing. Everything that is not sealed up gets filled with this dust. It is a major pain.
Now, where these facts all come together is that we live about four miles from a stock yard. It is about three miles long and holds about 10 million cows, plus or minus 3. When the wind is blowing from the southwest, it can reach our house and the airport. Yikes! Sometimes, on a really hot day, we get dust devils out in the desert. They are the biggest dust devils I have ever seen. They get over 1,000 feet tall and they spin very fast. I have seen five and six at a time while driving. The problem is when you drive toward town, you have to go by the stock yard and from time to time I have been driving when a dust devil crosses the road right in front of me. Now, the dust devil doesn't care what it's spinning over. Dirt, Cactus, Stock Yard. It's all the same to the devil. It just picks it up and swirls it. So, if the timing is just right, and you haven't remembered to hit the re-circulate button on the a/c. You don't go through a dust devil, oh no, you get the joy of knowing the inside of...you guessed it...a "Crap Devil". One time I was working out under the carport with my table saw and one of these "Demons of Dung" caught me in the open. Hello Sally, that sucked! Now just imagine if a 35,000 foot air mass thunderstorm starts poring it's 50 mph down draft on the desert and passes over the stock yard. Good-bye gust front, hello Crap Front!
One of the first projects we started on was to enclose our carport into a garage. I put up two walls in two days. Complete with windows and side door. Dad helped with the wiring and siding and then he freaked me out for not getting a building permit. So, while the project went on hold for the last month due to the heat, I took advantage of the time to go to the county and act like I was planning to build, and I got a permit. I thought it would be funny to call them up the day after I got the permit and say "OK, I'm ready for the inspection!" We have our garage door coming next week and then we can start using the a/c I installed in the garage. I am franticly studying up on drywall installation. No more Crap Devils for me!
// posted by Chris @ Friday, August 13, 2004
