Some Days in May

Here are some pics from my camera phone, taken during a spurt of wanting to document life.

The first robin to hatch in the nest right outside our door.

Poor Mom robin!

Every time we walk out the front door she goes flying frantically out of the bush :-/

Guess she'll get pretty rip wing muscles...

Daisy laying on Dad's lap while he played a game of Mississippi Marbles (aka Greedy) with Grandma while she was here.

She came up April 27th and left May 16th.

Lots of puzzles, games and ice-cream at Handel's.

She appreciates and enjoys food in a way I deeply respect, especially for a person her age. She is a model of choosing to be content and happy in life.

Mom opening her Mother's Day present from me. Yes, after basically missing last year's M Day and birthday, I put together this lovely box for her. Empty box :-)

BUT, inside was a sign saying "To be filled with produce from Stan's," and a card with a picture of an empty stomach promising to fill it with lunch at the Strip District. We used to go there back in the golden days (i.e. this spring), so it was fun to go again, though it was a Saturday morning, not a Monday like before.

Tonight, around 9 of the clock (i.e. o'clock). Grandma Kari and Grandpa Ken are here for a few days, and this is a typical evening position: watching a baseball game, with the dogs laying around and Grandpa and Daniel talking back and forth about sports things I have no capacity for remembering or regurgitating. They both have amazing minds for remembering details.

Care Group!!

I thought Dad and Dave looked pretty funny there, in an unwitting way :-)

It was a good care group. Dad wrapped up a lively discussion with some of the best words of summary, application, exhortation and love that I've ever heard from him. Good job, Dad!

A general shot of care group. It was Sanda's last meeting, and she shared some of what God's been revealing (and revolutionizing) in her through the back injury she's been dealing with. It was cool to hear how God's truth touched ground in her fine academic mind. I was really encouraged, as well, to see how she's grown since coming here - from being rather shy to joking and laughing and just radiating the joy of Christ.

Mr. Pierson's desk.

Where I worked on Youth Camp stuff all evening.

Lucky Charms.

Left over from Fuse Fun Night.

Which was a long time ago.

Glommy marshmallows = not so hot, but I'll still pick them out and eat 'em.

Happiness is . . .

:-)

Except this was at Arby's, not Taco Bell >:-(

While we're on the subject of food...

I knew there were lots of kinds of olives, just like there are many types of coffee, but somehow it just isn't real till you see a spread like this.

This was at Stamooli's, at the Strip.

Way cool place.

I got lots of odd stuff like Ouzo hard candy and half a candied citron.

The menu board at Fortunes, a sweet coffee place in the Strip District.

I got Mom a fruit smoothie, and I had an iced cappuccino (very very good).

They carry a marvelously-large selection of "Oral Fixation" mints. Mimosa, Jasmine, Green Tea . . . what joy it brings to this mint collector's heart!

Pirates Game!

Grandpa took Daniel, Dad and me to the ball game after church today.

I think Daniel knew I was taking the pic, and responded accordingly, but Grandpa was just kinda sitting there :-P

Want some popcorn?

Dad and his middle progeny.

Gotta love his expression :-)

Sorta like, "What on earth is this I have raised?"

So . . I make glass

Aight, here's some o' the digs on work:

First off, Guardian is a good company, and the people I work with in the plant are almost all happy and well-adjusted :-) There's a lot of joking and laughing and friendliness (and yes, bad language, but that's part of the real world). I'm getting my narrow white-collar world shaken up a bit, which is good. There are a lot of people who come home from work sweaty, tired and incredibly dirty, and they make our country run.

As you can see here, the plant is basically a big long warehouse, whose fundamental dimensions are obscured by multitudinous add-ons. The float line goes down the length - from the furnace hoppers dropping batch into the furnace (bottom left) to the cold end guys packing glass and the fork trucks zipping filled racks off to banding, end caps and storage (top rightish). There isn't overhead stuff, so you don't have to wear hard hats, which is really nice. Everybody walks around with steel toed shoes and safety glasses. If you're around anything hot, you wear your mint green jacket (which most people wear around all the time anyway). If you're doing true hot work, you wear a kevlar hood. If you're around breaking glass or loud stuff, you wear earplugs. If you go under the furnace, you wear a hard hat. If you're a slitter or a packer down at the cold end, you wear these big honkin' yellow bibs to protect you from breaking glass, and if the plates you're cutting are taller than your neck, you wear a full face mask. I pretty much walk around all day in steel toes, jeans, my green jacket, safety glasses, and hot work gloves sticking out of my back pocket.

The float glass line consists of a very large furnace, which you can see in this picture. This is the back left cornerish of it. The glowing spot is the edge of the actual furnace, and the gray squarish thing on the left is the intake/exhaust duct. It's hard to see the actual walls of the furnace under all the beams and pipes and cooling ducts and such, but when you find it, it's all white silica bricks, which are about the only thing that will stand the heat (2800 degrees) for the life of the furnace (~7 years). You're usually well-removed from the hot stuff, but you can open ports and look in the furnace, and there are a couple openings into the furnace and the "refiner" - which is a big swimming pool of melted glass. You can look in briefly, while holding a piece of dark glass in front of your eyes, but the heat gets to you. I've never been around such a volume of intense heat before. It's like when you open a hot oven and get blasted with air that makes your ears and forehead tingle...or when you're by one of those campfires that's so hot you sorta hold your hand up in front of your face after awhile. Just more intense.

It's a bit of a rush - walking on the catwalk over the ports on the firing side and feeling the metal of your belt buckle burning at the edge of your jeans. Or wondering if the tips of your ears could actually get burned by the heat of the air as you try to stand and listen like it's no big deal while Bobby explains the batch logs returning with the convective flows from the spring zone. Most people at the hot end have had some (or many) intense experiences with heat, and I'm sure I'll end up with a few of my own. For now, burning some hair at the front of my head is the craziest thing that's happened :-P

My job. As young Russ asked emphatically in The Kid, "But what do I DOOO?"

Well, basically, Guardian pays me to help the process run well/better. Operators, working 12-hour shifts, take care of the hour-by-hour maintenance, monitoring and documentation. They also take care of immediate upsets like batch hitting the wall or the ribbon swinging in the tin bath. The process engineers work a little more long term, thinking like "OK, why do we keep having adhesion chip issues? Where could they be coming from?" Or "How can we vary the batch compositions to speed up our transition to this darker color of glass?" The days are filled with a lot of walking around, hanging around control rooms, talking to people, watching screens, and a bit of desk work. In my three weeks, the process has been running quite stably, so there hasn't been much action. But when stuff hits the fan, things get pretty exciting :-/

Right now, to accomplish that ultimate goal, I am working as hard as I can to learn the basics. Trying to follow people around or track them down to show me stuff, asking every question I can come up with, taking copious notes when I get back to my desk, and trying to eschew laziness and "input myself" as much as possible in what's going on. What I've come to realize is that the process is, with little or no exaggeration, as dynamic, complicated and indecipherable as a human being. People who have worked with it for 30 years learn new things every day. In a way, no one really knows what's going on. Chemical plants are built, and the next 50 years are spent trying to figure out how they work and keep them from breaking down :-)

So yeah, it's a formidible challenge; but folks are looking out for me and planning out my training. It's great when I learn stuff, and even better when I can actually DO things. Last week I learned the raw material end of the process, and this week I was up in the payloader (i.e. front-end loader) hauling rail cars around and driving the dump truck back and forth with 8 tons of cullet (busted glass) in the back. I love it when I can get my jacket dirty. That's a good day of work :-)

Here's a good basic shot of the hot end office, where my desk is. This is looking directly left of the direction I sit. Jay, BT and Brian sit at the three desks in a line there, and Earl--my boss--has his office inside where that big window is. It's a nice little area. There's a central sound system in the whole plant, and when somebody isn't paging somebody, they play the XM radio. Thank You SO MUCH, Lord, for no radio commercials! I seriously think it would mess me up to have radio ads in my head all day every day. You can adjust the volume of the speakers in each office/area, too, which is cool. "Outside" my office, which is still inside the overall warehouseish thing, there's the float line going down, and then lots of little sub-buildings and areas like the QC lab, maintenance shop, store room, more offices, and lots and lots of stacked glass. Overall, it is quite a nice place - pretty clean, well kept, and not full of nasty chemicals or hazardous wastes (which made my co-op plant sort of a pain).

Quite honestly, I couldn't ask for a better job. The people really seem great, across the board, week after week, the location is 20 minutes from home with almost no traffic, every day is different, and I am expected to advance in my career, not just stay in this job forever. I've had a few tastes of doing real work - meaningful things that someone else couldn't do at the moment - and it's invigorating. I'm grateful to have people looking out for me and thinking about my training and learning program. I'm praying and working to do the best job I can and really help Guardian make more, better glass, and God has allowed me to be content and happy with the unchanging 8-hours-a-day schedule and early bed and rising times.

There's a LOT more I could write. I have to keep fighting back details about the process and plant that I'm so impressed with myself for knowing (yes, pride, it's everywhere, even in a know-nothing 3-week-old process engineer trainee). If anybody wants to know how glass is made, or what this common substance is actually like, let me know! :-) I hope to write a post in awhile about glass, and probably another one about "The operator and the engineer", and how you can succeed in life. Yes indeed :-P

Even though it was a hard transition, being in a real job in this field is pretty cool sometimes. Again, I couldn't ask for a better job, and God is wondrously good to have brought me here. May He use the money earned, the career begun, and the eight hours spent every weekday, to His glory and eternal purposes.

--Clear (actually, slightly bluish green from the iron oxide in the glass, which absorbs solar radiation so your car doesn't heat up as much in the sun) Ambassador

Two Things That Were Remarkable

Indeed, three that were noteworthy.

1) Wednesday. Daniel left at ~8:30pm to hang out with Justin and Heather at Denny's. I stayed home, worked out, and went to bed around 11.

2) I sat in the dining room with Mike and Carla Pierson while Andrew pulled out of the driveway with Caleb and Mitchell. First time they had both watched one of their children drive away. [i.e. Andrew got his drivers license today :-) ] I also loved how Mitch and Caleb were immediately like "Oooh, can I come??" when it was determined that Andrew would take the car over to Gramps and Grams. Being around younger kids is enlivening.

3) I sat up in a massive front-end loader and pulled around two rail cars at work today. Probably well over 300 tons total weight.

This is it. I'm already woefully late for the fourth night in a row this week, and I'm paying the price of deadness at work, so I can't give an update on work on life. THIS is work and life :-)

God is good.

--Clear Ambassador

Deeper than I can convey, not as much as I wish I could say

I think the best way for me to represent the past week is to describe where I'm at right now.

A big day is over. I spent all of Sunday in Bethel Park with Daniel and Nick--an old and oddly good friend. A warm glow remains in my memory from church - eating up Joel's sermon on Abraham (God initiates, we respond, and HE is faithful, not us), playing electric guitar for worship, and really catching up with several great folks outside of my usual social rounds. I got to hang out at the Piersons - something I've been wanting to do all week - and that always leaves you feeling great. They're a special and joyful household :-) We even got to see Spiderman III, after the PLP (Post Lunch Party) chillin' in a parking lot rocking tunes and drinking peach tea.

9:07 found me driving home in my car after dropping Daniel off for his ride back to Grove City and depositing Nick at home. There in the car the familiar feeling of the past week surfaced again. The friends, the fun, the light and glow of fellowship were over. There I was, rolling down the road with nothing but my heavy heart tugging away inside my ribcage. Ahead of me what I see is a strangled 30 minutes until 10 o'clock, after which every minute doing anything is a punishment beating me with future tiredness and irredeemable missed duty. I see driving back down the already-familiar road to the plant and having another day slip beneath my feet, the prime hours passing in a selfless and rigid drain. I see another day just like that afterwards, and another one after that, and another one after that.

Part of me could try to take you further down this path.. try to wake up the mood that tore me apart for days last week. Saddened my heart more than I've ever been before. But the fact is, when I woke up Thursday morning, those wounds were healed. The bleeding battle for God, for joy in Jesus, was fundamentally over . . at least for now. While the facts of what has passed, what is gone, and what lies ahead are all the same, the unshakable grief and sorrow was broken, by the ineffable mercy of God on a beaten-down soul. So while I felt that familiar feeling tug at me as I left the day behind and faced the week ahead, beneath it was and is a quiet peace and general hope of joy, filling out those days as they stretch ahead in my mind's eye. I found God in the valley and here in the clearer ground, and that is not a trivial thing. It's not something that can't meet me as I sit alone in my car with basically everything good behind me and everything hard and undesirable ahead of me. That's the story of this week. The hardest valley I can ever remember, and GOD shining through that, real and enlivening in the days I've been given.

Sorry if this is uselessly abstract or out of left field or something. It's a greatly-constrained chip off the tip of an iceberg that's kinda pretty big in my life.. sort of like the first time this whole "Christianity" thing has actually worked. We'll see how it keeps shaking out as the days roll by, incessantly demanding application and facing me with the choice of going hard for God's will or slipping back into my ways. There's a lot I'm not writing out, but maybe this gives you the idea that last week was pretty non-normal.

As I rode in the car, I walked out again the now-well-trodden path of dealing with the bleakness tugging at my heart. You never know what the right way will be to deal with your heart honestly before God.. a lot of times it's open prayer, kneeling down and letting God in and talking out where you're at. Sometimes it's taking your shirt off, mowing the lawn and pounding Good Charlotte through your head. Sometimes it's having a beer and talking with Dad till midnight. Tonight it was listening to the anthem of this season of my life.

You ever have a song that really hits you for awhile? Something where the words and the music come together almost too well to believe, and it just hits you, right where you're at, singing out what you could never write out so clearly yourself? Well, the ironic thing is, for the past two weeks, that song has been my own song :-) I put on my electric guitar song first ('cause the iPod was at that song anyway), and then I switched over to "Don't Doubt" and cranked up the sound system till it cut and pounded through my whole body. The words spoke to me with perfect encouragement, reproof and hope: "Don't doubt! Trust in what you know He says. Step out. Step out on His promises! He'll meet you. Look at all the lives around! Just trust Him; trust Him with your life." The bridge quaked with the pent-up energy that you can't even quite express.. that comes from living through God meeting you and suspecting, deep down, that He has great, real goodness for you that blows away what you've already seen if you push through and choose that right road. And when it breaks and comes crashing into the chorus... it's like the living, breathing excitement of hope - everything that's happened and will happen.. something you could never write or say without breaking. How could these words, that I wrote myself, reach out and speak to me so perfectly, like the closest counselor hitting me with just what I need to hear? It just makes me smile and wonder :-) I do need to mix more highs and lows into that song, though. It's punchy, but I had to crank the treble, on the FM transceiver, which you never do, and I upped the bass with the sub at full, which will usually leave your eyes bugging out of your head. But yeah, if you want to hear the call of my life and feel the excitement and challenge and tension of what God's been doing, just listen to that song. And go buy a subwoofer for your car, because I tell you in all seriousness, you have not heard a song until you've let its sound actually push your body around with it.

I think I'll stop writing. Crap, it's 11:15. Arrr man, that kills me! [exclamation point of fist-pounding, not excitement or lightness] Alas.

Look at me! I'm not miserable! I'm listening to Copeland, and it's right and good before God. I don't care about anything other than following God and getting His joy. I don't care about anything but that! I don't even know what to say *about* God that's effective enough. Just, look at me, and look at Him! Listen to my song and look at Him. Look at Him!

I can't believe all the things that You've done
Oh glorious things that Your plans have become
I saw you right there in front of my eyes
I can't believe all the things that You've done

--Clear Ambassador

List of things to buy with first paycheck:

• New (working) electric shaver
• Air filter for Pepsi Blue
• Two pairs of jeans that can be trashed
• Set of 50 foam inserts for my good earphones
• Flickr pro account
• A new left ankle (I wish!)