Winking Eye, Alcohol Suggestion

A word on surgery and narcotics.

First off, if you happen to be female and have had a kid, I don't want to hear it. I'm sure it's awful and I'm sure I will never be able to relate. I had surgery last week. The doctor made it sound like it wasn't going to be anything serious, however in the end I still feel like I got stabbed in the gut and run over by a truck. In all fairness, this was my first time as a patient in a hospital so I'm not sure what I was expecting. Well, I take that back. What I was expecting was some time in a humiliating hospital gown, some pain, and a day or two of rest. I hadn't taken into account the hours of waiting, the general anesthesia, the myriad of nurses with different and often conflicting instructions, nor the narcotics (which I might add are pretty amazing). Post surgery I'm looking at a around a month of recovery. Recovery entails limping around and not lifting anything over five pounds. By the way, do you know what weighs more than five pounds, EVERYTHING! I had the singular joy of taking my bandages off today which I had built up in my head to being something akin to the terror of opening a tube of Pillsbury crescent rolls. I would just keep pulling on the packaging until I eventually popped. Luckily that didn't happen. IV's, suck. Hospital gowns suck. Operation rooms, really suck. It pretty much felt like I had been wheeled in to a morgue. I've actually been healing pretty quick and all in all modern medicine is pretty amazing. I might actually try driving tomorrow!

Easter?

This may surprise everyone (that is, everyone not in my family), but the Easter holiday is something I just don't get. Growing up I remember hunting Easter eggs a couple of times and possibly having a family Easter dinner a couple of other times. I do remember doing Easter activities in elementary school, but I honestly felt more like a Jehovah's Witness on Christmas. This was mostly due to the remarks I recall from family members saying things about eggs and bunnies are not how you celebrate Easter. In fact, I remember thinking one year that Mormons don't celebrate Easter. This all was brought home again after watching my uncle's new family celebrating Easter like it's a second Christmas; new outfits, presents (big ones), candy out the yin-yang, big dinners, etc... In my adult years I've taken the stance that extravagant Easters are silly. (Mostly because I have to have something to say when people ask what I'm doing for Easter.) Why do you need presents, you don't have to go to hell, that's your present, Happy Easter! My married siblings all spend Easter with their in-laws and that leaves me eating some vaguely Mexican-themed dinner wondering what holiday it is that everybody keeps referencing.

A Sickness

I wish the first 7 minutes of this video didn't ring so true with me, but they do. I can't help myself.




There is no need for you to watch the rest of the video, but if you have time I recommend it.

A Word on Sequestration

Dear employees of the federal government,

       Really, this is nothing personal. We know you have families, and mortgages, bills, hopes, and aspirations for retirement just like the rest of us. However,  you had to have seen this coming. Your employer (good old Uncle Sam) has over spent. Wait... that doesn't seem quite accurate- your employer has GROSSLY  OVERSPENT! (still not adequate, but it will have to do) and he hasn't blown trillions on good things most of the time either. He has spent money on conflicts, bail-outs, hand-outs, studying and saving the endangered Moapa Dace, and a whole host of things most people would find upsetting. Trillions has been spent with little to show for it. I mean, I could understand the debt, to a point, if our infrastructure was up to date instead of crumbling, or if public eduction worked, or, or, or.... but that doesn't appear to be the case. It is unrealistic to assume that your employer can make the spending cuts he needs to and still keep employing all14 million + of you that he thinks there are (he's not real sure how many people he employs). So once again, please don't take this personally. We'd love to have you over here in the private sector. For those of you who went and got an education and training that is completely useless outside of government employment, you can always go get training or schooling more applicable to the world the rest of us all live in. Is it inconvenient? Yes. Will it be hard? I'm sure it will be. However, life is hard. You may not be handed a pension after working for a whole 20 years. You may not get benefits. You may not have the security of knowing you won't be fired no matter how bad you are at doing your job. The rest of us deal with all these issues and since we're the ones paying into the system we are sorry but you're fired.

A Couple Things To Discuss

First off, the Jeep is history. The only other employee of the engineering firm I work for had a Toyota Tacoma for a work vehicle and I asked him if wanted to trade. He asked why and I told him that I detested the thing. He responded with, "sure, I don't care what I drive." I spent at least 30 minutes trying to convince him that simply couldn't be the case, that he had to care what he drove to some extent. He was unmoved on this point so I gave up and we swapped keys.

While I'm no real fan of Toyota products I do enjoy this truck exponentially more than that clap-trap of a Chrysler product that I was driving before. It's a 4 cylinder with a manual transmission and 4WD. This is the first car I've used with Bluetooth and I must say it is quite handy.



In other news, this:

The Ely Stake YSA group had a temple trip to St. George last weekend and Megan and I (well just Megan) called Aunt Millie to come and join us. Yes, that is her waving at the camera. We had a fun visit. She is always a hoot.

The Year So Far

 December and (January so) have been the coldest in White Pine County that I can remember. We had nightly wind chill and frost bit warnings (meaning the temperature is in the -30's to -40's) for weeks on end and the daily high struggled to get past the single digits. This past week mother nature has given us a reprieve with the temperatures in the day getting up to near 40 degrees. Honestly, it feels like shorts weather almost. With the warming temperatures all the water lines down at the railroad that froze are now thawing out. One of the interns staying in the bunk house that we remodeled last year left for the holidays and turned the heat off (to avoid fire). A 2" water line in the engine house machine shop froze and subsequently produced a geyser of water which resulted in an indoor ice skating rink. A 6" water main feeding the new water column we installed this past spring also froze breaking a near $1000 gate valve. Not a great month for frozen pipes. Prior to the thaw I was out west of Austin, Nevada watching well drillers trying to sink a new water well for the city of Austin in -20 degree temperatures in the middle of week long snow storm. It wasn't the most efficient endeavor, but they finally got it. I just sat in my car and watched the storms roll in and out of the Reese River Valley.

I mostly read, napped, counted the sticks of pipe and the occasional bag of gravel (and watched water freeze, which was happening pretty quick). I was staying at the company house in Eureka which is about 65 miles East of the job site. My travels to and from work that week usually involved me slogging my way through a white-out while ignoring the "Chains or Snow Tires Required" signs.

 I'm generally not a big proponent of "New Years Resolutions", but I usually make a list of things I want to do or try during the year. One thing I definitely wanted to do this years was to make better use of the opportunity of traveling across Nevada. I'm always passing through small towns or ghost towns and other interesting things and as long as I'm in the neighborhood I should take the time to stop and look. So on this last trip I did a couple of things. First, one day when the drillers knocked off early I drove out to a hot spring near Austin and soaked for awhile. The spring didn't look like this picture when I was there. It was near zero and everything was dead and or covered with snow. The springs is on top of this small rise in the Big Smokey Valley off US 50 and the view is nice

Next, after work one evening I went over to the Eureka Sentinel Museum. I'd been meaning to stop there for awhile, but never seemed to have the time. I recommend it if you're ever in the area. Finally, the town of Eureka also has an indoor swimming pool and I got up early one morning while I was there and went and swam laps. I hadn't planned very well for that one. When I finished swimming I hopped out of the pool and dried off as best I could and ran out the door in my still damp swim trunks only to get blasted by the -15 degree morning breeze. I had a hard time warming up that day.

Also on the list for this year is:

• Take a trip on Amtrak
• Give a ride to a hitchhiker
• Go to a major car auction
• Drive up CA Route 1
• And whatever else I come up with

One Last Christmas Hurrah!

The holiday season for the Robertson family officially runs from the Monday before Thanksgiving to the 6th of January. We define "Holiday Season" almost exclusively by the amount of food we eat. So the wagon officially drops us all off for about 8 weeks. After Seth's birthday the wagon comes back by and we all slowly roll onto it fatter, exhausted, and vowing never to look at another holiday meal again.

That being said it was a fun holiday filled with family, food, disease, pictures, presents, snow, frostbite warnings, yelling, laughing, travel, screaming, crying, napping, etc, etc, etc...

As one last grand send-off allow me to share my favorite clip from the holiday episode of one of my favorite shows, "Bob's Burgers".