caleb walker

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Where was I?

Oh. Posting a sad poem on last year's Sept 11. (NP pointed that out when we were doing a photo walk in Oakmont.) So this post is meant to push that one down the page a bit.

NP and I took a photo walk in Oakmont this past weekend and we both got a lot of great shots around the river and up into the neighborhood a bit. But then something weird happened as I was loading the photos off my camera, and I lost them all. Yes I did.

labor day

I didn't know this:

Labor Day became a national holiday in 1894, partly because it was a convenient way for President Grover Cleveland to appease an angry workforce after he violently broke up a strike.

Read the whole story over at The Writer's Almanac.

various things

Some interesting (to me) things I've come across lately:

• Slide Rules! I'm old enough to have owned one of these and learned how to use it, but young enough to have never actually been required to use it.
• The Tunguska event was an enormous explosion over Russia in 1908, caused, probably, by a meteoroid. (Where "enormous" equals the largest impact in recent history. (Where "recent history" is undefined.))
• Pocket Eyes is a keychain-sized pair of pince-nez. I think I need a pair. Pince-nez reminds me of a book I read (but whose title I can't remember) where dogs have become sentient and many of them wear pince-nez on their snouts. And it's kind of a cool retro-y word.

There you go.

thirty-one

Ha! I wrote this last night and forgot to post it! Here it is, NOT BACK-DATED.

It's the last hour of the last day of May and my last NaBloPoMo post.

The morale of this story: It's easy enough to post something every day, but not so easy to write something worth reading. You know it as well as I do.

I have a few false starts saved that I can tweak into real posts for June.

bridges

It's Rachel Carson's birthday today (via). She wrote Silent Spring, the book that launched the environmental movement. I've never read her, but I often walk across her bridge. 

Downtown Pittsburgh is linked to the North Shore and the South Side by a butt-load of bridges. I work on the northern shore of the Allegheny River, which has three identical bridges over it. The 6th Street Bridge crosses from Downtown to the baseball park so it's called the Roberto Clemente Bridge. The 7th Street Bridge crosses over to the Warhol Museum and is called the Andy Warhol Bridge. And the 9th Street Bridge, the Rachel Carson Bridge, crosses over to... Well, the Alcoa Building, I guess. Or maybe the hobo village under the Parkway underpass.

plumbing

The utility sink in the basement was clogged. KR dumped Drano in it and plunged it, but still.

Under the sinks is an old drum trap (it took some googling to figure that out). The cap lifted right off since the threads had rusted away. Some probing with my hands (wearing rubber gloves at first, then without since I couldn't feel anything otherwise) revealed that the inlet at the bottom of the trap was plugged. It was a tight reach, under the sink, into the trap, to the bottom of the back wall of the drum.

KR brought me a silver pasta server, which would probably have helped clear the clog, but it would have been a suicide mission for the utensil. I used my fingers to clear most of the gunk. Then a wire coathanger to finish, jimmying it around until all the water in the sinks drained into the trap and out the outlet pipe. 

My fingernails are stained black as a reminder of this non-handy man's great success.

moving the needle

Today I heard a new phrase, "moving the needle," and I heard it about twenty times in a two-hour meeting.

"That's really gonna move the needle."

"Which feature will move the needle?"

"What we want here is a pervasive, ubiquitous strategic strategy that will move the needle."

Don't know what that means? I don't blame you. I couldn't figure it out from the context since it's such a vague phrase that it could mean any bunch of things. So I googled it. And you can too.

PS: Microsuasive.

PSS: "Interactive" is dead. Long live "Digital."

vanishing point

Vanishing Point from Bonsajo on Vimeo.

the new normal

One of the people in my writing group tonight used the term "the new normal." When a family experiences a crisis, things eventually get back to normal, but not the old normal. The new normal becomes ordinary, though it's not as good, as comfortable, as healthy as the old one.

eye-cicles

I thought I'd posted this, but it's been sitting here unpublished since Dec 22.

It's awful cold out today. And windy. Which, as my readers who live on the equator might not know, makes for a nasty wind chill. We hear reports on the radio like this morning's "It's four degrees out, with a wind chill of minus fifteen" and it makes us crawl back into bed and invite the dog in. I dawdled around the house this morning because I didn't really want to leave the house and go to work, and I was sort of planning anyway to drive so there was no reason to leave at 8:35 to catch the bus. Plus I thought the day might warm up a bit by 9:00.

The locks on my car doors were frozen. I tried using the lock-heater a friend gave me a couple Christmases ago, but couldn't figure out how to get results. So I popped the trunk, tripped the latch for the back seat, and crawled in that way. I parked on the windswept hill near campus and left the car unlocked (unless you're a car thief or my auto insurance agent, in which case I locked and re-iced my doors). The hill was particularly swept by wind this morning.

I pulled my hat down over my eyebrows and pulled my scarf up over my cheeks, leaving just my eyes to the elements. The wind blasted them, they watered and froze. I kept blinking so they wouldn't freeze shut, but still ice clumped around the edges of my vision.