Just about all the area schools are reporting closures. This has been a bumper year for snow-days :)
I went to Pratt’s for workshop hours.
Today was the second week of blacksmithing class at Pratt.
When the forge is first turned on, I smell the heat. There’s a whiff of gas, but it lights fast and burns, so not much escapes to the room. Mostly, I smell something else, the heat. The workroom is outside the main building, basically outdoors, with smooth concrete floors and metal walls, so it gets very cold except for the forge.
There’s a distinct smell that comes from iron freshly put into the fire. It’s sharper, fresher than other metal smells, as if the iron is still young. Sharp, tangy, like the iron in blood.
Flakes form as the outer surface cools to the air and then cracks, separates as you work the metal. The flakes have a different smell, dusty.
The metal is always cooling as you work it. Fresh warm metal has a middle-ring sound. As it cools, the sound rises in pitch. Clanging becomes pinging, then it’s time to heat the piece up again.
The smell of leather burning is usually the first clue that you’ve touched a part of the metal that is still too hot. It will be followed by your hand feeling warm, but hopefully not too hot!
Today, there was also the smell of cinnamon. My teacher was chewing cinnamon gum. A pleasant, kitchen-y scent anytime, but the warmed air made the scent hover and linger a bit. And it made a nice counterpoint to the smell of iron.
Now I’m home, and my hands still smell of leather and iron.
Next week, I need to take a pic of the forge. A 4-foot-high box of roaring fire. Can’t get cooler than that!
(See here, if you don’t get the reference)
Weekend Assignment #197: Now that the WGA strike has had lots of time to affect the prime time television schedules, how is it affecting you as a viewer? What show do you miss most, aside from reruns?
Actually, the writer’s guild strike is pretty welcome for me. I don’t watch TV, aside from a mild CSI addiction, and most major Hollywood movies are less interesting to me than re-tagging my music library (a never-to-be-finished project, I fear).
I do admit that I was keeping up with the CSI episodes — recording them, and watching them on Thursday night when I got home from whatever-else. But Season 8 hadn’t really developed its own arc yet, just tied things up from the big Season 7 cliffhanger, so the episodes weren’t any more gripping than normal. I find myself quite content to pull out a DVD (yes, I have Seasons 1-7 already) and watch a random episode if I feel a craving.
Hollywood movie writing — hm, I don’t know if I’ve noticed any improvement or decline there. :P Again, I’m happy to pick up a well-written drama from years gone by rather than go to a theater where you can’t pause to get up for a stretch, or make those comments to your co-watchers out loud.
I’m missing my weekly fest of Daily Show web-watching. I did feel nostalgically compelled to buy a Jon Stewart coffee table book, Democracy Inaction. I wonder if the gap in the humorous-criticism timeline will have later repercussions in the presidential races. (There’s a possible short-story topic for ya!) (or for me… hm….)
What am I doing with myself, during the WGA strike? Same thing we do every week, Pinky…
More Seriously, I’m doing my triathlon training for the year. I want to run 4 Sprint (short) triathlons this year, one a month Jun-Sept, in 2008. Speaking of which, it’s time for a run around Greenlake. Ta!
–Becky
Actually, this is what I did for the last whole year. Enjoy,
http://www.istartedsomething.com/20071116/microsoft-iris-uix-framework-zune/
Ah, Sunday. Breakfast done. Relaxing with a mug of tea, and my weekly Economist.
From the leader for the cover article, “Will the credit crisis trigger a downturn?”:
But there are cycles in all things: underpricing begets excess, which begets a reckoning. For a while at least, many people and businesses will have to pay more to borrow, or will not be able to borrow at all.
I think I want to be on the lending-side for the next 2-5 years….
The leader about the European Court’s decision in the Microsoft appeal had this neat recognition:
Many of those who called for action a decade ago no longer seem to care. Competitors have cut their own deals with Microsoft, extracting nearly $5 billion from the firm, rather than wait for this week’s ruling. Microsoft’s evil empire has been overshadowed by a newer, and therefore more exciting, threat in the shape of Google. And, geeks point out, the computing world has now become so interconnected that it will be hard for a single company to control it.
Yes, the tech/computing industry is a fluid, flexible market. It seems to correct itself pretty nicely. Governments on most continents are still scrambling (ineffectively, TG) to regulate, so they are not yet embroiled enough to control it, and thus cause inefficiencies (read: imbalances, including durable monopolies). Neither Microsoft, nor any other company, can long hold a monopoly, because the paradigms shift too quickly for any company to build up controlling power before the game field changes, letting in new and spy competitors.
And of course, they reviewed Greenspan’s book, which came out last week. It sounds like the book won’t make you laugh, but the title might:
“The Age of Turbulence” is a dull title, tending to confirm one’s fears, and that risible subtitle, “Adventures in a New World”, is fooling nobody.
(That comment made me laugh 
Much of this week’s Economist is spent covering their own bank run (Northern Rock, a British mortgage lender). The most interesting comments are here (article: The Turning Point), where they analyse the modern financial era. For of the past 30 years, the US and British economies have actually become more stable, and the question is whether that is a durable improvement, or a matter of luck?
For me, the question is the same as it was last week: Where do I want to put my investments, to ride the next 1-2 years?
I had my semi-monthly PT today. We used biofeedback to isolate the target muscle groups, and make sure my exercises were working the right spots. The system fed to a computer screen, and the readout was very immediate and sensitive. It was great — when I shrugged my shoulders, even just a little bit, the top-trap lines jumped right up.
After half an hour, I got faint. I actually had to sit and lie down, in order to let my the oxygen-flow stabilize. I just felt like I was concentrating super-hard.
Told Nic about it, and she instantly mentioned Vagus Sincope - http://www.healthscout.com/ency/68/754/main.html. Is it possible that I was tickling that nerve as I tried to move the lower muscles inside my mid-torso?
For our returning viewers, my shoulder is still achy from my accident 3 months ago.
I had my first PT appt for my shoulder today. She checked my resistance and pain reports, and then prescribed ibuprofin to get the swelling ALL the way down, VERY light exercises, and re-check the ergo’ness of my workstation.
And she taped my shoulder. It’s just two strips of elastic tape, but it sure reminded/encouraged me to keep better posture today!
Already getting better (I hope)…
Ever seen crumbs from safety glass? My cleaning people broke one of the two glass doors on the shower. They cleaned up and left a note, so I didn’t get to see most of the pieces. But there were a couple cubes left around in corners, each < .5 cm cube, and possible to touch without slicing.
Fascinating.
I saved a busload of people last night. I only saved them from being lost and afraid, but it was satisfying nonetheless.
Riding the bus home after dinner in Seattle, we diverted around 45th Street, which is being repaved. 45th Street goes straight along the grid. 40th doesn’t.
The bus driver stopped and made a small announcement. There were only 10-12 people on the bus. One lady kept interrupting; I’m not sure she understood what the driver was saying. He was older, 70+ I’d guess, and too soft-spoken to talk over her. I spoke up to encourage him to finish his announcement (so we could get going again! self-interested altruism). The driver said we’d divert over to the UDistrict, and then loop back at 50th Street. No worries for me - my stop is after 50th anyway.
We turn off and trundle down the darker streets. A couple people get off. The ladies in front of me continued their chatter.
At some point, I looked up, and saw that we were going south on the University Bridge. Um… that’s not the way to 50th Street.
The driver was an old guy, maybe around 65, thin. He was stopped and calling his dispatcher when I went to the front of the bus. He knew he was lost, but he wasn’t sure where we were, so I told him what I saw. His dispatcher gave him turnaround instructions (the street we were on was 4 lanes, but still not comfortable to turn a full-size city bus!) We started off again, and I stayed at the front, chatting with the driver while we trundled back toward Wallingford. The driver was pretty nervous still, and he really seemed to appreciate a chance to tell someone his tale. He knew his route, but the detour took him on unfamiliar streets, and it was the black of night. Amazing how you can -feel- people calm down when they really feel understood.
I helped him one more time. The driver, Ken, didn’t know Roanoke Ave, where the on-ramp to I-5 enters on the right. I talked him through and back to Meridian, until we were back on the normal route. My stop was right after Meridian, so I got off.
And the other riders gave me an ovation as I departed. I smiled all the way home.
Do you have a story about a local hero?