OK. I guess that’s a little overstating it. I’m not really unemployed. The job is over and the contract is up; I can’t sign up for unemployment because I’m making too much money – from my pension.
Students at a nuclear power plant simulator – photo rendered as a painting.
This was my second contract since I retired a little over three years ago. Both have been for about 6 months and both have been doing part of the job that I used to do before I retired – teaching license operator candidates in the classroom and in the simulator.
The class did well in the simulator operational exams administered by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission this week. The last day of the operational exams was Thursday, which was also my last day on the job. I had my box packed and was out the door by a little after 6 PM.
I suppose it will take a little time to get back into the swing of not working.
I think I’ll be up to speed by sometime Monday morning. 
I’ve got quite a lot of work to do around our place this spring, summer, and fall. Of course, we’ll get a little bit of traveling in, too.
Then, sometime in January, it looks like I’ll probably be back at work. That’s about the time the next class should be at the point where I’ll be needed – if they allocate the funds, which I think is quite likely.
I’ve worked a total of about 13 1/2 months out of the last 36 – and when I do work, it’s doing something I know well and get satisfaction from.
This is a day at work — a week — that’s hard to rearrange and/or reschedule.
It wasn’t supposed to do this until later in the day… but at 4:30 AM we already had a bit of white stuff.
It looks as though we may get a good bit more.
When the Arctic Oscillation went strongly negative last month,
temperatures in Arkansas dropped to 10 to 20°F below normal.
We are certainly getting a taste of winter this year.
… and road conditions are already deteriorating (blue is snow covered, green is slush).
The Arctic Oscillation has become strongly negative again.
Ten days ago, I had finally had it.
I had been created a photo gallery from the images of our first day in Rocky Mountain National Park. Unfortunately, I was having more difficulties than normal in getting the gallery uploaded to the server.
I had also been having more and more little problems with my computer — nothing serious that kept me from using it, just a bunch of little things that I either found a work-around on or just gave up on.
The computer was working and doing just about everything I needed, but it was 3 years old, and it was time for a change.
A drastic change.
No, I didn’t go out and buy a new computer, though that was a consideration.
Instead, I reset the computer back to the original software configuration. I’ve taken more drastic measures — such as reformatting the hard drive or buying a new one — to resolve problems with previous computers. This was bad enough, since I had to reload the programs I wanted and install all of the updates. That’s still not completely done.
I’ve also also figured out my problem with uploading material to the server. I’m in the process of downloading all of my material from the server and will be changing the way that I publish new stuff to the website. (The problem was in Microsoft FrontPage extensions, which I won’t be using any more.)
With working odd hours and dealing with all this, posting material from our September trip was interrupted. I will be posting more from the trip, hopefully in the next day or so.
My anticipated “weekend” away from work is being extended by a planned 3 week vacation.
We are currently camped at a KOA in La Junta, Colorado. Yesterday, we camped at Sandy Cove Corps of Engineers campground on Canton Lake in Oklahoma.
Tomorrow we will be traveling on for a week in the Rocky Mountain National Park area. We’ll be camped in the park for four days. When we reserved our campsite for the park, there was nothing available for the Labor Day weekend, so we made reservations at the Estes Park KOA. We prefer to have spots reserved for holiday weekends rather than trying to find a campsite when there will likely be a lot of other people camping.
After Labor Day, though, we shouldn’t have any trouble finding a place to camp.
We will be traveling on Labor Day, though…, and will probably be traveling I40, which brings back memories of another Labor Day on I40.
In 2001, we were headed from Steamboat Springs to Estes Park and decided to go by way of Golden to see a quilt exhibit. We didn’t even think about the fact that there would be heavy, heavy traffic heading from the mountains back to the cities.
We ended up in a traffic jam backed up for miles.
Fortunately, this time, we’ll be heading away from the cities, going west.
Here are a few photos from yesterday at Canton Lake:
The following “drawing” of boys at play in Lake Canton was rendered from a photograph using Corel Paintshop Pro Photo X2.
While I will be “off-line” and away fro the internet until Friday, there will continue to be daily posts that have been “pre-published.”
I plan to have more photos to share later in the week.
This post is being simultaneously published on Exit78 and Haw Creek Out ‘n About.
I’ve been working quite a number of hours in the simulator the last few weeks.
One of the requirements for reactor operators is that they demonstrate the ability to start up the reactor. Each candidate practiced the reactor startup 5 times and then had a startup where he or she is evaluated by someone from Operations management.
So that’s a total of 6 startups for each student. There are 12 students, so, over the last few weeks, there have been 72 startups for training or evaluation — and I was there for every one of them. Total time in the simulator for this was about 84 hours over a 4 week period — about 20 hours a week. And that doesn’t include the several startups that I did to verify the scenario I was using and to establish the conditions for the evaluations.
This week, I am working in the simulator from about 4 PM to midnight every day, providing support and guidance for a crew of students who are shutting the plant down and cooling to “cold iron.” Once that’s done, they’ll be doing a heatup to normal operating condition, with a startup and power escalation to as high in power as we can get before the end of the shift on Friday.
I’ll certainly be ready for a rest when the weekend rolls around.
published between 1898 and 1905
photomechanical print : photochrom, color.
Library of Congress Photochrom Print Collection
The Photochrom Print Collection has almost 6,000 views of Europe and the Middle East and 500 views of North America. The richly colored images look like photographs but are actually ink-based photolithographs, usually 6.5 x 9 inches.
Yesterday was supposed to be a 12 hour day. I went in a little early to make sure everything was set up right for the evaluations that we would be doing in the simulator. Unfortunately, four of the six evaluations took longer than expected. After getting to work around 6 A.M., I didn’t leave the building until 10:40 P.M.
It made for a very long day — the longest work day I’ve had in a very long while.
However, it’s enough to let me take all of Friday off, so I’ll have a three day weekend.
Blog Posting
While I am working a 40 hour week, I’ve found that publication on a very regular schedule works for me, so long as I keep with the blog tagline, “Sharing some of my photos, vintage images I’ve discovered, and — occasionally — commentary and thoughts from retired life.”
And that’s what I plan to do, much as I’ve done the last couple of weeks — photos from our travels, vintage images of interest that I’ve found, and an occasional commentary, say once a week or so, on various topics.
For the visitors who like my photos, I’m also publishing them on two other blogs, Haw Creek and Haw Creek Out ‘n About.
While those two blogs are intended to have slightly different content, one RV related and the other travel related, right now all I am primarily publishing a random photo from our travels each day.
Photos published here and on the other two blogs are always different from each other and, generally, have not been published in the past. The exceptions to that are that I may republish some images that I post while we are traveling and some images that I posted before I established my current semi-random selection process may reappear. It’s just too difficult to go back through all of the old posts.
“I’m going to take every single sick day even if I don’t get sick; they’re mine.” — or — “I only take days off sick if I’m really feeling lousy.”
Busy…, wet…, behind — and more photos!
October 30, 2009
I really have intended to work my way through the photos from our September trip. However, I have managed to find other activities to keep me from that goal. I do, however, have a new photo gallery for Day 3 of Rocky Mountain National Park.
Check out Day 3 of Rocky Mountain National Park and my other Haw Creek photo galleries.
Work, of course, takes a huge chunk of time and my time is shifted since the simulator is primarily available for the students in the evening. While I was planning for the contract to be over at the end of 2009, there is a distinct possibility that I will be there until the second week of March.
Karen has a new notebook computer. I spent the better part of a day installing all of her old programs and transferring files. The notebook runs on Windows 7.
I’m going to also be moving from XP to Windows 7. After restoring my laptop to near original configuration, there are still times where I am waiting an excessive time for processes to finish. My new laptop is on order and will be assembled and shipped next week.
Early this year, I rediscovered a love for reading. I used to read three or more novels a week on a regular basis. After many years of only a few books a year, I’m now reading at least a couple of books a week.
This has been the wettest year of all the years we have lived in Arkansas. Much of the state is well over 20″ over the normal rainfall amounts for the year to date. This is already about the 12th or 13th wettest year on record for Little Rock. From what I understand, the wettest year on record was in the 1880s, and there was a little more than ten inches more than what Little Rock has already so far this year — and there is still two more months of 2009 to go.
I’m going to be concentrating on posting the rest of the material from our September trip and building photo galleries. I’ll post on other topics as I have the time and the inclination.
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