Musings

I'm bored. That's our life at work these days. I'm constantly reminding myself to appreciate this, because in 9 months, I'll be sitting in my office, stressed to the max and pulling out my hair, wishing I was bored. This project has just managed to go that well. It's amusing. My superintendent is flying home for a meeting in which he gets to stand up in front of all the company superintendents and management and tell them how we did things here to make it go so well. I call it a good mix of people, great foreman from the subs, and we lucked out with the one Corps team that has common sense. In my career, at this point in the project, everyone is working 12-14 hour days, Monday thru Saturday. Even some Sundays. So believe me when I say this is new territory for me, I don't know what to do.

I know, I'll update my blog. :-)

Here's some photos of my project. This is one of the buildings, the one that will be finished first. It's kinda hard to see, given the sun actually chose to shine today.

The vehicle maintenance corridor:
The repair bays:
Notice the ginromous bridge crane in there. That was kinda fun to watch getting installed. It didn't go in until the building was done. They had to back the truck into the building, and used two forklifts in tandem to get the crane off the truck and up into place. Here's a photo of it going in:
So, since we are pretty much bored out of our minds, here's some other thoughts to occupy my time:

*For those of you scorching in the rest of the country, we've hit 80 degrees a grand total of 6 times this summer. Yes, you read that right. And I actually contemplated turning on the heat when I woke up the morning, it was cold. I'll look back next summer with great appreciation of that fact.

*Speaking of next summer, as I've reported, I will be in North Carolina. But last week, that whole thing took an interesting and unexpected turn. I'm going to NC, but I'm not moving there. Given my company's great communication skills......, I finally asked my boss what the plans were for me moving out there. He looked at me like I was on something. Long story short, he has no intention of me moving out there. It is only a temp thing till we get more work at Fort Lewis. This is my home base. So, I am now going be Traveling Kelli!! It's a good thing in the fact that I don't have to totally stress about selling my house any more. It's a not so good thing because I'm going to state with state income tax, and I can't afford that as long as I have my house. So still a little stress. But... in the grand scheme of things, I appreciate the opportunity to go because it means I still have a job. Most in the construction industry can't say that right now. I'll take the stress. Plus, because I will be travelling from my home base, it means I get to go home every 3 or 4 weeks for a long weekend. Since I have no real reason to come home, except to make sure my house is still there, I'm thinking trips around the country may be in order. Get your guest rooms ready!! :-)

*Speaking of my house, I was pretty much set on the fact I was going to have to walk on it. I hated that, and struggled mightily with the thought. Now that it's not a necessity, I'm not as stressed about it. However, I will still leave it listed. Since the plan is for me to continue working at Fort Lewis, I would like to move a little closer. Not only that, Belfair may be beautiful, but it is definitely not the place for a single lady. So I need to be outta here. The best thing that could happen is I sell it in the next few months, then move all my stuff into a storage unit, and save some money. For all the crap I've gone through in the last couple of years, that only seems fair. So whoever has power to make that happen...... :-)
*Speaking of power, has our country's leadership had a total brain fart or what?! Seriously, I don't care what party you are for, both suck right now. I have never been one to follow politics, but given this latest crap directly affects my employment, my house, and a lot of my military friend's livelihoods, I started paying attention. I find it truly amazing that a tiny minority can cause so many problems. I get the whole concept behind the tea party. But I wish they would remember that when the actual tea party happened, the whole country consisted of only a few states, and not just the country's, but the whole world's, economy wasn't dependent on the decisions currently being made.

*Speaking of tiny minority, isn't it funny how a few people can make all the difference. A few people say we shouldn't say the pledge of allegiance in school, so we don't. A few people say references to God should be removed from school books, so we removed them. A few people say don't compromise, do what I want, so we do what they want. How can a few people have such an impact on things we do, especially when such a large number totally object to it? And when did we become so worried about offending a few people that the grand majority of people have to suffer?
*Speaking of offending, last week we had a meeting with our Corps of Engineers project manager to discuss the overall project. At the end of each project, the Corps does a review and overall rating of how everything went. Ultimately, that review has a direct bearing on a company getting more government work. Since our other project out here didn't do so well, my boss and PM wanted to find out where we sit. So we met last week to find out. Everything generally was good. But one funny thing came out of it. When we got to the section on "Responsiveness and cooperation", we got a Satisfactory. Totally stumped on that one, we asked why. Turns out, a conversation I had with this particular guy back in October is what lowered the score. Go figure. Admittedly, I did go over the top in craziness in that conversation, and I apologized several times for it. Despite the rest of the project going as well as it has, he remembered that one conversation. And was docking the whole project for it. I spoke my peace on it, and ultimately he needs to remember it wasn't an argument at him, but how the Corps does things. As my softball coach used to say, "it's business, not personnal". He informed me that for future work, I need to work on controlling my temper. I guess the lesson here was, watch what you say, it could come back to bite you.

*Speaking of watching my temper, I was also informed I have a bit of a reputation here on the north side of Fort Lewis. And not necessarily a good one. We in the office think it's funny. Apparently I've told off enough people that word has gotten around to not piss me off. But when stupid people do stupid things, what do they expect. I tell them what I think, and how they're going to fix it. Not me, but them. They don't like hearing "no", thus the reputation. I like this. I've worked hard for that. :-)
*I guess I have to end this post at some point in time. So I'll end with this. I don't do Twitter. But I may start, just so I can follow one person. Some witty person out there has started a twitter page called SueBirdsHair. It is spoken the voice of her hair. And whoever is doing the posting is pretty darn funny. In true Saturday Night Live "Deep thoughts" fashion, it (because it's hair, it can't have a gender, as it's pointed out) posted the other day after Sue hit a game winning shot with .4 of a second left in the game:

"Who almost peed their pants after that shot? I can't pee my pants b/c I'm hair, but if I had the ability to pee I would have peed my pants."

On that note, I'll go find something to read on the internet. Or maybe do some work. Nah.