Sunset

[altivo]

Summer is over. The sun went down before I got out of work today.

I find myself in an unusually bad mood due to stupid stuff. They are starting (STARTING?) road construction on my route to and from work next week. Why so late in the year, I can't imagine. Nor, for that matter, what they expect to be doing, except ripping everything up so that it stays unusable all winter. Undoubtedly it's "stimulus" money that has to be spent, so we've got a pointless porkbarrel now.

The alternate route past the construction site is already closed. It's been closed since June, though I have no idea what they are doing there either. Totally closed, no traffic allowed.

Along the road to Harvard I noticed last week that a huge oak tree was being removed. Now that tree had an overhanging branch that extended over the entire roof of an old farmhouse, and after so many old trees blew down in that odd "bow wave" thing we had a couple of months back, I figured someone was being fearfully cautious. Wrong. They went on to remove every single tree around the house. This week I noticed that they were bulldozing the former yard behind it. Now they've put up an ugly steel tower there. And I do mean ugly. I thought it might be a cell phone tower (though there are half a dozen already visible from that location) but it's too short, only about 50 feet. It has a little platform like a crow's nest atop it, and climbing staples with a protective cage around them all the way up from the ground. Now today I noticed that they seem to be gutting the house as well. Ripping out the insides. This all looks very suspicious. It doesn't help that the tower resembles a photo I once saw of a tower that was built for an atomic weapons test out in New Mexico. The house never had a for sale sign, I'm sure of that. But it may well have been auctioned for non-payment of taxes or as a result of a mortgage foreclosure. Those have become so frequent around here in the last five years that the bulk of the weekly newspaper is often made up of the legal announcements. Whatever they're doing there, I suspect it's some monumental piece of commercial greed which, as usual, takes no interest in what it does to the land, the air, or anything but someone's bottom line.

Library systems were completely down today as the primary database server was upgraded to new hardware. They came back on about 2:30 this afternoon, which was nice since they'd predicted an all day outage. We had been warning folks for a week that they should try to avoid returning or borrowing books today, and it appears that most took us seriously. Door traffic was normal, but circulation was very low.

New director is writing new job descriptions for everyone and recreating "titles." Looks like I'm going from "General Service Librarian" to "Technical Services Librarian" which is probably more accurate up to a point. The description has to be modeled on something she got from the ALA or whatever, as it pretty much describes a department head in a moderate size library. Although it makes me the chief liaison with OCLC and the consortium technical staff, it omits my responsibility for web sites, internal network, and PC software and maintenance. I may just let it stand that way because I'd just as soon dump all that anyway. Somehow I don't think it will make much difference though. Saying "It isn't my job" when you've been doing it for nearly eight years just doesn't carry much weight.

Obviously, I'm grumpy. It's getting hot again, which doesn't help. And it's Wednesday. Better go to bed.

Comments

[avon-deer.livejournal.com]

The place where I work uses changes in job titles usually to brow beat people into accepting a wider remit with no extra pay.

[altivo]

Yes, that's really common over here too. I don't think that's really what's going on in our case. Instead, it's mostly bureaucracy. The state library system, which is now an agency without teeth in the current economic crisis, says that job descriptions and various other paperwork are needed. They can't enforce it, because they no longer have any significant control over our budget. Our former director had been in her position for so long (30 years) that she felt quite confident in ignoring these policy demands or following them selectively. The new director isn't so familiar with the situation.

If I have potentially serious disagreements with her, it's over policy and/or the scope of our mission, rather than specific job responsibilities. The actual job description is fine. It neither makes me underqualified nor assigns any new responsibilities, really.

[avon-deer.livejournal.com]

Lack of experience can be a problem when getting new leaders. Glad you're happy with your new title though.

[moonhare]

"They are starting (STARTING?) road construction on my route to and from work next week."

Two miles of my five mile route are slated for stripping/repaving, though four miles need it. Since the March rains undermined all the sewer construction from the last ten years, the road wavy, pot-holed, and sinking in spots. One-lane stop zones due to construction of new sewer hook-ups in two locations isn't helping my mood, either.

[altivo]

Fortunately, no sewers along these rural roads. One of the local farm roads I sometimes take to get over to the state highway was badly undercut in the spring of 2009 by heavy rain and runoff, leaving it bumpy and caved in with ruts and potholes in the asphalt. You could still drive it, but had to be careful and not go too fast. I blame this damage on the stupid developers who chopped up a 250 acre cornfield north of me and along that road. They haven't sold much in this economy, of course, but they ruined the drainage all over the area.

The road is only a township road, and the township has little money of course, but they finally repaved it just this month. I don't expect it to last, though.

Sewers and water lines are at issue in Harvard itself. The street on which the library sits is mostly residential but also provides access to the hospital. It was in very bad condition, and they resurfaced between the hospital and US-14 last year. Now they've marked up all that stretch with various colored paint and I'm convinced they are about to dig it full of holes and patches again due to sewer or water issues.

[hrrunka]

Re-surface the road one week, and some utility or other will be along to dig it up again the next week, or so it seems. At present the roads round here seem to be suffering attack by the gas pipeline folks. As often as not, one utility, in doing their work, disturb something belonging to another utility, who then have to dig things up to fix the problem. We had a power cut this morning. My first thought was that the gas works had hit something, but power came back relatively quickly so i guess it wasn't anything drastic, and as a consequence I discovered one of my UPS batteries needs replacing, and one of my phones had a poor connection, so it could have been worse. One morning several years ago the electricity contractor was using a cable trench cutting machine which cut, along the way, every single phone line on one side of the street. When the phone provider got the ninth out-of-order report in a row the finally managed to get through to the contractor and get the digger stopped...

[altivo]

Here we can often tell when work is planned because all the utilities come through and plant hundreds of little flags and paint lines on the pavement to show where their stuff is and warn workers not to cut into it. The workers of course seem to ignore this and trash power and phone lines wholesale.

When we lived in Chicago the gas company was forced to replace service lines all over the city after a major explosion with casualties in one area. Of course they hired all the cheap contractors they could find to do the work, and broke water mains and sewers up everywhere in the process.

[hrrunka]

Here, it's multi-coloured spray paint all over the place, but still they usually manage to break something they should have missed. Thankfully we've not had anything quite as drastic as a gas explosion. The worst thing I remember was the burst water main under-mining the road, and that was spotted and fixed fairly quickly.

[hrrunka]

Round here there are now many fewer tall trees than there were when I moved in nearly twenty years ago. Many of the old avenue of horse chestnuts have been taken down, I've had to remove a few tall conifers and an old silver birch, and neighbours have removed large trees from their properties. (The most recent bout was a bit of a hack job.) While some young trees have been planted, they take a while to grow...

[altivo]

Nice garden. Shame about those chestnut trees, though. I find that Americans seem particularly intolerant of trees. The attitudes involved are very puzzling to me, and seem most often to boil down to complaints about trees making things "gloomy", dropping leaves and twigs all over, or (oddest of all) attracting birds and insects.

The treehaters are easy to spot. They have a house in the middle of a (sometimes vast) plot of grass, without a tree in sight. Or at least, no tree taller than six or eight feet. They spend hours every week mowing grass, the clippings of which they bundle up in bags and pay to have hauled away. No "unsightly" composting for them.

I've commented before on the British immigrants to the west of us who seem determined to eliminate every single tree on their five acre plot. Now the land to the east of us has been sold, and the woman told Gary that once they finish remodeling the house, they will start "clearing up all this stuff" with a vague gesture toward a hundred year old stand of oaks and hickories.

Meanwhile, the county conservation district has been pumping out publicity urging people to conserve the native burr oaks, which are declining in number. The old first growth is almost entirely gone due to land clearance for farming in the 19th century, but the second growth is now maturing and thinning out. Unless new young oaks are allowed to grow, we will lose the primary native ecosystem of the area: oak savanna.

As it happens, the houses along our road are planted right in an oak savanna. I love the trees, which now stand about 20 meters tall and harbor an extensive system of wildlife. When these homes were built, the architects miraculously chose to nest them into the trees rather than removing forest canopy wholesale. Now insensitive new owners are clear cutting it. And for what? To make vast wastelands of non-native grass that will require constant maintenance. Somehow this is a "status symbol."

[hrrunka]

A friend had come to the conclusion that it was a generation thing; her parents were tree-removers, and she's a tree-planter. Doesn't quite work for me, though. My grandfather would look at an avenue of elms or a grove of oak that someone was saying they'd never cut down because their great-grandfather (or whomever) had planted them, and say they'd been planted as a crop and they were just right for felling, and then the new seedlings would be ready for the great grandchildren to cut. My father, in his later years, concentrated on planting indigenous trees where he could. I'm reminded of a song by Fay White, an Aussie folk singer I heard a few years back, lamenting the damage that forest clearance has done to parts of Australia;

"And an underground flood is rising
"Bringing salt up by degrees
"And our land will turn into a salty waste
"If we don't replace the trees."

When you take land from nature and change it for your own purposes you have to start managing it sympathetically, or, one way or another, it'll go wrong on you.

[altivo]

It does seem like the kind of thing (as with politics) that can alternate generations as children overreact to their parents' attitudes. However, it doesn't always do that. My grandparents were tree planters and protectors, so were my parents, and so am I.

[hrrunka]

Aye. Possibly one of those patterns that sometimes fits, but often doesn't; works for her, but not for you, nor for me.