Every word of that Lynyrd Skynyrd song is true.
I know. I was there from June of 96 to May of 97.
I still get a tear in my eye whenever I hear that song.
But I'm getting
over it.
"Weather Report" January 8, 1997
Tuesday morning I went back to my trailer to try to sleep.
Trailers in winter are cold metal boxes. People tell me to expect a
$200 electricity bill, but I beat that by turning the heat way down
at night when I'm not home.
So I got home and turned up the heat from 55 to 70, and the
furnace, basically a big hair dryer with vents in every room, made a
burning smell. Darryl and Darryl came over and tried to fix it. A big
circuit breaker inside the furnace was charred and had chunks
missing. Darryl worked on it a bit, then told Darryl to turn the main
breaker outside back on. It takes 240V. Darryl only takes 120V, and
it threw him into a wall. They couldn't find another 240V 20A
breaker, so they pulled out the whole furnace and gave me some tiny
space heaters that keep throwing all the other circuit breakers.
Later, Darryl and Darryl came back, because they were working on a
warshin' machine up the street and couldn't figure out it's wahrin'.
They figured I seemed like the kind of guy who would let them look at
the back of my warshin' machine, and I am, so I did. And Darryl
wanted to buy my rental car. I may sell it to him.
Roger.
Weather Conditions at 4 AM CST on 8 JAN 97 for Huntsville, AL.
Temp(F) Humidity(%) Wind(mph) Pressure(in) Weather
========================================================================
36 48% ENE at 13 30.15 Overcast
TONIGHT...MOSTLY CLOUDY WITH A CHANCE OF RAIN...SLEET OR SNOW.
NO ACCUMULATION. LOW NEAR 30. NORTHEAST WIND AROUND 10 MPH.
CHANCE OF PRECIPITATION 30 PERCENT.
WEDNESDAY...PERIODS OF RAIN. RAIN MAY BE MIXED WITH SLEET EARLY.
HIGH NEAR 40. NORTHEAST WIND 10 TO 15 MPH. CHANCE OF PRECIPITATION
90 PERCENT.
WEDNESDAY NIGHT...RAIN. HEAVY AT TIMES. TEMPERATURES STEADY IN
THE UPPER 30S. CHANCE OF RAIN NEAR 100 PERCENT.
THURSDAY...OCCASIONAL RAIN. HIGH IN THE MID 40S. CHANCE OF RAIN
80 PERCENT.
January 11, 1997
So for those of you keeping score, they went with sleet on
Wednesday, a diarhea-like mixture of rain and ice. Miserable, cold,
and quite painful on bare skin. Thursday there were snow flurries,
but mostly it rained. Darryl and Darryl came over with a little
cardboard box, only about half the size of the furnace they took out.
Darryl said he was afraid that when they opened it, it was gonna
spring out into full-size, and Darryl said he was afraid it wasn't.
But they crawled around it for awhile like a couple of good apes, and
figured it out. "Space savin'" Darryl said admiringly. And Darryl,
ever the ladies man, pointed out that you could build a shelf in that
space for the lady of the house to put stuff on. I think Darryl's
been married at least once. These boys do know which end of a hammer
to hold, though. They had to tear out a bit of wall to get this thing
into the tiny closet, and in only two hours they had it in, fully
trimmed, and the wall looking like nothing had happened. They had to
wait until today for all the parts to come in, but they got it set up
and turned on. Just in time, too.
It snowed today and got goddamn cold. We got about 3 or 4 inches.
Traffic turned the roads into black ice. You can hardly walk on the
roads. They have no snow service here, no salt, no sand, no plows.
You can't believe what a difference that makes. Highways, businesses,
schools will be closed for days, rightly so. It will be ice until it
gets warm, maybe middle of next week, and even then, it will be ice
again at night, when I'm coming in. It took me over an hour to get to
work tonight, a drive that normally takes 10-15 minutes. Lots of
wrecks. This driving is as bad as any I've ever seen. It's in the low
teens out there now, below zero with the wind chill. It's so cold you
can't make a snowball. We're supposed to get more, too.
Been working a lot lately, if every day since thanksgiving is a
lot. I did about 320 hours in december. I may be in Los Angeles next
weekend, 17-20 or so. Then again, I might just sleep. We'll see.
Roger.
ps,
STATE FORECAST DISCUSSION
NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE BIRMINGHAM, AL
241 AM CST SAT JAN 11 1997
ARCTIC HI PRES WILL REMAIN ENDLESSLY ENTRENCHED OVER FCST AREA AND
MOST OF THE EASTERN HALF OF COUNTY FOR QUITE SOMETIME...AT LEAST THRU
72 HRS AND MAYBE MORE. THUS WARMING WILL BE HARD TO COME BY. HINTS
OF MORE MOISTURE RETURNING TO MAINLY SOUTH AND COASTAL AREAS BY SUN
NGT INTO MONDAY. THINGS MIGHT GET NASTY BY LATE SUN/MON WITH LOW
THICKNESS VALUES REMAINING IN PLACE. FURTHER MODEL RUNS WILL BE
NEEDED OF COURSE AND WILL BE ANALYZED CAREFULLY. TDY WILL KEEP WND
CHILL ADVISORY FOR THIS MRNG OVR NORTH AND WILL ISSUE ANOTHER WSW
TO INDICATE THIS.
"*1* days with heat, power, and no tornadoes!" January 14, 1997
We're running another long x-ray measurement, so it's email
time.
When we last left Roger-Bob, there was heat in his trailer, ice on
the ground, and too much joy in his heart.
So to push matters, I decided to combat old man winter with an
assault vehicle. I've been trying to find a rental car agency with
some kinda 4x4 for months. I've only found one once, and it was $60 a
day. At $1800 a month, that's a little steep. I normally pay $180 a
week for a Grand Am or this damn Dodge Stealth I'm driving now. You
know how an infinite number of monkeys on an infinite number of
typewriters can write the collected works of Shakespeare? The average
American car has a dashboard designed by 3 monkeys in 10 minutes.
Those monkeys are then locked into the transmission case and put in
charge of shifting gears.
So anyway, I call up National's 800 number at 7 am Saturday
morning, and ask for a Chevy Blazer. In iced-up Huntsville. In an
hour. At the airport. Reasonably priced. Make it green, to match my
eyes.
And the woman says, OK. She says, that's $350 a week. Not too bad
for a few weeks, I think. But, she says, you got a gold national
renter card, so it's $220 a week. But you got a ninja gold card, so
it's less, so it comes to, let's see, $183 a month.
So I'm thinking, OK.
So I go over to the airport, driving the Stealth. I think they
call it a Stealth because it goes so slowly, you can't tell it's
approaching. It's bad on the ice, too.
There are people in line, so I hit the national car-rent ATM
machine. It says, we don't got none of them blazers. Howzabout a
Grand Am? and I think, ah, this is my life. For a moment there I
thought they had accidentally given me someone else's day, one of
those people who make green lights and stuff. I feel sorry for that
person. 5 minutes of one of my days would kill somebody like that,
like some health nut somehow accidentally eating a twinkie.
So I wait in line, not to yell at the woman, just because I want
to hear that the machine is wrong and they're even out of Grand Ams.
That's the kind of touch that makes it my life, that turns stories
like this from OK to great.
But they're not out of Grand Ams. In fact, the woman is the
manager, and she's been driving the Blazer. She's busted. She hands
the keys over, and I've got her blazer. She wants it back, she makes
sure I'm bringing it back to this agency. I don't tell her she's not
seeing it until May, but that's ok. It's even green, and has three
ice scrapers. So Saturday goes well.
So Sunday morning I'm driving home to get some sleep and tape some
football games, and the radio says it's 7 degrees, with a windchill
of 0. I'm thinking, that can't be right. In the sun, it feels like at
least 9.
So I get home, and though the thermostat is at 50, the heat is
running. I never like that. I mean, if the heat is running to keep it
at 50, are we gonna make it to 70?
We don't make it.
I noticed a draft around my feet. The new furnace is quiet, but
not this quiet. This is too quiet. I eventually found that the 90 amp
breaker in the box was tripped and really hot. It did not take long
to cool down, given that my trailer quickly plummeted to maybe 40. I
couldn't get it to reset and run any part of the furnace. I called
the management, and she called back to say she couldn't get aholt of
Darryl or Darryl, and she doubted they could get parts anyway. I was
pretty tired, too tired to track down my own breaker or some space
heaters, so I packed up and got out, headed to a friend's apartment
for an afternoon's sleep. By the time I got out, it was getting
scary-cold in the trailer. I left thinking that all the pipes, even
the toilets, were gonna break, that I was going to have to move
again.
But when I woke up, there was a message: they'd found a breaker
and fixed my heat, and when I got home Monday morning it was true.
And even more unbelievably, I made it through the whole night shift
Sunday, and the day shift shift change Monday morning, without
hearing a football score. I suspected the scores, so it wasn't as
good as live, but I watched the games Monday morning to find that my
two favorite teams are in the superbowl. And the heat worked all day,
too.
So now I'm wondering what's going to go wrong to make up for that.
This might be the last anyone hears from me.
Roger.
STATE FORECAST DISCUSSION
NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE BIRMINGHAM, AL
301 AM CST TUE JAN 14 1997
STRONG AMPLIFICATION OF PRESSURE RIDGE OFF WEST COAST TO ALASKA WILL ALLOW
ANOTHER ARCTIC EXPRESS TO SURGE SOUTHWARD STRAIGHT FROM N POLE EAST OF ROCKIES
MAKING ITS WAY TO ALABAMA BY LATE FRI PROVIDING FOR ANOTHER "INTERESTING"
EXTENDED FORECAST.
I'd have bet $10 that you'd never see N POLE and ALABAMA in the
same forecast.
"Late Night=Letterman, Late Afternoon=Carlson" January 21, 1997
Long day Monday, not much sleep. Some days you have to act like a
human, though, and have breakfast in the morning when you get home
from work, even if you do have beer and coffee instead of orange
juice and coffee with your pancakes, and you end up staying up late.
Gotta have coffee. You don't need to run an intervention on me, I can
quit whenever I want.
So I didn't head off to bed until around 1pm, and as I was walking
down the hallway to my bedroom, there was a knock at the door. Man, I
thought, if that's my star wars game, I am not sleeping today. Y'see,
we all here in the control room all went out and bought ourselves
some high-end SGI-type 94 megahertz R4300 jurassic-park-makin' home
computers. Also known as Nintendo 64's. We have no lives anyway, but
at least we have something to do now. These are pretty amazing
machines. The computers themselves are easy to find here, now, but
it's still hard to find any software. It was brutal at Christmas,
they tell me. Nintendo could have made a lot of money. They will
anyway. There are only about 10 games out now, and you can only find
the less popular ones. Maybe they're actually making more money,
since titles like "Homework and Vegetables" wouldn't sell at all if
you could buy Star Wars. This is going to be the king of all game
machines. I have never owned a game machine before, never played one
since I was ten and my friend Marc had an old Atari. This is better
than that. Star Wars should be amazing.
Ah, Star Wars. The holy grail. The night shift is pretty excited
about seeing the old movies again soon. Star Wars, back on the big
screen, new footage, new effects, new scenes, new explosions, later
this month. We tell each other about it every night and hum the music
and sneer at anyone who mentions Star Trek, though the new captain
does have a nice haircut. Night shift will be there for the premier
matinee. And maybe sit right through to the late show. But the Star
Wars game cartridge, that's what we want right now. We've seen it on
the web. You get to shoot stormtroopers. You get to shoot tie
fighters from the Falcon. You get to fly a snow speeder and fire a
cable and trip the big AT-AT. We need this. We almost have it. Over
the weekend, scouts heard that had briefly appeared in stock at the
Walmart on Drake, the Walmart on University, and the Walmart on north
Parkway. The two Walmarts on south Parkway did not have it at all. I
have mail-ordered it, but the mail order houses are bad places to get
it. Stores only get a few at a time. Catalogs have hundreds of
backorders. Sam Walton doesn't take backorders. At Walmart, the race
goes to the swift. Nobody is swifter than the night shift.
So to get back to the narrative, as I said, I'm on my way to bed
at 1 in the afternoon, and there's a knock at the door. And I'm
thinking Star Wars! It's star wars! I'll just try it for a minute,
and then right off to bed, I promise.
But it's Darryl. He's got some big guy with him, Otto or
something, here to spray for cockroaches. They're wearing overalls. I
have some overalls, and I've tested this. If you put on overalls and
workboots, you can walk into a bank and say, hi, I'm here to work on
the safe, and they'll let you in.
So I let them in. Far as I know, maybe if I wasn't home, they
weren't gonna spray bugs at all, maybe they were just gonna play some
Homework and Vegetables. I bet my furnace breaks a lot more once I
get star wars.
Otto has probably never been one of the rocket scientists here on
the Nasa base. Otto may have been one of the boys they sent up to the
rocket test stand with a match when the regular igniters didn't work,
but Otto as one of the actual rocket scientists, no. You can go into
the whole nature/nurture argument, talk about society, circumstances,
and public education, but the simple fact of the matter is, at some
point, Otto, of his own free will, decided to take a job where he was
gonna get a lot of exposure to stuff that kills cockroaches. Otto may
have figured that since he's not a cockroach, he'd be ok, but
somebody shoulda at least made sure he wasn't drinking it when he ran
out of beer on Sundays. Alabama goes dry on Sundays, but I don't
think Otto does.
So while Otto was navigating some of the trickier turns in my
mobile home, Darryl told me excitedly that I had another new car. I
keep telling Darryl that I rent 'em, and that whenever I want, I can
go get another one. Darryl never gets tired of hearing that. Darryl
is tickled at the thought of getting a new car whenever he wants. He
especially likes a Tercel I had once, and often tells me so. Now,
he's a workman, a very competent workman, with a lot of tools, muddy
boots, overalls, an old baseball hat, the works. You'd think he'd
like this Blazer. Nope, he likes that Tercel. Alabama is a place
where Chevy owners don't talk to Ford owners, and nobody owns
anything but trucks. Admitting you like small, gutless,
fuel-efficient import sedans, well, I'm not from here and I am
normally open minded, but the local culture and morals do have a way
of seeping into you, and it makes me uncomfortable when Darryl admits
that he likes Tercels. And he does it too often. It makes me nervous.
It's like he keeps telling me that the trailer would look better with
some ferns over there.
Otto, on the other hand, likes the Blazer. He's not that far gone.
He offers me some bug spray, and I decline, and he heads out, happily
suckling at the spray nozzle. He's adjusted the spray from mist to
jet to clean his teeth. I don't want to know what he found in my
trailer to get stuck in his teeth.
Darryl, before leaving, inquires as to the continued performance
of my new furnace. He's not as funny as the other Darryl, but he does
get off a good one now and then. We're having a heat wave, and it's
60, and nobody needs a furnace right now. I tell him it's working
pretty good today.
So once the circus is gone, it's definitely bedtime. It's going on
2 o'clock. I've been trying to get lot of sleep during the day,
trying to shake some kinda bronchitis I got when I came out of the
cleanroom. Our cleanroom is so good, it has unmeasurably few
particles of 3 micron size per cubic meter. That size particle is
invisible dust, virus size, and the filters also get everything
bigger than that. A normal room has millions of particles per cubic
meter. A decent cleanroom for our kind of heavy work has 100,000
particles per cubic meter. Ours was built for 2,000, but it runs at
much better than 100. It's unmeasurable, nearly zero. So you go in
there for a week or two, and get yourself whacked on nights, and when
you come out, your body hasn't seen a germ in weeks and you discover
that you've left your immune system in your other pants, and you get
sick. Everybody here is sick. And I'm trying to get well before I
bother flying back to LA in mid-February for my, ahem, birthday,
ahem, on the 14th at Toes, so staying up until 2pm is not in the
cards.
So I'm heading back down to bed at 2pm, dragging a bit, and there
comes *another* knock at the door. And I'm thinking, if that's star
wars, I hope I can stop myself after playing with it just a little
bit. I *have got* to get some sleep.
I only wish it had just been star wars.
It was my new espresso machine.
"havin' a heat wave, a tropical heat wave!" January 22, 1997
The blue stuff in the outhouse at work melted!
I don't mind the rain. It can rain all it wants. I'm crazy mad in
love with this 50 degree weather.
I saw Darryl and Otto again yesterday. They were out spraying some
other places, I guess, and drove by while I was out at the mailbox.
Darryl told me that I had a package at the office. "It's cookies," he
said. "Guess they're a surprise for your birthday."
Otto looked dimly into my eyes. His eyes narrowed. "You a test
conductor?" he asked.
Yeah, I said, x-ray optics.
He nodded slowly, and said "I did F1 rocket engines for the Saturn
V moon rocket. 1968," he said, and walked back to his truck.
Darryl shook his head sadly. "First time he's talked about
it."
Otto came back with the can of cockroach killer, and held the
spray wand out toward me.
"Espresso?" he said.
"40 hours off!" January 27, 1997
I've been on nights without a day off since Christmas. We had
Christmas off, but before that, we worked every day since
thanksgiving, so since thanksgiving, I've had one day off. I'm
thinking of checking into some university psychology sleep
experiment. I bet I can put a funny data point on their graphs.
Yesterday I slept for 4 hours when I got home. I drank beer
instead of coffee during the superbowl, and was surprised to find
that some deep lizard brain instinct/memory allowed my body to accept
this alien liquid. I may try water soon, too. With the game, we had
jambalaya and hot cheese dip, ensuring a packer victory. Had it been
in doubt, I would have broken out the bratwurst, but that proved
unnecessary. At 10pm, I had a splitting headache, and figured it was
caffeine withdrawal, so I drank a few espressos. It cleared up, and I
went to bed and fell immediately, soundly asleep for 4 hours. I don't
remember how humans, coffee, and sleep were supposed to work, but I'm
pretty sure this isn't it. I woke up this morning at 3 am. Nothing
like getting up early and having a really long day off. I took my
time, finally, with the espresso machine and got it making a higher
grade of paint stripper. By 4am, I was relaxing on the couch, in fine
day off mode, enjoying my own creation, a Cafe Malta (just try
getting Starbucks to put malted milk in a latte. Go ahead, try. Death
to Starbucks.) Nothing like it. Feet up on the couch, a hot Cafe
Malta and some cold leftover pizza from the game..... My day was
complete when my surfing skills produced an aerobics program with
three bikini clad women hopping around on a beach wearing boxing
gloves.
Now time for a road trip: there's a warehouse an hour from here
that sells all the lost luggage and contents that airlines can't
return to the rightful owners. This could finally be the year I get
my Christmas shopping done early.
"reading comprehension test" January 29, 1997
while reading the following, ask yourself:
- who do I know whom TRW has not reimbursed for travel expenses
for several months, thus running up the goddamn amex card TRW
forced into his credit record and pay the all the late fees
himself?
- who do I know who recently moved into a part of the country
that serves biscuits?
>Dow Jones SkyNews: -- NABISCO HOLDINGS said fourth-quarter earnings before
>items climbed 30% on the strength of its once-sluggish biscuit unit, which
>includes Oreos, Ritz and Chips Ahoy brands. -- AMERICAN EXPRESS said it plans
>to cut 3,300 jobs this year, about 5% of its work force, in an effort to
>improve the performance of its travel-services unit. Net income at the
>financial services company rose 55% from a year earlier.
ps - Insider trading tip: Buy pork futures. Sell pork pasts. Send
pork presents.
"frequently asked questions" February 10, 1997
Haven't really been in the mood to write much lately, working too
hard. Our day shift test conductor & boss-man, lead singer,
driver of the Winnebago, Scott, went home for a week and Jon and I
had to go to 12 hour shifts to cover him. To show you how clearly we
were thinking, we came up with 3am and 3pm as the split time, so I
was waking up, sort of, at 1 in the morning.
But I survived. This test ends Tuesday morning, then I'm going
home for a week to turn 30. Or back to 30. I feel 70.
But to answer some questions:
I got the star wars cartridge. One of the Kodakians here got it
from Rochester, NY, and another Kodakian air couriered it down. Their
award fee went way up.
Yes, we had tornadoes. It sucked, no pun intended. I wish I could
tell you a funny story about waiting it out in a root cellar with
Darryl and Darrell (I was spelling it wrong) but I can't. We had a
hellacious thunderstorm, just constant, sharp, exploding blasts of
thunder that woke the hell out of me at about 5 in the afternoon. No
way I could sleep. I wondered if I should turn on the TV and find out
more or evacuate or what, and I'll admit, I got a little nervous, but
the lights and cars at trailers around me seemed normal. It wasn't
long before the thunder faded a bit, and I heard an air raid siren.
The thunder was so loud and often that I could not hear it before. I
didn't know if it meant tornado watch, tornado warning, or tornado 50
feet to your left. I felt silly evacuating, but there was *no way* I
could sleep. And I asked myself if I wanted to die in bed (alone) in
a trailer park in Alabama, and I said no. (I ask myself daily if I
want to live in bed (alone) in a trailer park in Alabama, and I say
no to that every day, too). So I got in my truck, which I figure can
take higher wind than the trailer, and went to work for a while. They
had safed everything, closed covers, closed gate valves in the big
vacuum tube, and were taking it pretty seriously, but that's what you
do when you have a half a billion dollars in glass in a tornado. I
don't know if any really touched down or not, I never see a paper or
the news or any humans.
Really hoping this ends soon. I'll probably be here in May and
June, but they say I'll get home "more often" then.
Roger.
"Sweet Home Alabama" April 18, 1997
Well, the end of the tunnel just might be in sight. The two flight
cameras were supposed to get here last December, and I was supposed
to go home permanently May 1st. The first camera, the HRC, got here a
month ago, and the second, the ACIS, got here last Monday. It looked
for a long time like the ACIS wouldn't get here at all, and that was
pretty depressing. We worked unusually hard, even for here, and got
swapped out the HRC and swapped in the ACIS in only 5 days, 3 days of
which was spent just getting the instrument chamber up and down from
vacuum. We had two or three really long nights in the cleanroom
getting the ACIS mounted, pictures at
http://hea-www.harvard.edu/asctrw/pix_9704.html
if you're interested. We now start a week of vacuum work with the
ACIS, and break again next weekend to pull the mirrors out. I go home
next weekend, too. The mirrors go home to TRW May 5th, and I'll go
with them as well, but not permanently as originally planned. The two
cameras want to keep working here throughout May and June....the
scheduled end is now June 27th. I'll have been here for exactly one
year.
TRW's bid for May and June was for the three of us to work a 9 day
cycle with two of us always here. Each of us would get 6 days here, 3
days home. Nasa has balked at the cost, and they are considering
cutting us to only having 1 person here at a time, so we'd go to 6
days here, 12 days home. I am doing my best to act useless and
expensive.
I stumbled out of here Wednesday after all that cleanroom work,
and went home by a different route. I've been having a lot of email
trouble lately, and I have now gone so far as to try yet another
service. They send your mail by physically moving a printed copy from
one place to another. Instead of charging you a flat rate, they
charge you for each piece sent, so I figured I'd try it with a few
pieces. So I went to a "post office" to buy some "stamps." These are
little pieces of artwork you stick to your mail, to indicate payment.
Another strange thing is that it's a felony to harm the mail system
personnel. Most mail systems I've seen, if you can find the
administrator, by somehow tricking him into answering his pager, and
harm him, the other users give you a nice plaque.
So anyway, from there, I was fading out pretty fast. It was around
noon, and I'd been up for something like 20 hours, most of it on my
feet in the cleanroom, and I really needed lunch and a tank of gas. I
was in a part of town I don't get to much, and to my wondering eyes
there appeared a combination Texaco / Dairy Queen. Rarely do you get
such a clear sign from the gods. I know what's good for me, I don't
mess with power like this, so I pulled in. I gassed the truck up
first. The pumps had card readers, and I used it, as usual. This one
was a little fancier than usual: the interface was a touch
screen.
You males in the audience might want to sit down for this
part.
When I started pumping gas, the touch screen turned into a TV set,
and showed me a Three Stooges episode. It was one with Curly. They
were dentists.
The Stooges shut off when your tank is full.
So after 17 gallons of enlightenment, at a buck-twenty a gallon, I
went inside for lunch. A friendly manager was very happy to see me.
Somehow, I think he could tell that he had set the hook deeply in
another one. I told him he should put big buckets or something out by
the pumps in case a really good episode comes on. He said they got
that suggestion a lot. He said they could no longer show the tape of
the one where they are doctors on account of it caused the station
over on south parkway to burn down the first week it was open. The
tragedy was this one guy just kept pumping, and although the fire
department got there in 3 minutes, that episode runs for 20, and by
that time even the fire trucks were fully engulfed.
"Calling Dr. Howard, Dr. Fine, Dr. Howard," he said sadly, and
shook his head.
Anyway, further details for you guys are: large chocolate malt,
footlong chili dog, large fries. You women in the audience are
thinking, My god, he'll be dead in a month. You men in the audience
are thinking, Why'd he get the malt? You can get a malt anywhere. Why
not a Blizzard? Was there cheese on the dog?
Those who really know me know I didn't stop at just a chili
dog.
So while the deep fryer was working its magic on my vegetables, I
bought a paper to read with lunch. And there on page 2 is an article
on a UC Davis chemist studying coffee. Coffee smells good, he
reasoned, so it must be good for you. I like this man. I like the way
he thinks. I may have him to look into chili dogs.
Anyway, he has found that freshly brewed coffee does in fact have
a potent mix of antioxidants. In loose terms, a cup of coffee has
antioxidants comparable to three oranges.
I have easily five cups of coffee a night. Easily. Sixteen ounce
cups, so let's call that ten eight ounce cups. And I have been here
for 300 days.
So this year I've had nine thousand oranges.
On my way out, the manager told me to "come back and see us
again."
You know, I just might.
Roger
"Lord, I'm coming home to you" June 18, 1997
Well, it finally ended. I've been home for about a month now, and
I can finally think clearly enough to get out the last installment.
It was touch and go there for a while. When it was over, the
stress-whiplash got a lot of people. Jon, Scott and I took a little
vacation down to Panama City, New Orleans, and Mobile, and I was sick
the whole time. Marty Weisskopf, the chief project scientist, and a
heck of a guy when he's had enough nicotine and junk food, (quote
from him in USA Today: "This is the big-energy stuff and we're the
cosmic-violence guys, the people who brought you black holes and
exploding stars.") had a heart attack but is now well enough to be
giving out great quotes. Duane, one of our local test conductors and
the only person in Huntsville from Huntsville, had 75 feet of
intestine removed. Curtis, the test conductor from Texas, threw
himself down a flight of stairs onto his head in an attempt to rid
himself of the memories and the twitching. Nathan, aka Gatorboy, the
cajun test conductor, has vanished into the swamps. Somewhere,
mosquitoes are exploding.
But Scott, Jon, and I made it home.
The day before I left, one of the guards gave me a surfboard. He
was from Santa Cruz, and wound up in Huntsville. He had 5 of these
soft beginner boards, and he wasn't gonna use it, so he gave it to
me.
That night, as I was packing, I saw Darryl working all around the
edge of my trailer. I figured he was just patching up the skirt from
all the wind damage. There were a lot of tornadoes and storms in the
area that had blown out the panels a bit. I never saw a funnel cloud,
but for a while there, they were in the neighborhood a few times a
week. That got old.
So anyway, when I went outside later to go to work, I discovered
why Darryl had done all that work: he had a huge animal trap, a
humane cage trap, stuck in the last hole under my trailer.
Skunk, I thought. I'm gonna spend my last night in Alabama, in a
trailer, with a skunk in a wire mesh cage outside my window. This is
the cherry on the cake of my day.
But it never caught anything while I was there, to my
disappointment. If it had been a skunk, I would have brought it back
to TRW travel accounting as a peace offering. Here you are, ladies.
It's a kitty! Like they'd know. No one in that building knows the
difference between a skunk and a brick. Hell, I may paint a white
stripe on a brick and tell them it's a skunk just to watch them
abandon the building. A brick with a white stripe on it in an empty
building would probably be better at getting me reimbursed, too.
The next day, late for my plane, I had to wrap that board in
cardboard (with help from Gatorboy), get home, pick up my luggage,
get the board from work on the way to the airport, drop off some
boxes at UPS, return the car, and get the board checked. Naturally, I
was running late.
When I got home, they were installing a new trailer on the empty
lot across the street from me. This involved about 15 guys in
overalls, I'd say about 4500 pounds of talent, and lots of big
trucks. I came around the corner to find complete gridlock.
Somehow, I got past them into my driveway. As I was thrashing
around inside, Darryl and Otto came in to spray the place again. I
told them the bad news: that I was leaving, and as a matter of fact,
right that instant. They were sorry to see me go, but Darryl, as
always, was pleased to see that I had a new car. It was some kinda
sedan, I forget. Otto said he missed the Blazer, and I said I did,
too. Darryl reminisced fondly about the Tercel, and asked me if I had
a car in Los Angeles. I said yes, and I'm still sort of nervous that
any second he's gonna show up here and want to see it. If he likes
Tercels, I don't think he's gonna like the
Hodag.
You don't need to hear about the next hour. The next hour was just
one of those 78 rpm hours you spend trying to get everything done and
get on a plane. I got the surfboard, dropped off the boxes, returned
the car, checked the board (didn't get charged any fee, since I was
so late), and upgraded to first class and started the long process of
rinsing the red Alabama clay out of my system with strong
solvents.
That's a long process. I need your help.
Roger