I was busy stacking firewood with Laurae this afternoon and then we tackled the run-away tomato plant in the patio area. Gone! We picked some late falling walnuts and now it’s getting colder and cloudier every minute. Could be raining soon and a fire would be nice.
So what am I getting at? Well, I was reading my granddaughters blog the other day and she was bemoaning the fact that life wasn’t following her plan; or she didn’t have a plan that looked anything at all like her life. And so I was thinking about that as I picked through the walnuts and stacked the firewood. How did we get to this place in our lives? Why are we in Orland in the year 2006? Is this what we planned? Those were good questions and it started me thinking about my own life plans, back when I was ready to leave my parent’s house.
Some of those plans are already recounted earlier in this blog and so if you have read it, I don’t have to tell you that my plans were; shall we say, tenuous?
As a child I wanted to be a veterinarian, a cowboy, a fireman and a host of others. But none of those dreams made it past my freshman year of high school. That was when I realized that I had to be SERIOUS about my career. If I didn’t get it at first, my career counselor made it very clear at our second meeting. But getting it and doing it were two very different things. And I left high school without a plan.
Then there was a semester of Junior College…which I hated! It was boring and my classes were boring; life was boring. So I joined the Navy because I was bored. What kind of a plan is that?
After the Navy, I had some vague plans. Go back to school and make something of myself. I was admitted to Cal Poly and then proceeded to party; wasting a semester of life preparation. No plan there.
To make a long story short, our life has been short of well executed plans. They may have been well thought out and brilliantly detailed, but when things happened in our lives, we made corrections in our course and sailed on; oblivious to our destination or even a need for one. Not the wisest way to travel! But it seemed to fit us…
Luckily, we humans are blessed with much resilience and a natural optimism. We may fail at something and see our dreams evaporate, but we generally pick ourselves up and motor on, building a new dream as we go. Then we tell ourselves that this new dream is better anyway; much better than the last one.
I think I see a theme here; plans aren’t made…plans happen.
Saturday, November 11, 2006
Thursday, November 02, 2006
Postcard
Here's an old postcard view of that corner. The Broadway store is on the right and in the room behind the window on the 3rd floor is the column I was describing...
And here's a long view of the same corner...looking west. Notice the absence of traffic!
And here's a long view of the same corner...looking west. Notice the absence of traffic!
Picture this
As I continue this story called “Working”, I want to be able to post some photos as I go along. I don’t have a lot of those from the early years and the ones I do have are mostly Polaroid’s; remember those? And since posting photos means that I will have to browse through the boxes of photos we have and then scan them, this project may take awhile. Have you ever been successful at quickly browsing through old photographs? The hours fly by and I’m still looking at the first box!
Back to the story…I’ll look at the photos later.
One of the remodel projects that I was involved in was on the 3rd floor of the Broadway store on the corner of Hollywood and Vine; that most famous of intersections. It was pretty much a normal job for us, except for the location. Everyday, as we went down the street to buy lunch, we found the corner crowded with tourists, all taking pictures of the street sign. In fact, all four corners had a crowd. And a lot of them would step out into traffic to get that perfect shot!
The story I remember most about this store remodel was an incident that didn’t happen to me at all; it happened to a plumber.
One day, I was using a High Velocity powder actuated tool to fasten some steel to a concrete column and before I pulled the trigger, the plumber stopped me…and told me why he had been off the job recently. He had been doing the same thing I was about to do, except when he pulled the trigger, the pin drove into the concrete and then hit a buried piece of roof drain piping. The shape of the pipe made the pin turn and come back out, point first. This is called “Fish hooking” and there was an armored plate at the end of the gun to catch those rare instances. But in this case, it missed the plate and entered his stomach, cutting him up very badly. He had spent the last few weeks in the hospital and had just come back to work. Then he showed me his scar…very sobering!
Yes, I pulled the trigger…but it was with some reluctance. I had always depended on that armor plate and thought it was fool proof.
Back to the story…I’ll look at the photos later.
One of the remodel projects that I was involved in was on the 3rd floor of the Broadway store on the corner of Hollywood and Vine; that most famous of intersections. It was pretty much a normal job for us, except for the location. Everyday, as we went down the street to buy lunch, we found the corner crowded with tourists, all taking pictures of the street sign. In fact, all four corners had a crowd. And a lot of them would step out into traffic to get that perfect shot!
The story I remember most about this store remodel was an incident that didn’t happen to me at all; it happened to a plumber.
One day, I was using a High Velocity powder actuated tool to fasten some steel to a concrete column and before I pulled the trigger, the plumber stopped me…and told me why he had been off the job recently. He had been doing the same thing I was about to do, except when he pulled the trigger, the pin drove into the concrete and then hit a buried piece of roof drain piping. The shape of the pipe made the pin turn and come back out, point first. This is called “Fish hooking” and there was an armored plate at the end of the gun to catch those rare instances. But in this case, it missed the plate and entered his stomach, cutting him up very badly. He had spent the last few weeks in the hospital and had just come back to work. Then he showed me his scar…very sobering!
Yes, I pulled the trigger…but it was with some reluctance. I had always depended on that armor plate and thought it was fool proof.
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