Category Archives: Engineering

career, Engineering

Eight years to go, and counting

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At work, and at other places as well, I often give people the number of years, months, and days left until my retirement. People probably think I have a countdown meter somewhere, I do it so quickly. But in reality I can do that because I will retire on my 65th birthday, which happens to coincide withe the last day of the year. So the countdown is easy. I know the year, and I can quickly figure how many months and days left in the year.

Today the countdown reached exactly eight years. That is, unless if economic conditions are such that I have to extend my working days, a distinct possibility the way things are looking right now. Having to work until I’m 67 or even longer is a real scenario.

Of course, I hold a slim hope to the possibility of my writing career taking off, and of supplemental income from that resulting in early retirement from engineering. Yes, I’m not quite free of my pipe dream.

My computer clock now shows it is 8:03 AM, and I must be about my employer’s business.

career, Engineering

Growth and Success

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My thoughts may be somewhat random today, written over a period of time between other duties at work. Last night I worked until 10:30 PM, breaking from 6 to 7 PM for supper with my mother-in-law. The urgent need was the utility drawings and specifications for a road widening project in Bentonville that our transportation group is designing. Another department had designed the utility improvements and prepared the drawings and specs, and our Transportation Dept manager took me up on my offer to check them. I began that late Monday afternoon, but decided to hit it hard yesterday and not leave until I finished checking the drawings, leaving the spec for today.

I did this because our TransDept manager, Greg, seemed particularly stressed out over this. He was handling the stress well, but I could see that he needed some support to get his project out. Greg is one of the good ones, wanting always to do things the right way. He and I have had many conversations in the two to three years he’s been here, always centering on doing engineering the right way. So I offered to check this part of his construction documents. I enjoy doing quality control checks, so the work was enjoyable, if somewhat intense.

Why did I offer to do this? Part of our CEI vision statement says, “…we are committed to the growth and success of each other.” Last week we had some special leadership training concerning “corporate culture”, and the vision statement was the star of the show. So it was fresh on my mind. What exactly does that mean, “we are committed to the growth and success of each other”, or, personalizing it: “I am committed to the growth and success of others [in the office, in the family, in the community, at church, etc.]?

Why trying to fully grasp this statement, I figured it at least mean, “I will assist a colleague who is under the gun and who is having to use staff not under his direct supervision and who may or may not know what they are doing.” That’s an easy application of the principle to actual practice.

I notice that no one ever seems to do that to me, to put themselves out for my “growth and success”. In fact, it usually seems to be the opposite. When I need a CADD tech (since I am not CADD literate), department heads seem to disappear into the cubicles. When I need help modeling a creek, people make commitments then say they never so committed. When I ask for reviewers of a new guide specification, or for someone more knowledgeable than myself to actually write the document, people forget how to read e-mail, though they sure recognize the function of the delete button.

Alas, this is the way of the world. I’m not sure why I’m surprised at that. I guess I’m not surprised at all, just saddened by people’s lack of vision–our specific vision statement.

As I said, today’s entry is somewhat unfocused and rambling.

Engineering, flood studies

Little Osage Creek

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My main work for over a month has been the flood study for the headwaters of Little Osage Creek in Centerton, Arkansas. I’m way behind on the project, and am soon to be over budget (in part because the project included a flood study of the headwaters of McKisic Creek as well; yet the budget is 80 percent consumed). I let this project sit almost a year, then got a promise from another department in the company to piggy-back it on one of their projects along the West Branch of Little Osage Creek. Somehow they didn’t do it, saying they never claimed they were intending to. So I had to take it back into my work load, dust off my “tools”, and get the job done.

As of today, I am really, really close. I have completed a complicated computer model for calculating the flood flows. This model includes 18 detention ponds, some 21 subbasins, and a number of stream runs (called “reaches” in the vernacular). I have run this model for the 100-year storm, and had believable and predicted results. Next, in a separate program, I merged the existing FEMA stream geometry model with the CEI stream geometry model (the one my project was supposed to piggy-back on), filled in the 600 foot gap between them, corrected a considerable number of errors in both, added missing culverts, added needed cross-sections that were left out of the FEMA model and due to which the model never should have been approved, and finally, today, ran a successful stream geometry model together with the flood flows from the other model. I have an answer!

I still have some tweaking to do. The results (i.e. the flood elevation, which drives the spread of the flood waters) are not as favorable as I would like, so I have to look some more at it and see if anything in the merged geometry is too conservative. If so, I might be able to reduce both. If not, the City will just have to live with the calculated flood elevation and spread.

When I started the study I had some goals in mind as to how to improve the situation on the existing flood maps, which contained obvious errors along with some things that drastically changed from the previous flood map, but which may or may not have been errors. One of the obvious errors will be gone on the new map; the other looks like it will remain. That’s not a final answer, but it’s most likely.

Why am I writing this? Today there has been an emotional release with the success of these models. I still have much to do on the project, including model tweaks, calculating flows for other storms, writing a technical report, making a presentation before an unhappy city council, putting an electronic and print submittal together for FEMA, and then working through the (probable) six month FEMA approval process. But with the successful model having all missing links plugged, no obvious errors, and believable results, the release is at hand.

Engineering, poetry, Writing

Alignment

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You hear of stars aligning, and astrologers will say that means something. Or you will hear someone say, “The stars must have been aligned for me!” Well, tonight events align for me. Significant events; events that demand my immediate attention, that will consume the evening.

Yes, today is payday, and in today’s mail will be my monthly bank statement. So tonight I get to balance the checkbook, see what bills have to be paid (or automatic payments recorded), and plan out my budget for the month ahead. Rarely do these two events come on the same day of the month. I will also use this occasion to enter several months’ worth of expenses into my budget tracking spreadsheet. So the evening will be consumed with the mundane.

Oh, you were expecting these events to be something momentous? Expecting me to announce a book deal, or some other publication acceptance? Sorry to disappoint. The mundane, common-place events of life govern, I’m afraid. In this regard I think of Charles Lamb, on of my favorite authors, a Romantic-era essayist and man of belles lettres. He worked at the East India House as a clerk, and did his writing on the side. His job was not strenuous, nor his hours long by today’s standards. Yet he always claimed his real work were not his essays, poems, and letters, but rather the endless ledgers in which he recorded endless sums for endless ships with endless imports.

So, perhaps, may it be with me. The works I shall be known for will not be the poems, essays, or novels I hack out in 30 minutes stretches on work day evenings or two hour blocks on weekends. No, it will be volumes of construction specifications, engineering reports, training class notes, internal e-mails and thousands of business letters. These are my works, world. Look upon them and despair.

Don’t mind me. Received a rejection last night, for a poem I submitted eleven months ago, and had long written off. I’m surprised it came, because it had the old postage on it.

And my key board here at work is acting up. Many letters I have to pound twice to get the pixels to behave, and the space bar is spaced out.

Engineering, poetry, Writing

Trying to get engaged

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For some time now I have not been applying myself wholeheartedly to anything. At work, I have been in a position that doesn’t require significant application of brain power. As senior engineer in the company, I’m assisting people on their more difficult problems. I’m coordinating training courses, and on occasion teach one. That has taken up a lot more time than I expected it to do. But it’s easy. Make calls, send e-mails, repeat. I spend a lot of time on what I call research and development, studying new trends in our business, taking notes, plan some training, write some simple design guides or specifications–most enjoyable, but not brain taxing.

For the last several weeks I have disengaged from writing. All I’m doing is organizing, filing, and typing a few things I wrote some time ago. I’m also back-checking the latest round of edits on Doctor Luke’s Assistant before discarding the mark-ups. I was working on some new Bible studies to write, but I’ve set those aside as well. Oh, yes, I also wrote a couple of haiku over the last weeks. These were not simple 5-7-5 ones, but rather well-thought out for the fundamental haiku elements.

Work around the house doesn’t take much effort, nor does the reading list I’m going through. So I have felt my brain slowly disengaging. Certainly at work it is somewhat, and now off work it is as well. This is a terrible feeling in a way, for I have always had my brain engaged in many things; scattering concentrated thought around many projects. Now it seems the toughest thing I have to decide is whether to keep a certain piece of paper or not, and if kept where to file it. I wrote a triolet about this sort of thing last November:

Conflicted

I long to live that day when I will rest,
and cease to tax my brain. Then I will die
and stand before my Maker. Yet, I’m blessed;
I long to live! The day that I will rest
is somewhere out there, far beyond the quest
that now demands I try, and fail, and try.
I long to live that day when I will rest
and cease to tax my brain, then I will die.

But beginning last week, really Friday of the week before that, I began working on a project at work I had put off for a long time. It required learning a new computer program, and what I feared would be tedious work depicting a large drainage basin for calculating flood flows. Only one person in the office knew the program, and I didn’t think he knew it much. While waiting on him to answer an e-mail of a request for help, I worked on learning the program myself through reading the manual and just trying stuff. I got pretty far along, far enough to enter a dummy project and get it to run. I finally had this training session and it turned out the guy didn’t know any more than I did at that stage.

As I feared, the work is extremely tedious. It requires me to really think about what I am doing. My brain as a consequence has rebelled. By the time I finish a full day of working on that, I have nothing left to think at home. Hence I have been reading, doing a few of these simple writing things, and playing mindless computer games. For an hour or more.

My hope is that this difficult project at work will be like exercise for my brain. Can the brain atrophy, like one of the voluntary muscles? When I cease to tax my brain, will I then die–intellectually if not physically? Hmmm, enquiring minds want to know. Hopefully this will turn out to be good for me. Maybe a few more days of having to use my brain the full eight hours at work will strengthen it, and I will find myself with something left in the skull come evening. Hey, this evening I had enough left to write this post.

Engineering, Wesley

New Name for Blog?

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Well, my conference is finished. My presentation went well yesterday, with several in the room coming to see me afterwards, and a few stopping me in the exhibit hall even later. Heading home tomorrow, back to the real world. Or maybe this is the real world for me, the world of scholarly engineering with a Christian worldview as a foundation, not the world or authorship and novels, non-fiction, etc.

I’m thinking about changing the name of this blog. When I first created it last December, Todd Blog was just a place holder as I thought about what to name it. I’ve taken my time, and thought about it much. I’m thinking about re-naming it “An Arrow Through the Air”, after the passage in the John Wesley letter I blogged about in April 2008, over several posts. I love what Wesley said:

“I am afraid of nothing more than of growing old too soon, of having my body worn out before my soul is past childhood. Would it not be terrible to have the wheels of life stand still, when we had scarce started for the goal; before the work of the day was half done, to have the night come, wherein no one can work? I shiver at the thought of losing my strength before I have found [it]; to have my senses fail ere I have a stock of rational pleasures, my blood cold ere my heart is warmed with virtue! Strange, to look back on a train of years that have passed, ‘as an arrow through the air,’ without leaving any mark behind them, without our being able to trace them in our improvement!”

What better way to describe my current life situation? While I’m much older than Wesley when he wrote this, and am more than half-way done with my life, and thus maturity issues are not a factor. But I feel in my own life the urgency of accomplishment that Wesley so eloquently expressed. I find myself riding a sinusoidal wave between Wesley’s arrow and Emerson’s “time-enough-for-all-that-i-must-do.”

Anyone have any thoughts about the blog name change?

Engineering, travel

Orlando

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Yes, I am in Orlando, attending the StormCon 08 conference. I will present a paper tomorrow: “A Water and Wastewater Engineer Retools for Stormwater“. It will tell of the differences in the engineering approach to storm water as compared to water and wastewater, and give my 11 step program for how I’m working through the problem.

This is the first engineering paper I have written and prepared since one about wastewater odor control at a conference in Barcelona, Spain in 1990. I co-authored a paper that was presented in August 1990 (actually, I was listed as co-author, but in fact had little to do with the actual writing), but in the aftermath of Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait on August 2 of that year I was not able to make the trip to that conference.

It’s good to be back on the “conference circuit”, I think. Went to this same one last year, in Phoenix, and made lots of good contacts. This year, however, I have more noticed the difference in age, my age compared to the average conference attendee. Very few people here are my age. Possibly this is because storm water treatment is such a new field for engineers, as is low impact development, that this is a young person’s game. Then again, perhaps I’m just getting old.

I don’t know when I will post again. I doubt much will come from this conference that will be of interest to the typical reader of this blog. And my writing suffers at this time. I expected to be able to write some, but so far not so. Maybe next week.

Engineering, expatriate life

The journey is a joy

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Today marks the 34th anniversary of beginning my first job after graduating college, so perhaps my few readers will indulge me if I make a second post today on this non-milestone anniversary.

I began work in Kansas City for Black & Veatch, one of the leading engineering firms in the nation. I remember much about that first day: the layout of the large room; the empty desk right behind my reference table, of the man who was on assignment in Duluth; the man in front and kitty corner to the front (Bill and Stan, respectively); of being told I would be drafting for the first few months (turned out to be only two), not engineering; of quickly realizing how much I didn’t know; the heat walking to and from the remote parking lot; the team across the room who flipped coins for coffee every morning about 9 AM.

I’ve had four jobs in my career, this last one lasting more than seventeen years. It would have been only two or three jobs had Iraq not invaded Kuwait in 1990, keeping me from returning to my expatriate home away from home. Most of the time the work has been pleasurable. Challenging, fulfilling, interesting, almost always giving a feeling of accomplishment. They say that if you love what you do you’ll never work a day in your life. And I have loved the engineering I’ve done, even as the career changed. First designing wastewater treatment plants, then designing lattice-steel transmission towers, then studying water distribution systems, then designing water treatment plants and other water works, then moving into a project management/department head roll of a crew mostly designing wastewater collection systems, then designing a mixture of wastewater and water works, including an award winning reverse osmosis water treatment plant, then on a major wastewater system study and related work in a management position. And that’s just the first 17 years! After that it is a blur of design, management, new roles, much work and many hours.

My interests are slowly changing, as I tumble to a retirement that, unless plans change, is only 8 years, 6 months, and 13 days away. Writing has certainly taken over the non-engineering hours, and even sometimes the engineering ones, forcing me to work the extra hours to put in my time. When someday I write my memoirs, should any one care about them besides my most immediate family, I expect the title to be The Journey Was A Joy.

Engineering, reading

This week in review

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It was a good week–finally!

After several weeks in which something always seemed to occur to make the week less than stellar, last week was better, much better. Hopefully it’s not because I’m batching it. Some highlights from the week:

– I completed the proposal for my study guide on The Screwtape Letters. Only a couple of days of polishing remain before I send it to the interested editor.
– I was able to concentrate on my work at work. I didn’t complete my major project, a flood study, but I made progress on it, including planning how to make it work. I organized my new work space, and completed a number of minor things that I started months ago, but had let lag.
– I tallied up my continuing education credits for the year and organized the certificates. This is important because, until this year, we had a staff member who did this, but cuts have put this back on licensees.
– I kept up with housework in Lynda’s absence, unlike previous times she’s been away.
– I worked on maintenance tasks around the house.
– I kept up with reading and blogging and e-mailing.

I’m excited about almost having the proposal done. I think this is possibly my best current work as related to being accepted for publication. And I think I did this right: plan out the book; prepare sample chapters; prepare a one-sheet promotional to show at the conference; then prepare a proposal at the editor’s request. In preparing the proposal I used Terry Whalin’s Book Proposals That Sell as a guide.

Also this week, my reading produced several ideas for future blog posts.

Carlyle, Engineering, Wesley

It’s been an even more turbulent week

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More than a week has passed since I last gave the “weekly report”. Sorry for my absence. Many of the days during this time were chock full of what I can only describe as turbulence. Much of that was at work, but some was personal, especially yesterday. I can’t say anything publicly. The immediate crisis has passed, but a long term crisis looms.

But, each cloud has a silver lining, right? The good news is that all the stress has about taken away my appetite. I’ve reduced to the lowest weight I’ve been at for two or three years.

Hopefully tomorrow I will find time to get back to the Wesley letter of recent posts, then to a Carlyle letter I began research on three weeks ago.

We can hope.