The Leonids

I read that a meteor shower would be happening in the early morning in the east sky tomorrow morning (Nov 18).  Meteor showers are named after the constellation from which it appears that the shower originates. Word has it that you may see 10 or more an hour if you have a dark sky and look east early in the morning in Leo.

On a similar morning, ten or eleven years ago, I was up early one morning to walk around our neighborhood in Kingman, AZ for a little exercise. I looked up and saw several shooting stars in just a few minutes.

I immediately headed home and wanting to share it with someone and recognizing that Vicki valued sleep more than shooting stars, I woke Katherine and asked her if she wanted to she some meteors.  She said "sure" so I pulled out the Levi quilt, laid it out on the ground like a sleeping bag and we crawled in to stay warm and count shooting stars.

In less than 20 minutes we counted over 100.  We saw most of them at the same time but I missed one that Katherine didn't.  I had glanced down at the quilt when suddenly the sky lit up.  I could easily see the ties on the quilt. "Oooo" Katherine exclaimed.  I looked up, but all I could see was the smoke left from the meteor.

What a pleasant memory that was.

Moving Mountains

April of 1995 I accepted a position with General Cable Company in Kingman, Arizona.  As I drove down to start the job, I had the highlight of seeing Hoover Dam. Upon arriving at the dam, I parked and got out and walked the dam enjoying all the plaques and construction displays.The spillway walls were up and the dam was near to overflowing.  My how things have changed.

It wasn't long before my friends at General Cable told me that preliminary work was ongoing to construct a bypass bridge.  It would be built in about ten years.  I have crossed the dam probably 100 times or more since that first trip.  A memorable crossing was the second Saturday after 9/11 when we took our youth to the LasVegas temple to do baptisms for the dead.  Some parents didn't want their children to go and I can appreciate that. But it was interesting to see the security changes that took place so quickly.The government was quick to install a check point on either side of the dam. The first 6 months, they were very thorough with their searches of every vehicle.  Then I learned some expediting tricks.  If your vehicle has tinted windows, roll them all down so that they can see in side.  Always have your driver side window down for communication purposes.  Act like your not hiding anything.  And always say thank you just in case they remember you the next time.  You will sail right through 99% of the time.

Driving from Kingman it was about 60 miles from the detour route around the dam to the check point.  There were lots of signs warning people that all vehicles except for cars would be turned back.  As we approached the dam that day, we saw a yellow 16 foot moving van which was occupied by a couple of men who appeared to be of middle eastern descent.  Sure enough, they were turned around and had to travel back 60 miles to the detour and then another 100 miles to get to LasVegas.

Over the years, I watched the construction with anticipation of the bypass bridge completion.  I have waited in traffic for construction work; at other times for movies being made on the dam and of course for tourists.  I got pretty good at knowing when to take the detour because of bad traffic.  Friday nights and Saturday afternoons into LasVegas were the worst.  Saturday from noon to 4 going to Kingman were just as bad.

As the preliminary work was being completed and the design was taking shape, I started to follow the progress on hooverdambypass.org.  I was on the website when the hits were in the low 100,000.  Today the count was 14,591,800.  I have followed every step of the way since they contemplated the style of bridge to build including polling the web site visitors;  (I voted for a cable stay bridge. I like wires. I lost.) the location of the bridge; the construction of the approaches and ultimately the construction of the bridge.

The highlight of the bridge construction for me was this past Saturday when I got to walk the bridge with 20,000 of my closest friends.  Some souvenirs were given out.  I have saved them in their original  form.  Maybe in 50 years, my children can get $25 for the set.

Here is a link which will take you to a video tribute I made to show the bridge and some of the work involved in building the bridge.  I hope that you can get a feel for what is was like.

TTFN
-Ron

Unseen Passengers

We may have some unseen passengers riding with us in the Tahoe from now on.

Now that may sound strange but we are coming up on Halloween and after you hear what happened it may not be so far fetched.

The brakes on the Tahoe had gotten real bad.  No chirping or squeaking, just flat out grinding.  So Wednesday about Noon, the Tahoe was taken to our mechanic for an inspection. 

We trust our mechanic. He has treated us fairly and like family and he is ASE certified.  He knows his stuff.  He had done so much to extend the life of other car parts that we knew he was a straight shooter.

The results of his inspection:

• Front Brake pads? Gone
• Front rotors? Too thin to turn. Replace
• Back brake pads? Gone
• Back drum rotors? Too thin to turn. Replace
• springs, seals, fluids everything but the master cylinder?  Replace all of it.

Upon his report, I told him to fix it up.  Usually, he is really fast in getting things done.  I thought we may get a call Wednesday evening but no such luck.  It seemed real weird that I didn't hear from him on Thursday. Today when I didn't get a call at all from him, I decided that I better give him a call.

The call went something like this.

Me: Hey hows it going.
Mechanic: Great.  I'm just taking your Tahoe out for a test drive.
Me: Glad to hear it.  When can I pick it up.
Mechanic: Anytime this afternoon. (pause)  I think there is something you should know.
Me: O.K?
Mechanic:  Everything is fine with your car. But . . . We had a fire at the business in the far end of the building Wednesday night about 8:30 and the fire department came into the shop and cut holes in the back roll-up doors and and the roof to make sure we didn't have any fire in our section.
Me:  Isn't the far end business a pet crematory.
Mechanic: No, It's a human crematory.

When we picked up the Tahoe this afternoon, there was a definite "camp fire smell".  We just couldn't tell if it was Douglas Fir or Alder that we could smell. 

The next time you ride with us don't be surprised if we introduce you to Doug or Alder.  Don't worry though.  They are just wafting through.

Stairs

Stairs are ubiquitous but unique.  Some are strictly functional while others are primarily artistic.  Sometimes, stairs are a nuisance.  When in a hurry, it isn’t uncommon to see someone jump to the floor, skipping the last stair or two. To a home with a family, stairs can be entertainment for the children and fearsome to the parents as the stairs serve as potential energy inviting all sorts of experiments.

What goes down stairs alone and in pairs and makes that slinkety sound?  A spring, a spring, a marvelous thing, everyone knows it’s a slinky.

I was raised in a home with stairs.  I played all sorts of games on stairs.  I would run up stairs skipping every other one.  I would run funny patterns on stairs going up against the wall on the right or jumping from the right side to the left side never stepping in the middle.  When playing ball, I found that the stairs were the best teammate ever.  They could give you grounder practice if you were playing with a baseball or return a pass when you were playing basketball.  My stairs were consistent, always passing the ball back and I didn’t ever need to chase a bad pass.  I would practice my basketball passes to the first stair, the second stair, the third stair, all the way up to the top step; except when I messed up and passed to the seventh stair before the sixth stair.  Then I would have to start over.

I remember the day a new upright freezer was delivered to the house.  The only place where we had room for the freezer was in a remote corner of the basement.  Once the freezer was in place, the movers were preparing to remove the box. I didn’t want them to take the box away. I begged for the box to stay, I pleaded for the box to stay.  I recruited my sister to join the groveling.  Mom relented and with the box fitting snuggly between the walls, the stairs suddenly became a slippery slide and a steep mountain slope to climb. 

Stairs have always been slides.  My children figured out that slippery nylon sleeping bags increase the speed and enhance the thrill of going down stairs.  They slid down the stairs feet first, and head first. They slid solo in the bag and teamed up with each other.  Each ride down elicited the giggles of glee and screams of joy with changing pitches of little voices as each step bump was crossed.

Stairs have so much excitement about them with new and unique opportunities to the creative.  Or the bored.  Boredom was my problem one day.  I was seven or eight years old and I don’t remember any of my other seven siblings being in the house to play with me.  I was at the bottom of the stairs trying to figure out what to do.  I stood on the bottom step and jumped down.  Then I climbed to the second step and jumped to the bottom again.  An idea struck like a flash of lighting.  My mind discovered a new game.  Climbing one step at a time, I would jump from each successively higher step to the bottom, until I had jumped from the top step.

To make this new game official, I would have to start over.  Back to the first step.  Jump.  Land. 

Second step. Jump. Land. 

Third step.  Jump. Land.  “Oof.  That almost hurt.  I need something to soften my landing.”  I searched the basement and found a mattress cushion from a baby crib.  “That will do.”  I drug it over to the base of the stairs.

Fourth Step.  Jump.  Land. “Soft. That’s better.  But truthfully this is getting boring.  I’ll just go to the top step and jump and be done with this game.”

My father was an architectural engineer.  The architect title meant that he could design buildings.  The engineer title meant that his designs were more functional and less form.   More functional describes the house in which I was raised.  The house was a rectangular box.  Everything was divided along the centerline and no room crossed the center line. The front of the house had a living room with two bedrooms connected by a hall.  The hall had cabinets and drawers for storage which was right in line with the closets of the two bedrooms. Function demands storage.

The back of the house had a dining room, kitchen and master bedroom. Squeezed in between the kitchen and master bedroom were stairs and a master bathroom.  The stairs led down to the basement in one direction and out the door to the back yard in the other.  The master bathroom had two doors; one by the bedroom and one by the back door.  This facilitated the bathroom being shared by all the neighbor kids who came to play in the back yard.  Once again, function over form.

Rooms and storage in our house were fit together so tight that I now believe that dad used a shoe horn when he drew up the plans.  I didn’t believe that when I was small however.  I thought we had a big house.  We could fit ten people around our dining room table.  Of course the first one in had to go to the far end and couldn't escape once everyone else was seated. 

The upstairs had a couple more rooms.  Coming off the backside wall of the hall was a second entry to the master bedroom, the hall bathroom and the hall closet.   The hall closet was maybe three and a half feet wide and two and a half feet deep.  A shelf about six feet high extended to the ceiling for storage and the floor was sloped.  The sloped floor could hold shoes because narrow boards running lengthwise had been nailed into the floor so it would catch the shoe heels.  The hall closet was my favorite place to hide when playing hide and seek.  I would scooch up to the top of the sloping floor and hide behind the coats.  You really had to look to find me there.

Perhaps the one flourish in the home design was the redwood paneling that covered the living room walls and served as a veneer around a support beam which the vaulted ceiling rested on, providing an open space between the dining and living room.  Actually, all the rooms upstairs had vaulted ceilings, a nice feature for sure, but truthfully the home was just a long rectangular box so the vault went right down the center of the house.  Function won out again.

Of course, I really didn’t care about form or function that day.  I had a goal.  I started climbing to the top of the stairs.  Unbeknownst to me a slight problem was arising.  Being eight, I was not a very observant tyke.  I had failed to notice the pertinent architectural features of the house.  As I had mentioned, the stairs had a very tall vaulted ceiling that made the stairway seem very open.  At the top of the stairs was a four foot by four foot landing.  As I reached the landing, I turned around, placed my toes at the top step’s edge and focused on the cushion at the bottom of the stairs. Swinging my arms back I crouched down and for just a split second I held the mounting energy in my stance; my energy suddenly reversing my arms thrown forward and legs springing I was on my way.  It was a long ways to that cushion.  I had to clear 11 stairs.

As my feet left that top step, I looked up for the first time.  I noticed that the back wall from the hall closet was coming towards me while I was in mid-flight.  I surveyed the situation and made a snap judgment which perhaps only an eight year old could appreciate the simplistic beauty and novelty of the choice. With the wall getting closer and closer, I shut my eyes.

I don’t know how it happened but I’ll tell you that I sure am grateful for function.  Someplace between Newton’s law of gravity, my falling with style, and the functionality of a sloped floor of a hall closet that precisely matched the sloped ceiling of the last four steps of the stairway, I managed to hit the cushion at the bottom of the stairs without hitting the wall. 

I grew in wisdom that day.  As I stood up from the cushion, I distinctly remember my first thoughts.  “That was stupid. I’ll never do that again” And I haven’t.