One Crazy Long Weekend

I tried to savor it as much as possible -- driving around in the afternoon sunshine of a Monday.. waking up at 10am on Tuesday... 5 straight days without work!


Here's the backstory: After 2 weeks on the 12-8 schedule, I was informed Friday morning that I was being put on D crew as the fill-in hot end supervisor, until a bona fide replacement can be found. 12-hour shifts on a rotating schedule, starting out on days (6am - 6pm) on Wednesday. Aha! An extra 2 days off, courtesy of my boss. AND, with the way the schedule works, I work Wednesday and Thursday, and don't have to come back till Monday night (6pm - 6am)! Except I'm taking Monday off to go to New York City!
So yeah - lotsa days off in a short space of time. Something to savor indeed.
And before the NYC trip hits, I want to jot down what I did with all those days.


Friday I slept till about 4pm, packed up and hung out with Daniel as he packed up for Grove City, and reluctantly left at 5:37pm -- 37 minutes after I planned to leave, and 97 minutes after I should have left to get to frisbee on time. Yep: a frisbee game in Akron - the kickoff to a long-overdue Ohio weekend. Even though I didn't arrive till almost 8, I still caught a lot of great frisbee action, as the sunset painted the sky light orange and the breeze was warm over the drying August grass. We hit Zack's (excellent frozen yogurt) after it was too dark to play any more and we were tired of playing while it was too dark to play any more. Then the night changed from the plan. Chad and I went to a good-bye party for Dave Davis at the Chimas, and I ended up hanging out there with Brian and Nick, Steve, Jes Arlia, Joel Putnam and some others until around 3am. Everyone would say we had a good time, but I wonder about the usefulness of a bunch of immature people lounging around talking about nothing and making each other laugh. We did go to Taco Bell, though, and that was definitely time well spent :-)


Slept till noon Saturday up in Craig and Chad's room, and wiled away the afternoon hanging out with Collin and going on a couple errands with him and Craig. Not real purposeful, but I wouldn't call it a waste. Since Steve-O had slept in from the night before, he was working late, and then going to a movie, so I shrugged my shoulders and accepted the Tuminos' invitation to come along to a birthday/anniversary gathering with their relatives. Ended up being a sweet time at a really nice house, eating some good food (yes, including corn), talking to some new and very pleasant folks, climbing saplings, and jumping a badminton net (which amazed everyone there). Craig, Chad and I left early, listened to some of my recordings on the way home, and ended up watching "The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly" for the evening. Great movie! Aa-ee-aa-ee-aaahhh....


Thus endeth the chronicles of the Tumino house era of my trip. Beginneth "Smorgasbord Sunday." Woke up at the Tuminos, went to church (sans breakfast), enjoyed the Chad-led worship service and Randy Stewart-preached sermon, chatted about, double-entreed at Chipotle with Steve-O, picked up some shingles, and sat in the parking lot watching a TV show on Steve's iPod while waiting for the rain to clear up so we could finish this roof he was working on. OK, so, the rain's not clearing up. Off we go to the (old) Roberts Care Group farewell picnic, where I have a couple good conversations, grab a burger, and head off down the road following Cory Thompson's Jeep Cherokee towards Cleveland. Cutting out the details, I end up standing on the floor of the House of Blues with Craig, Cory, Steve-O and Charlie (my buddy from Pitt), waiting for Styx to hit the stage. And they hit it! And boy howdey did they hit it good :-) A dazzling and entertaining display of proficiency and experience. Maybe a little too up close and personal for a band of that style and age, but everyone basically said it was the best concert they'd ever been to. The night ended flopped upon the couch in the Hoffman's den at 2am with Brandy curled up at my feet and Steve-O getting out his schedule to discover what classes he had tomorrow and when he should get up. Ah yes.


Thus endeth the Akronian segment of my saga. Now beginneth the brief, second, Cleveland excursion. I got up as soon as I could drag myself out of bed (about 9) and drove to Charlie's place to hang out for the morning. We took a long walking tour of Case Western and got lunch at this sweet place called Tommy's (which ironically is right by the Grog Shop, where I saw State Fair play with Golinski and Shannon).


Now we enter the Grove City portion of my wanderings. However, we don't enter it easily, since my cell phone absolutely refuses to get charged, and by this point is completely dead. I called Daniel from Charlie's phone right before I left, and left a voicemail to the effect of "Hey, I'm coming... um, I don't know where your room is, or what your class schedule is.. and I don't have any way to call you again, and you don't have any way to call me... but here I come!" So we set sail to GC with a broken telegraph and no wood to make a fire for smoke signals. Fortunately the celly takes enough charge to get a text with his room location. Unfortunately, the driver is dumb and goes on the wrong highway. Fortunately, there's a Rita's where he cuts through to get back on track, and cotton candy ice is deLISHious. Daniel is asleep peacefully on the couch when we arrive.

It was interesting being at Grove City on the first day of classes, but not being a student. Lots of people greeting friends they hadn't seen in awhile, and lots of bustley class stuff. We ate dinner in the cafeteria with a few guys from AEX, and went to the hall afterwards and chilled for awhile. It's fun seeing the fun and funny things that transpire in a dorm hall, and get little pictures of people as they stop in the room for a minute. Eventually we got our butts up off the couch and went to Wal-Mart with Jess. Pretty much the classic thing to do when visiting a GCC student :-)

The rest of the night was spent in Daniel's room, with a morphing group of people occupying the room as time went by. Eventually Daniel, Tim and myself were left, talkin' about good stuff and relaxing in the light of the white mesh Christmas lights. Then people started getting back from the freshman square dance, somebody was talking in a hillbilly accent, three people returned pieces of western garb borrowed from Daniel, and EVERETT finally came in! I had been waiting to meet Daniel's roommate, and I was unprepared for how sweet he is. He seems pretty easy-going and considerate, and he's got a good streak of random humor, which will serve him well in his Daniel-roommate capacity. Definitely a good guy.

Sleep that night, wakeupfulness the next morning, lunch at Taco Bell, and off down the sun-baked highway home. I'm SO glad I got to see Daniel's setup, see some of the faces around him, and get a little feel for where he's at. His room's quite nice, with a couch and two big chairs and carpet, and there seem to be a lot of solid guys in his hall. I'm sure he'll be going over to the AEX hall a lot, and I'm looking forward to seeing Skipper and Shane and other quality dudes from there as I drop by over the semester.

Thus endeth the saga. Thanks for reading! I'm sure my next post will be even harder to keep from being too long. New York, here we come!

Be not anxious

Rest easy, world! Mothers, tuck your children back in bed and whisper words of comfort in their ears. Be at peace citizens, for watchful eyes are over the glass plant while you sleep and night embraces the land.

In other words, I'm now working midnight - 8am for a month or so :-)

I volunteered for this shift to help out as we make some changes in how the tin bath is being run. There's another guy who's working 4 - 12, so between him, myself and the daylight folks, we've got 24-hour coverage for most of the week.

So how is it?

Well, things started out rough. I couldn't make myself go to sleep Sunday evening, so by the end of my first night I'd been going 25 hours straight. Worse than that, we had a size change (going to a different width and thickness of glass ribbon) that went awry and cost us a lot of production, and seemed to be due to me failing in my purported role.

Tuesday was better, since we didn't have any size changes, and the crew that was on for most of the night was one of the best. It got even better at the end as I talked to my boss when he came in. Turns out I did OK the night before, and the focus of the problem lay elsewhere. WHEW. I had had faith going into this, which turned to despair, but God didn't let me sink. I still need him every hour of every night, because I have a lot to learn about this process, and when things start going wrong, I don't have a big pile of experience to turn to.

Wednesday I tore my to-do list UP, baby! Good to feel productive, and to be so, demonstratively.

Tonight is real quiet, and the network is having issues, so I can't do most of what I need to do. Which is why I wrote this.

I'm sleeping fitfully (meaning I'm waking up 4 or 5 times) from 9 till 4 or so. I drag at the end of the night, but when the sun comes up, the day shift comes on, and the world wakes up, I get all perky again. Although I'm getting more sleep than before, it's not as deep. I ain't fooled by no shade over no window, bubba -- it's light outside and I know it!

Good: I still have evenings free, which is when other earthlings are typically free and foraging about for hang outage.
Bad: No more sleeping out on the deck. In fact, no more sleeping at night at all, which I find myself lamenting.
Good: The plant is peaceful, and I'm by myself at my desk.
Bad: Dismissing myself from whatever's going on at 11pm and going off, not to close my eyes in slumber, but to work a full workday. This was hard last night at the GROW picnic: saying my good-byes in the middle of everybody sharing what God had done over the summer.. leaving that rich group of people circled around the campfire, the warmth of fellowship and the glow of the firelight. It was also hard tonight, when I had to quick lay down my last idea for the bass line and shut the studio down in the middle of a spurt of jubilant inspiration on a new song. Oww my most of me! :-/
Good: Change, stretching, growth. God. God's presence. Which I need to remember and listen to more. But which is comforting nonetheless.

Time to go see how the tin bath is doing.

--JPB

A couple days...

[I started this post I think at the end of this week, and got up to Tuesday. Now I don't remember what I did the rest of the week. Alas!]

Sunday 8/3 - Another splendidly long Summer weekend day. Went to church early with Daniel and Chad, and played my synth along with practice to try to start learning what sounds good in a worship setting. Mr. Pierson dished out another fantastic sermon, and after lunch all the Ohio folks and a lot of 'Burghers hit up Panera for lunch. Chad, Abbey, Hannah and Halley (and Nick Schuch) came with us back to our house, where we lolled about in the family room, played some music, and then went out and... picked blackberries in the woods! Which turned out to be a great time despite the voracious thorns. Wild blackberries aren't consistently sweet or flavorful, but those that are are exquisite. And there were TONS of them. Patches of berry-clad brances that make your eyes light up. After berrypicking we cleaned up and worked on dinner. I grilled the dogs, and we all sat out on the patio and ate in the perfect summer air, laughing a lot, and having some good convo as well. Cornfolks headed out shortly thereafter. "Chad we just, oh Chad.." :-P Really good times with those folks. AND THEN, Daniel and I left for Schenley Park, where a big group of church folks were gathered on the hill to toss a disc and watch the "Cinema Under The Stars" movie. Frisbee was sweet on the long slope, and the movie's mediocrity was redeemed by the STUNNING vista spreading out behind it. A smoky gradient of blue to red at the horizon, and a thin sliver of moon, turning blood red as it sank into the blinking lights of the city skyline. Never has Pittsburgh seemed so broad, open, and plain cool! A memorable night. Followed up by Fuel & Fuddle!! Ah, it was an amazing night, let alone the fantastic day preceding it.



Monday 8/4 - The hardest day of work since things started going better. I will never again come in to work at 8:00 on a Monday. I had 3 days to report on for the 9am morning meeting, and simply not enough time to prepare. Earl and Kirby were gone, so I was pretty much alone getting grilled by the plant manager and not having the answers. Left a lousy taste in my mouth that lingered through the rest of the day's stressfulness. That evening Steve Gole came over for dinner, talkin' and jammin', which was sweet! He hasn't been around for a month, so it was good to catch up, and Daniel joined us for the music, which was a lot of fun.



Tuesday 8/5 - "Heathen Night." :-) Daniel was going with Mr. Harvey to give stuff out and talk to homeless folks, so the rest of GROW banded together for the evening. We went to Schenley Park and played frisbee till it was too dark to see (well, past that point, actually), then we took a long leisurely walk to Dave 'n' Andy's, which is a famous Pittsburgh homemade ice-cream joint. Even I liked it, and I don't get very excited about ice-cream. On the walk back to the cars I halted the group and encouraged us toward profitable discussion, which everybody did very well. We walked up to the cars, and stood around and kept talking for 30 minutes! Good times in the car with Shannon and Heather on the way there & back.

...that's all folks...