miscellaneous

Well Done, USA Soccer Team

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I fell in love with soccer while living overseas, and seeing weekly matches in the English FA Cup league, and some Italian and Spanish league games. So today I simply say congratulations to the USA team, winning over Algeria and advancing to the next round of the World Cup tournament. Well done.

With two goals disallowed under questionable circumstances, the USA actually scored 6 goals and gave up 3, and should have had two wins and 7 points. A very good performance.

Good luck in the round of 16.

Writing

The Other Shoe Dropped

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I can’t believe I haven’t written anything here since Wednesday.

Well, yes I can. On Wednesday the other shoe dropped. I wrote about this in a post last Wednesday, that every time I try to ratchet up a little the amount of time/effort I put into my writing, something happens in life to negate those intentions, something to prevent me from more time writing. Having applied on Wednesday for a contributing writer position to an on-line magazine, I said I was waiting for the other shoe to drop, for something to rear-up in life and prevent me from doing that extra writing should I be accepted. It happened Wednesday night.

My wife was in Oklahoma City. My mother-in-law was staying with me, since she had been having low blood sugar attacks due to her difficulty regulating insulin doses and eating to be in sync. Wednesday night I rushed home from work so we could eat a rushed supper and rush to special church services in Rogers, our denomination’s district assembly for North Arkansas. We arrived right as the service started, getting the last handicapped space and convenient seats on the back row.

It was hot in the church, way too hot. Lots of standing during songs and up and down during the service. Then making our way to the car, greeting people as we went. By the time we got to the car I could tell she was having a low blood sugar attach. Unfortunately I didn’t think that she probably had some glucose pills in her purse. As the attack deepened on the 30 minute ride home, I considered stopping somewhere to buy her a sugar drink, but decided instead to get home as fast as I could.

By the time we got home I had to almost carry her in the house. Now sparing some of the details, I called 911, the paramedics were there 10 minutes later, her blood sugar was 35 (dangerously low), they pumped a glucose feed in her and her sugar went up to 371. Because of the wild swing, I had them take her to the hospital; it was by that time 10:30 PM. At 15 minutes after midnight they called me to say she was fine and could come home. So I went there, another half hour drive each way, picked her up, and wound up home and in bed about 1:30 AM.

I’m sure my mother-in-law will be staying with us for a while, perhaps permanently. That’s fine, but I know it will be one more drag on writing time, on research time, on pleasure reading, on just about everything. Call it a reduction in already limited discretionary time.

I haven’t heard from the magazine yet, but I don’t know if I’ll be able to write for them even if they accept me. The other shoe did indeed drop, on the same day.

Magazines, Writing

Waiting for the Other Shoe

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That’s a horrible cliche, I know: waiting for the other shoe to drop. But that’s the way I feel today. My reason for saying that is that today I took a big step in terms of writing assignments. I applied to an on-line magazine for a writing position. It appears it can be part time, and either replace my Suite101.com writing or go along side of it.

The magazine is for the construction industry, both buildings and infrastructure, and includes engineering topics. They pay very well for on-line writing. If accepted, and if my articles pass muster, I could make some real spending money through this site. They have several types of articles to write, of varying lengths and for different payment. I don’t know how long the evaluation process will require, but at midday, Wednesday June 16, 2010, I’m optimistic.

So why am I waiting for the other shoe to drop? It seems that every time I try to ratchet up my writing activities, something gets in the way. My time gets usurped for things that must be done. My CEI work suddenly increases. I’m expected to do something else. Computer crash, car crash, home repairs, etc.

It is predictable. If I try to increase the time I spend on writing, something will come into my life that prevents my doing so. I have wondered if this is God’s way of presenting closed doors, an indication that writing is the wrong direction for me to go. When I put writing aside for a time to do some other needed item, nothing ever interrupts my doing that item.

So we’ll see what happens. Maybe this e-zine won’t accept me. Maybe I’ll get into it and discover it’s not as lucrative as it appears. Maybe I’ll find it’s not a good site to write for after all. We’ll see. If the other shoe does drop, I’ll fall back on one of my standard comforts: Retirement is only 7 years, 6 months, and 14 days away.

Writing

To Write or not to Write

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I had a weekend that should have resulted in some major writing accomplishments. My wife is in Oklahoma City, helping the kids and grandkid out. My mother-in-law stayed at my house from Thursday through Saturday, because she had been having low blood sugar blackout. But by mid-day Saturday she was much better, and decided I should take her home. I did so, going on to the office to complete my Life Group lesson for Sunday. Saturday night I had to prepare some breakfast food to take to church Sunday, consuming an hour of time. Sunday was Life Groups and church and then home. I should have had an easy time of accomplishing much in the way of writing.

So what did I accomplish? In terms of writing, only the Life Group lesson, nicely presented on two sheets, in columns, with photographs, and lots of fill-in-the-blanks. In terms of enjoyment, much. I watched the USA-England draw in the World Cup on Saturday, punctuated by my weekly trip to Wal-Mart during the halftime and early second half, for groceries. And I read a couple of hundred pages in the book I purchased last Friday. It’s a biography of John F. Kennedy that I hadn’t seen before. I’m sure I’ll post a review of it when I’m done.

I probably should have read more than 225 pages, but I watched four episodes of “Criminal Minds” and two of “Forensic Files”. I enjoy both those shows. I read on the commercials, but I imagine if I hadn’t spent those five hours with the TV (actually, six and a half hours including Germany vs. Australia), I might have come close to finishing the book.

But I really should have been writing. I could have had more than ten glorious hours of word-smithing. Sunday late-afternoon I went to The Dungeon intending to do some writing, but got in front of the monitor, fingers on keyboard, and couldn’t write. It’s not writer’s block, for I had plenty of ideas. It was more, “Why am I bothering? Am I ever going to sell anything?” And I decided to not waste my time on that.

I don’t know what I’m going to do. I imagine this funk won’t last forever, and I’ll be back writing again. Meanwhile I’m committed to this series of Bible study lessons, and will write that weekly. I shared a synopsis of my China Tour novel with our Life Group on Sunday, and everyone said it was a book they would buy and read. So I’ll continue on. But man, it’s difficult right now.

Engineering, flood studies, Suite 101, Writing

Two Down, Two to Go

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Yes, yesterday the SW “I” Street CLOMR project was stuffed into a FedEx envelope and today was dropped off at the LOMC Clearinghouse in Maryland. My second flood study is done–until I get comments back from FEMA, if they don’t approve the submittal. While the work was tedious and intensive, I actually enjoyed doing this project, or so it seems in hindsight. I just need to figure out how to generate some articles for Suite101.com from the project.

Speaking of that pursuit of mine, I published my 99th article there last night, about recent stock market trends. Despite that, my page views are considerably below where they were two months ago, and still well below my highs from October 2009, when I had just 50 or so articles posted. Today looks better as far as page views are concerned. Revenue is still in the toilet, however, with no turnaround in sight. Oh, well, I guess I can go back to thinking of Suite as just “platform building”.

The rest of this week at work I’m trying to do some miscellaneous tasks that I’ve put off for a month or longer. One is a water system evaluation in my own town, Bella Vista. I had the first of two site visits scheduled for tomorrow morning, but will have to put that off one day due to a health situation with my mother-in-law. That will give me more time in the office tomorrow to get other miscellaneous projects out the door. It feels good to finally have some time to spend on them.

As far as getting back into the thick of writing, I don’t see any light yet. My wife will be gone for ten days beginning today. Normally I get lots of writing done at those times, but if I have m-i-l duties in her place, writing time may be difficult to come by.

So next week I begin flood study number 3, the Perry Road flood study. We’re designing the widening of Perry Road, and installing larger and longer culverts. This will affect the floodplain, though I’m not sure how yet. On the heals of that will be the McKisic Creek flood study in Centerton. I may actually try to work on that simultaneously with Perry Road. I’d really love to knock both of them out in a month and see my way clear to get back to training.

Engineering, flood studies, Writing

Not Much Time for Nothing

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I had great plans to write some blog posts last week and over the weekend. Life got in the way, however. This second flood study has become an all-consuming monster as I try to make an extended deadline—extended through the goodness of the reviewer for FEMA’s consultant. I even went in to work about four hours on Sunday. Today, finally, the three drawings are done, my computer models are correct, the request to burn CDs has been turned in. And the original of the computer models and my engineering mini-report are on my desk, ready for making hard copies tomorrow. All that remains is a title sheet and dividers between the sections. Well, I still haven’t seen the drawings off the plotter. I still have to put my seal and signature on them, and write a certification, but those are minor. I’d say it’s a guarantee I’d have it out the door tomorrow except…

…I’ve been called on to go to Eureka Springs (an hour east of our office) tomorrow, to chase a new drainage project. That will consume my day from 8:30 AM to about 2:00 PM—prime time for copying, assembling, and packaging submittals. We have an admin assistant who can do most of that, but it’s nice to be available for the unexpected glitch.

I find these flood studies to be all consuming as far as brain power is concerned. I get home at night drained, and don’t feel much like writing. What time I do have has gone to study for the Life Group lesson series I’m teaching. Perhaps I can cobble up a post on that this week.

After this flood study goes out the door, I have two other things I have to jump on real quickly, get them knocked out, then go to the third flood study. This one will be from scratch, I think. I won’t have to struggle over whether to fix other people’s mistakes or just let them ride. Won’t have to second guess how another engineer built the model or drew the map. That, at least, will be a nice change.

So when will I get back to writing? Don’t know. The situation at Suite101 is not good. Something has happened to the web site business model. Page views and revenue has tanked. I’m not writing hardly anything there any more, though that’s partly because of the time and brain drain thing. I’ll try to keep posting here, but I see lots of difficulty ahead.

stock market

A Stock Market Move Called (sort of)

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This post would be a lot more impressive if I had posted it Friday or Saturday, as planned, but perhaps it still has value.

Tuesday May 26 was a wild ride on Wall Street. The market plunged at the open , traded down hard most of the day (about 3%), then at the end of the day rose just as hard as it fell. Some of the indexes closed up a reasonable amount for a normal trading day. The Dow Jones Industrial Average closed down less than a half percent.

I had watched the market a little during the day, casually, since I didn’t have any stocks in my account. But I didn’t hear about the late day rally until driving home. I thought from the report, “The market made a hammer today. Better look at charts tonight.”

A “hammer” is a candlestick pattern of a price variation, such as a stock, a stock index, or really any commodity whose price varies. Candlesticks are a way to display price variation so it is easy to read the important information of a security’s open, high, low, and close for the period. Any period actually. Candlesticks can be drawn minute by minute, for half-hours, hours, days, weeks, months, or even years. Any time period you want. Different types of traders use different time frames. I was thinking of a hammer candlestick on the daily chart.

So I studied the stock index charts that night. All the major indexes had indeed made a hammer of one type or another. I came upstairs from the Dungeon and told Lynda it looked as if the market was about to go on a run to the upside.

So what happened? Wednesday and Thursday saw strength in the market. While many indexes went down on Wednesday, they closed well above lows of the previous session. Thursday was up strong. At some point on Wednesday, when the market was strong at midday, I told Lynda, “I nailed it.”

She reminded me that you can’t claim to have nailed it unless you put some money behind your prediction. And I hadn’t. Knowing the busyness of the next few days at the office, I knew I couldn’t watch trades, so I didn’t place any on Tuesday night. Had I done so, and managed the trade according to risk-reward rules, I would have made a few percentage points on a trade over two or three days. I could have accepted that. The movement, of course, may be rather short-lived, as the market today closed below the close of last Tuesday. It’s still above the lows of the 26th, so the movement may not be over yet.

Lynda did take a position on a stock on Thursday, based on my prediction, and made 1.5% from Thursday to Friday, closing out then. I’d take 1.5% overnight any day.

So, I guess I’ll keep watching stock price and volume patterns, trying to figure out where the money is moving, and what is happening, spotting the trend, making 1.5% every few days. Maybe, just maybe, I can make some money with all this training I’ve received.
flood studies, Writing

Holiday’s Over; Back to Work–But on What?

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Well, the Memorial Day weekend is over. I’m back at work and trying to put my mind and heart into it, finding that difficult. We had five guests at the house Saturday through this morning, relatives, most traveling from southwest Kansas to Louisville for a family wedding, breaking their trip with a visit to us. They left this morning, probably ten or fifteen minutes after I left for the office. It was a good weekend. Lots of good meals, relaxation, conversation, some war movies yesterday, game playing (by some; I didn’t take part in that), and sitting on the deck conversing and watching birds.

But that meant I didn’t take much time for writing projects or research or reading. I read about ten pages in the book on which I’m basing the Life Group lesson series I’ll begin teaching this coming Sunday. And I re-read the last couple of chapter in The Shack, just in case I was called on to teach the final lesson in that series last Sunday. But other than that, no reading. And no writing on my blog.

I have three or four posts I’ve been thinking of, which wouldn’t take too much time. I guess I’ll be fleshing them out and trying to post daily this week. I’m not going to post goals again this month, as I still am uncertain of where I’m going with my writing career.

Last week I contacted the principal of the Christian school our daughter graduated from, to discuss whether their art teacher would be interested in having their art students illustrate Father Daughter Day as a class project. He sounded interested, but said he had to run to a meeting and would get back with me. That was last Tuesday, and I’ve yet to hear from him. Is he uninterested, or just forgot? Should I call him, or just let it go as another rejection? For now, I’ll do the latter.

Well, back to the grind. I reviewed one drainage project today, and will now jump back on that flood study I wrote about last week. Only a day or two to go on that, methinks. Then I have two or three more flood studies backed up, waiting for me to release them from their current impoundment.

Engineering

A Construction Project Completed (sort of)

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Yes, yesterday, at long last, the church parking lot improvements were “completed”. I put that in quotes, because just like the flood study I just posted about, the project is not really done. Yesterday the sub-contractor completed the corrections for two areas that were non-draining. We put the hose on them, and they both seemed to drain. The larger one, however, drains to another area that doesn’t drain. That, however, can be corrected by a little bit of grinding in the gutter to get the water into the east rain garden.

The contractor actually had a couple of more things to do when I left the site yesterday. He had concrete coming to pour two short sections of sidewalks where we cut in the entrance. I’m assuming that happened as scheduled. Also, the contractor yesterday noticed a short concrete apron that he poured earlier that wasn’t draining. He saw it just too late to order concrete for it, so said he would take it out today and re-pour it. I didn’t go to the church to see. This is a vindication of sorts. When the apron was being poured, I warned the contractor twice that it didn’t look right and that he ought to put a level on it. He said he would, but never it. It turns out I was right.

Then he also has to finish the striping. He held back some of it where the corrective patches were to be made. Today is a beautiful day, and I thought he would come do it. But he says no, he’ll come tomorrow, Saturday, when there’s no one at church using the parking lot, and do it then. So I assume when I arrive at church on Sunday the lot will be fully striped. I’m not actually holding my breath on that.

Then there will be the contractor’s final bill to haggle over, then the church’s own work to put a light pole and lights on an existing base, and to finish out the rain gardens with bedding soil and plants. But hey, the end is in sight, and I don’t need to be making daily trips to the church to watch the contractors. I have close to 30 hours to make up for time siphoned off from my employer.

And yesterday was a good wrap-up, being on site and smelling fresh asphalt being laid. It’s one of my favorite smells. I guess you’d have to have been on a lot of construction sites to enjoy the smell of asphalt.

Engineering, flood studies

A Deadline Met (sort of)

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Monday, the federal Memorial Day holiday, is the deadline to have a re-submittal in to FEMA’s consultant for the floodplain project I’m currently working on. That means that Tuesday is the day it would have to be turned in. Just today, about 10 AM, I made all corrections to the computer model and had successful runs of the conditions that must be checked.

That’s just the computer model, however, is not the full submittal. We now have to take the computer results and re-map the floodplain, creating a revised work map at a large scale and a revised floodplain map at a smaller scale. For this I will be at the mercy of the CADD people. I have a tech assigned to it, and may have him do some of it this afternoon–or I may wait until Tuesday. For I called FEMA–actually the consulting firm that reviews map change requests turned in to FEMA, and the assigned reviewer said as long as the computer models are turned in on Tuesday, he would consider the deadline met and we would have a few more days to get the paper submittals in.

Hooray for that! In the second half of the morning I spent my time “cleaning-up” the model. As I do one of these, lots of extraneous information is added, as I try out this or that to see how the model can be made more accurate. All of those can be confusing to the reviewer. He just needs to see the files that we actually want him to check, the correct ones. I’m almost done with the clean-up; maybe another 30 minutes or so. I’ll get the e-mail fired off (remembering to attached the files, of course), and that part of the project will be done. I’ll begin printing the paper files, and as I said above maybe get to some of the modeling. Or not. I have another project on my desk for QC review that I really ought to get to today.

So the “I” Street CLOMR is almost done. Hopefully Wednesday it will be. Then I get to work on the Perry Road CLOMR, then the McKisic Creek LOMR (complete with hydrology work), then a re-do of the Crystal Bridges CLOMR (to correct the labyrinth weirs). Then I hear we might have a CLOMR or LOMR in Terrell, Texas. I’m supposed to coach a young engineer in that, rather than do it myself.

At this rate, I might become an expert in floodplain modeling. Which doesn’t really further my writing career, but helps with the job security that I need for another 7 years, 7 months, and 3 days.

Author | Engineer