Sunset

Aug. 18th, 2010 09:32 pm
altivo: Commission line art colored by myself (cs-tivo-color)
[personal profile] 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.

Date: 2010-08-19 08:33 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] 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.

Date: 2010-08-19 09:46 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] avon-deer.livejournal.com
Lack of experience can be a problem when getting new leaders. Glad you're happy with your new title though.

Date: 2010-08-19 09:57 am (UTC)
moonhare: (Default)
From: [personal profile] 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.

Date: 2010-08-19 01:16 pm (UTC)
hrrunka: Frowning face from a character sheet by Keihound (frown)
From: [personal profile] 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...

Date: 2010-08-21 10:17 pm (UTC)
hrrunka: Three-quarter view from a badge by Marcie McAdam (harper)
From: [personal profile] 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.

Date: 2010-08-19 01:44 pm (UTC)
hrrunka: Our new garden in summer (garden)
From: [personal profile] 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...

Date: 2010-08-21 10:59 pm (UTC)
hrrunka: Frowning face from a character sheet by Keihound (thinking)
From: [personal profile] 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.

Date: 2010-08-25 07:35 pm (UTC)
hrrunka: Frowning face from a character sheet by Keihound (thinking)
From: [personal profile] hrrunka
Aye. Possibly one of those patterns that sometimes fits, but often doesn't; works for her, but not for you, nor for me.

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