The dumbest moments

A story related to me by a fellow rider; The person who this story is about, owned a pickup that broke down . His employer told him to use a company pickup to get back and forth to work until his own truck was fixed. Pretty generous of them. It seems the company pickup had a snow plow on it and his driveway needed to be plowed. Being that he was good employee and they let him take the pickup home it was probably all right to plow his drive out. The pickup has a camera mounted to the windshield to record an accident. It sees out in front and also the driver in the cab. Once he started plowing his drive he tripped the camera about 15 times because the camera thinks there were 15 accidents, but they were actually the plow hitting hard spots in the snow that tripped the camera.)

The upper management did not see the humor in his using the snow plow. Using the pickup was ok though. Needless to say he received a reprimand.

It is finally here.

Thursday, the 7th of June at 6:30 pm I received delivery of our 2009 Ultra Classic. It hit the pocket book hard. I believe it is worth it for I was feeling pretty low without a ride for the month. The month that had some beautiful weather to ride in. Now we are getting it ready to ride to the HOG Rally in Springfield, Il. So here it is waiting outside of the Party Room.

Interesting people

Today when we finished fixing a fault on this man's electric service we had to inform him of a momentary outage to switch him off of the 1:1 to his own full service.  He was an elderly gentleman, tall, thin and active physically and mentally, his name was Orville Olson.  I engaged him in some conversation about how his farm was being surrounded by subdivisions and the richest soil in the world was being paved over by land hungry people, who someday will wonder where their food will come from after we have paved all of the good farm ground over.   He said his grandfather came from Sweden in 1880 and worked enough so that he could purchase a farm when the land cost $25.00 an acre.  That was 1889, the farm was just north of Cortland, Il.,  no more than a mile.  

He then told me how his grandfather decided to come to America.  It seems the grandfather, let's call him Carl, was a 19 year old who had a buddy, lets call him Swen. It seems Swen had gotten a girl in a family way and did not want to marry her.  The answer seemed to be to leave Sweden and come to America where Swen's sister worked in a bakery in Sycamore.  As fate would play it, Swen decided to leave one night to go to America, he wanted to tell someone. That someone was Carl.   Carl said he would like to go.  But he had no money and his father said he had none to give him.   His dad left the house and came back a while later with enough money to get him to America via a 3 week boat across the Atlantic trip which most like was a sailing vessel of some kind.  Once here in this country they took a train all the way to Cortland and Carl got off, but Swen didn't, until he detrained in Clinton, Ia., and speaking no english someone got him turned around the next day and got him to DeKalb.  There is where that story ended but another started about the marshes around northern Illinois.  In 1889 when he bought the farm there was a 50 acre lake that he had to farm around.  In 1905, Carl along with thirteen other farmers hired a firm to dig a union tile line from south of rte 38 north to Sycamore.  It was an 18" diameter clay tile that was used until 2005 when the town of Cortland replaced it with a 36" one.  A union tile is like a union drainage ditch where farmers could lay their own field drainage system to drain into the union tile which would drain into a natural creek or river.  This made the land tillable.

As I looked out at the now drained field it looked like the rest of the farm land around and you would not suspect that it was full of water before.  Carl lived to be 96 years old dying in 1957.  Then Orville Olson asked me how old I thought he was.  I figured probably in his 70's, no, I was off a few years, he is 92 and pretty darn good shape.  He must have his grandfather's longevity genes.  A footnote to this tale is that he has been offered $50,000 an acre from the developers and has no intention to sell.

Museum trip to Harley Davidson

Yesterday, Bev and I took a club trip to Milwaukee.  It was more than I thought it would be.  Enjoyed it.  The real issue is after owning  three Harley's I still cannot figure out why there are so many Americans that will sell this country out to Japan or any other country.  Buying a Japanese bike that is a copy of the Harley is beyond comprehension.  Price?  HD starts out at less then 9,000 dollars.  Quality? No difference.  Un-American?  You bet.  If you think a HD rider looks at the Jap bike rider with thumbs up, they are kidding themselves.  

Old timer

Today we were transferring all of the wire over to a new pole and if you work around a small town people will stop and talk to you.   Today it happened not once but twice, first a lineman/foreman that retired  stopped and talked for awhile.  After he left another guy stopped who none of us knew.  He was a lineman about 75  that worked for the contractors.  He gets out and starts with small talk and by the end of a half  hour he was our best friend.  Knew he was a  lineman because he knew the job and the tool names.  And, of course, a lot of stories were told.  Something to be said of small towns.  

Procrastinate

Part of my job was to be a troubleshooter after normal work hours.  People would call in complaining of an electrical problem they were having.  I would be expected to figure out what was causing the problem and of course fix it.  Over the years you learn from experience, common sense, and experimentation what is wrong and how to rectify it.  Several times I have found problems in their wiring  that more than likely would have caused their home to burn down.   One night a couple of  years ago a ticket came in with a blinking lights problem,  I drove there, diagnosed that the problem was inside their home.  They were advised of such, and that they needed to contact an electrician to further investigate and fix their problem.  I drove by there a few months later and saw the 19th century Queen Anne home burned to the ground.  I can only assume that the electrical problem didn't get fixed and started the home on fire.

Windmills, are they the new folly?

Are these the new folly, "the fool America" into thinking that it is green.  Oh, yes, they use the renewable resource.  Do you wonder if  the whole truth is out there.  What happens when the wind dies down or the wind is blowing to fast.  Windmill stops.   Does the power still come to your house?  How?  Are they an inexpensive form of power?  Is nuclear or coal, still cheaper?  Do you want to pay a higher price for electricity if you didn't know they were on the grid?   And how many have to be put up as a blight on the landscape before they have any significant impact on our electricity usage?

The tool chest

When I started working in 1972 the introduction of  a truck that could dig holes, set poles, hang transformers, and give a man a lift up to the work area had become commonplace.  You still need to have the ability to climb a pole and work in your hooks.  The top shelf on the right has rubber blankets,  line hose on the second shelf and fiberglass sticks on the third to deal with the high voltage.  On the door to the left is an assortment of drill bits for a power drill either run by 24 volts or 120 volts laying on the coiled yellow cords on the right.  A handline hangs next to a number of yellow nylon lifting slings.  Behind the rope and slings is an assortment of hoists, and rope blocks to help move conductors around on the pole.  In a bin next to this one is an assortment of grips for different sizes of conductor wires along with cutting tools and presses to make connections with other wires.  There are several more bins that carry mostly materials to build power lines that are overhead and undergound.

When the lights go out

When I come upon a street light it will extinguish and as I walk away it will come back on, so says a group known as 'SLIders'.  There are many people in the world who are SLIders,  true believers in their paranormal ability to turn off street lights.  
‘H' of Seattle in the USA wrote in with his experiences of SLI.
"When I encounter a lamp subject to my SLI, the lamp will extinguish every time I pass by it, without fail. This is, of course, subject to the lamp's being on in the first place. I have never experienced passing by a lamp, turning it off, then immediately turning around, passing it and subsequently turning it on. Occasionally I have turned them on, but this is probably no more than 5% of the total incidents. Each lamp has always (no exceptions) either gone on or off but never both. This occasionally occurs when a lamp happens to be on during daylight hours. I should state that when I encounter a lamp subject to my SLI, the phenomenon invariably occurs at each encounter "
I have to believe that many people exaggerate the truth to fit themselves. I too have experienced street lights turning off when I approach and coming back on. Sometimes I have to pull over and watch when it does. And when that happens I get into the bucket of the aerial lift and change the bulb that has come to the end of its useful life that signals me of its pending doom by blinking off and coming back on. Then I guarantee that no SLIder will be able to turn it off when they walk by it.

Call me if you need me

Here I sit in the middle of the night at a computer that relies on my job as a lineman for it to work. The phone is ringing now, each time it does it portends the end of my job and life as I used to know it. How does that happen you say. My job is a 24hr-7day a week job that requires my coming to work to repair something that has broken down on the electrical grid. It is a complex work culture that wraps around your life that ensnares a person into a virtual prison. A prison that limits your hobbies or interests or family bonding. One that keeps you home when a dance recital or your little guy's ball game is scheduled, dare you miss the call to go to work. If I decide to break away from that prison then I do it as a work release. I have to go back afterwards.