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Picture of the Week



Sunday 14 July 2002

Sunday.  Not much going on, to tell the truth. Played with the laptop, tried to get it connected up to the DSL, without any luck. Went to the Blue Koi for lunch with friends. Went by Staple's and Best Buy, as well as Lowe's and Von's. Frolicked in a friends pool and then went home to bed...

From an old sea chantey, fun to sing in the car with the kids:

Dear Lord above,
send down your dove,
with beak as sharp as razors,
To carve the throats -
of them there blokes,
what sells bad beer to sailors!

Monday 15 July 2002

Monday - a pretty good day. Made the mistake of calling my dentist for an appointment - Wednesday! Ulp.

Talked to my Dad, he says that he went by the site's of the new bridges over the Sacramento river, at Benecia and Vallejo . At Vallejo they are now stringing the suspension cables - I'd really like to see that in person sometime. Benecia is going to be a standard truss type I think - apart from the two ship channels it's quite shallow and doesn't need the long center span of a suspension bridge. I once walked across most of the river - between the two ship channels just upstream of the bridge it is only about a foot deep at low tide!

Tuesday 16 July 2002

Tuesday - a nice, rather humid day, about 30%. This adversely affects the efficiency of the swamp cooler, but as it's also a moderately cool day, 95F max, the house is nice and cool.

Have I done my bad drivers rant yet this month? This morning a guy in a Ford Sporttrak passed me, and the semi-truck ahead of me, by speeding by on the right, in the turn lane.  He had to cut the semi-truck off to do it. A mile and a half further on I pulled into a gas station. Guess who was also pulling in, just in front of me. Yep. He risked his life to gainone car length ! Yes, I felt like saying something, but I didn't. This is Southern California, I might get shot.

Still Waiting for Greenhouse has some fun stuff this week. The temperature station of the week is the one in Death Valley, and the author of the page has some things to say about the carefully slanted temperature plaque there. The butterfly article's follow up story is also quite interesting. I'm not saying that global warming isn't happening, I'm just saying that the little evidence that exists seems poor and contradictory. Read the article on " The Surface Record " as well...

Wednesday 17 July 2002

Wed - a trip to the dentist. Not much else going on.

Thursday 18 July 2002

Thursday. Dinner at The Thai Cafe. I'm still a bit tired from the root canal yesterday. The Moving Wall is in town. I really want to get over to see it, but it's too late tonight. Maybe tomorrow.

Friday 19 July 2002

Friday - busier than a one-armed paper hanger. The rest of my team was out, so I spent a lot of the day setting up to run a largish CFD job over the weekend - hours. Only to hear on the PA, at 2 pm, "Attention: there will be a facilities power outage from six am to six pm Saturday and Sunday."  At two o'clock on Friday. And the fact that it is only being turned off during work hours tells us that it isn't urgent enough to pay overtime, which means that it really isn't particularly urgent, and could have been put on the schedule in advance...

After work, hand therapy. After therapy some friends and I went to a minor league ball game, the Lancaster Jethawks vs Visalia.  A local doctor had some fairly nice third base seats that he was giving away tickets to. The girl in front of us was nominated by her boyfriend to go out and hula dance on the field, and then a little girl in a wheel chair was challenged to a race around the bases by Kaboom, the Jethawks mascot. It was a close thing, but Kaboom was fooled by a "detour" sign that someone held up, and Christina won!

Saturday 20 July 2002

Saturday  - violently ill all day. The soft pretzels last night?

I note that the list of items that you are not allowed to bring into the stadium due to "increased security" looks remarkably like a list of items that might cut into the concession revenues. Movie theaters have been doing this for years.





Picture of the Week
 

San Diego thru a periscope
Photo Notes:
  Here's a picture that should frighten you - an American City through the periscope of a deadly russian submarine! Well, OK, so it's a tourist attraction moored next to the Queen Mary in San Diego. Still it's rather cool to go through. My brother, an ex-submariner, found it quite fascinating. It's diesel-electric, and not particularly up-to-date and I don't think the SKORPION would have posed much threat to modern anti-submarine forces.
 


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