Just a few minutes after the last post, we lost power — 7 days to the day after the last time. The good news, for us, is that we only lost it for 3 hours, much better that the 33 hours last week.

The emergency sirens went off twice, for good reason. Atkins, a town 15 miles from us, and the area around it, was apparently hit quite badly. There’s a lot of property damage with injuries and it looks like at least three fatalities, a father, a mother and a child, apparently the same family, when their home was hit by the tornado.

It sounds like the tornado was on the ground for at least 70 miles. The town of Gasville was apparently flattened as was a boat factory in Clinton. The Little Rock TV stations have been doing weather without a commercial break since the middle of the afternoon, trying to let people know what is coming there way so that they can take shelter.

Just heard that the National Guard is being activated tomorrow to help with the disaster in this county. This is the third time in a month that we’ve borne the brunt of severe weather, and this one sound like it is far worse than the earlier episodes.

image by by simondbarnes

The sky is getting dark and darker. Lightning is flashing and thunder is rumbling. Off in the distance the emergency sirens are wailing for the second time.

According to the National Weather Service, portions of our county are in a tornado warning.

The good news, at least for us, is that the cell will be passing south and east of us.

It was 73°F earlier today.

The weather has been crazy this year. Today’s spring weather and storms don’t bode well for Spring when it really gets here.

Image by Philgarlic

I’m not a small guy — and I guess I’m not as small as I used to be. Our oldest daughter took this picture of me going down into the after torpedo room on the USS Razorback, a submarine permanantly moored in the Arkansas River at North Little Rock. The Razorback is a WWII era diesel submarine, commissioned toward the end of the war. After its service in the U.S. Navy it was sold to Turkey for another couple of decades of service. After it was decommisioned by Turkey, it was sold to North Little Rock and is now part of a growing maritime museum. It’s named after a type of fish, not the mascot of the University of Arkansas. This was my second trip through this sub. The first was last year and was the first time I had been on a submarine since I stepped off my boat, the USS Casimir Pulaski, thirty years earlier.

This was a pretty full weekend and, with going back to work all of a sudden, I’m finding it a little difficult to squeeze things into the reduced amount of time that I now have. I’m only working 40 hours a week, with no overtime, but, with travel, that’s about 45 hours a week that I had for other stuff before last week. I’m getting up early to go to the fitness center, but the workouts are a little shorter.

However, it is just for a short term contract — 26 weeks — so it won’t be long till I’m free again, plus, we should have some of our recurring bills eliminated, so financially this should be a plus.

It’s bedtime, I’m tired, and I’m starting to babble on, so it’s time to close — I will endeaver to keep up with this blog. We’ll see.

It’s been 3 days now of getting up early to go to the fitness center before going to work. The fitness center opens at 5 A.M. and normal working hours begin at 7 A.M. This morning I was at the gym about 10 minutes after it opened.

Tonight, I was sitting in the living room reading and the next thing I know, two hours have passed — I’ve been sleeping. I guess I’ve grown accustomed to a bit more sleep over the last 12 months. I could go to the fitness center after work, but I prefer going in the morning when it is less crowded. On days where I’m in the simulator with the class in the late afternoon and evening, I’ll be going later in the morning.

I’ve spent most of the last couple of days reading procedures. I’ve got two “instructor refamiliarization guides” to complete before I can resume teaching. One is for general instructor and the other is for simulator instructor. Needless to say, the reading is pretty dry — make that very dry!

My first scheduled class to teach is Monday, February 11th.

(Note: The control room in the photograph is from Shippingport Nuclear Power Plant, one of the early plants, no longer in operation.)

We were planning to sleep on the couches in the living room last night because that was the only warm area of the house. Just as we were starting to get ready for bed, though, the power came back on. So we changed our plans, turned off the generator, shut the side dampers on the fireplace insert, and got ready for bed.

There are still quite a few people that don’t have power back. The wind storm apparently damaged the power lines in a lot of different areas. There are a lot of insurance claims for damage to shingles on houses and trees falling on cars. In other parts of the state, there were two fatalities. One person died when a tree fell on her house and another from a tree crushing a car as it was going down a road.

Saw utility trucks and crews from North Carolina and Mississippi. We certainly appreciate the help!

We lost seven pines from the wind. Several of them were at least 30 years old.

The snow held off until evening today. We ended up getting less than 1/2 inch.

I’d say I was ready for Spring, but the way the weather has been going, it’ll not surprise me if we have a very active season of storms when it gets here. The most recent tornado, a couple of weeks ago, touched down less than five miles from here after the storm cell had gone by here. It dumped more rain in a very short period of time than I have seen in a very long time.

Crazy weather, this year.

Yesterday started out to be a very, very nice day. We were planning to work outside, expecting temperatures in the upper 60s to low 70s. We didn’t know that a fiece cold front was heading our way.

The temperature peaked at about 72 degrees, but about 100 miles northwest of us the temperature was already 50 degrees below that. I decided working outside wasn’t too smart after our trash cans had blown over three times, especially with small dead branches and twigs coming off the trees. After the third time, we decided to bring the trash containers next the house where thay would be sheltered from the wind.

As we were heading back indoors, I heard a sound like sheet metal roofing ripping loose. We looked around to see if we could find the cause and discovered we had several trees down in our acre east of the house. Great. We’ll deal with that later.

Soon after we got back in the house, we lost power. That was at 1 P.M. When we called the utility company, the automated system said that they were aware of the power outage and that power would be restored by 9 P.M.. It’s now after 9 P.M. the next day and power is still out.

Not long after we lost power, I got a phone call from the consulting company that my contract is going to be through with word that they had received the purchase order and that the client would like me to start today. So I went to work this morning, even though employment paperwork could not be done because I didn’t have computer access due to the power outage.

Tonight, I have a generator running to provide power for the fan in our fireplace insert, a light, our DSL modem, wireless router, laptop, television and satellite dish — and power to the printer so I could print out the employment paperwork so I can get it all filled out and faxed in from work in the morning. Bedrooms are closed off, so we are sleeping on couches in the living room tonight. They’ve opened shelters in a nearby town for people that don’t have heat. In Ft. Chaffee, the wind wind spread a fire through over 100 buildings slated for a 21 million dollar demolition project — the building that Elvis got his haircut in when he went in the army wasn’t affected, though.

They’re predicting snow for tomorrow.

……Previous posts on this (most recent on top):

• Heigh Ho, Heigh Ho… (not yet!)
• Heigh Ho, Heigh Ho, it’s….
• BIG BUMP in the road for my online plans…. perhaps.
• The BIG BUMP revealed

Karen calls one of her quilt projects Insanity. The quilt uses patterns from a book called “Dear Jane” and is based on the civil war quilt of a New England lady by the name of Jane Stickles. Every block in the main body of the quilt has a unique design as does every colored triangle shaped block in the borders and the four corner blocks. To this point, the quilt has 4,253 pieces and, when done, will probably be over 5,000. On February 23, she will have been working on this project on and off for three years. Insanity!

Karen blogs occasionally at Quilts…etc.

.

.

.

.

I’ve not started back to work on the contract job yet. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. I’ll probably be out there sometime next week — perhaps.

The real surprise is that it’s occurring at all.

Three years ago, I was in a situation where I really needed help to get everything done that needed to be done. One of the options that was attempted was to bring back another instructor who had retired a couple of years earlier. He would be a contract instructor, much like what I will be doing.

It never happened.

A couple of years later, I happened to run into the man they had wanted to come back as a contractor. He said he had been willing to do it, but after they had initially talked to him, he hadn’t heard anything from them. I subsequently found out that they had not been able to get approval for hiring a contractor.

My contract manager — the guy used to be my boss — called me today about documentation on some of my qualifications, so things are apparently still moving ahead. It appears part of the problem is that recent restructuring has reduced the number of people in the corporate office that looks at contracts from eight people down to one part-time employee who only works three afternoons a week. I’ve heard that other departments are having similar problems.

Maybe Monday. However, I’m planning on going to the bi-weekly retiree breakfast. (They’ll get a kick out of this run-around.)

I’ll have my cell phone with me.

……Previous posts on this (most recent on top):

• Heigh Ho, Heigh Ho, it’s….
• BIG BUMP in the road for my online plans…. perhaps.
• The BIG BUMP revealed

A composite image from several photos.

I was too close to get the whole thing in the viewfinder, so took some overlapping images and used autostitch to assemble them into one image. That’s why some of the people look a little ghostly. They were in two or more of the overlapping images and got “blended” into the scenery.

The same arch can be seen from a closer viewpoin in Utah Sky in a Natural Frame.

Photos in this composite image were taken September 24, 2007.