An Observation on Earthmovers

Earthmovers, bulldozers, diggers, they're often referred to in a somewhat negative way, earth-rippers, despoilers of the planet.

But on my way home from work today, a different side of the heavy plant story occurred to me, when I saw this...

 And this...

Yes, when the men in hard-hats and steel-toed boots leave the site, the  laughter and swearing's fading, engines are hushed, it's then, and only then, that you'll see the protective, nurturing instincts of a mother excavator.

What!????

Another Chilly Day

And now I'm home and it's snowing again.

Self Inflicted

Recently, I was told to put on my heating-repair-guru hat, and go try solve the chilly woes of a tenant. This guy rents several thousand square feet of warehousing plus an office from us. He grumbles, bitches  and moans, perpetually, about every little thing. A squeaking door hinge, a flickering light, a smell nobody else can detect. Usually these complaints come just after he's received a reminder that his rent payment is overdue. He rents the building on what is referred to as a full repairing lease, meaning that he's responsible for the interior state of the buildings, anything that fails or needs maintenance is up to him, when the lease ends, or is renewed, the premises must be in as good a state of repair and decoration as they were when the lease was signed.

We will do all the works, if required, and charge them to the tenant. This guy chose to get another contractor to do his heating service and repair, because he thought we were too expensive.

So, since the end of september, his heating in the warehouse has not worked. He got his contractor to service it, and the guy issued a certificate to say all was working correctly. He got his contractor to come back and fault-find the unit. Their diagnosis was that the ignition-control unit was shot, and very expensive to replace. They quoted him several thousand pounds for a new heater, which they said was only sensible, as, if they replaced the ignition, who could say something else, like the gas-valve, might be just waiting to expire? He hired mobile, (and expensive to run), heaters for his warehouse staff but only after they'd threatened to walk out.

Then, as a last resort, he rang our office and asked for me to come and quote for fixing the problem.

I started by undoing two screws, on the timer control, this is what I found.

Can you, dear reader, repair the heater for a minimal fee? In ten seconds or less?

Might the service contractor be either: a- incompetent, or: b- dishonest?

" Because it's Cold " is No Excuse...

In this case, the job had been planned for a while. New heating/air-con for the office, and because the contractors were pushed for time, or didn't like heights, or something, and didn't want to take the old outdoor units down, or fix the structure for the new ones, I apparently volunteered to do it. Amazing the number of things I volunteer for without being aware of them. So this morning, first job was a bit of snow clearing and gritting, by which time the big green thing was warmed up and ready to go.
The new units are lower down because um. because the fitters don't like ladders. Or green things.
Bare hands on aluminium ladders, that sucks the warmth from your bones on a minus degrees morning. But I never got the hang of doing stuff with nuts and bolts and wrenches with gloves on.

Ladder and platform? Well, our driver had to go away and do something else, so the ladder was the vital pathway for delivery of hot tea and more cutting blades.

Brrr!

Temperature 17 miles east, last night, -12 deg C, 10.4degF

Temperature last night at Llysdinam, Wales (170miles), 0 deg F, -17.8 deg C.
The North Pole, at the same time, was -14 deg C.

Freddy the Rat Perishes Revisited

Why? I'm reposting this from  2007, because all of a sudden there's a cluster of hits via google and the question in the google searchbox?  "what is the poem freddy the rat perishes about?".
Look, kids, just read the damn poem. It is what it is, Freddy the Rat fights a Tarantula, who has been terrorising the creatures of the newsroom.  He seeks to stop the tyranny, and he is not afraid of the spider's venom as he has already eaten poisoned cheese. With his last act he saves his friends.
Is it an allegory of the underworld of New York in the 1920s? Maybe. The only person who could say for sure is the writer, and he died in 1937, so there's no point in asking him.
So. Poems? The one thing we can be sure of in a poem, is that our perception of it will not exactly mirror that of its writer. That's the whole story of art. It asks questions, leaves possibilities, and every time we read it, there's a slightly different story.
"Oh yeah!", you say "Well that's not what my teacher says, so who do you think you are to disagree?" Me? I'm a human, and thus as well qualified to have an opinion on Freddy the Rat as anyone else. And that's my advice to you. Read the poem, form an opinion. Stop asking others what it's about, ask yourself.
If you want to learn more, read about the writer, Don Marquis. read about the America he lived in, learn about the world outside his windows, learn about the people who read his column, and of course, read all the other stories he wrote.

The story of Freddy was not written in a vacuum, it was one of a whole series, written by Archie the cockroach, who was a re-incarnated free-verse poet, living in the bottom of Don Marquis' typewriter, and writing his poems and stories by jumping from key to key, in the night when no humans were around.

 
Of course, he could use no capital letters because he couldn't jump on the shift key simultaneously. Oh. Yes, sorry, I forgot that many of you have little or no idea what a typewriter is, let alone have used one.
A steampunk manually powered keyboard, all levers and fulcrums, no screen! stamping out letters on paper at a speed even the slowest crummiest printer would find laughable.

You can see one in a museum, I guess. Here's the poem. Oh. By the way, typewriters only had one font, until the nineteen seventies, when the IBM selectric came along.

The poem's displayed here in a type-like font

"Freddy the Rat Perishes"

By Don Marquis, Published in "archy and mehitabel," 1927

listen to me there have

been some doings here since last

i wrote there has been a battle

behind that rusty typewriter cover

in the corner

you remember freddy the rat well

freddy is no more but

he died game the other

day a stranger with a lot of

legs came into our

little circle a tough looking kid

he was with a bad eye

who are you said a thousand legs

if i bite you once

said the stranger you won t ask

again he he little poison tongue said

the thousand legs who gave you hydrophobia

i got it by biting myself said

the stranger i m bad keep away

from me where i step a weed dies

if i was to walk on your forehead it would

raise measles and if

you give me any lip i ll do it

they mixed it then

and the thousand legs succumbed

well we found out this fellow

was a tarantula he had come up from

south america in a bunch of bananas

for days he bossed us life

was not worth living he would stand in

the middle of the floor and taunt

us ha ha he would say where i

step a weed dies do

you want any of my game i was

raised on red pepper and blood i am

so hot if you scratch me i will light

like a match you better

dodge me when i m feeling mean and

i don t feel any other way i was nursed

on a tabasco bottle if i was to slap

your wrist in kindness you

would boil over like job and heaven

help you if i get angry give me

room i feel a wicked spell coming on

last night he made a break at freddy

the rat keep your distance

little one said freddy i m not

feeling well myself somebody poisoned some

cheese for me im as full of

death as a drug store i

feel that i am going to die anyhow

come on little torpedo don t stop

to visit and search then they

went at it and both are no more please

throw a late edition on the floor i want to

keep up with china we dropped freddy

off the fire escape into the alley with

military honors

archy

Tonight's Scene From my Window

Four hours ago there was a screech of tyres followed by an almighty bang. A car was smashed up at the road junction a few houses away. There was a lot of angry shouting and a crowd of about fifty people out there. Somebody yelling "Get out! get out!", and not in a sympathetic way at all.
A short while later, ambulances, (at least two, plus paramedics), fire crews, and eventually police arrived. I just looked out again. A big truck-crane, more police, men in yellow coats... police tape across the road by my front gate, and a bored looking police officer telling both traffic and pedestrians to turn around and seek another route.
Looks like they'll be here a while.

Update: Car was a stolen Renault Clio, out of control, during the early evening rush, when commuters seek to bypass the main routes via our leafy road. The car came sideways out of a cross-junction, and somehow missed the evening line of cars, it shot across the road, spinning and smacked sideways into a tree, wrapping itself around the tree and smashing a cast-iron telephone-cable junction-box and uprooted a four-foot iron bollard. Two men are seriously injured in hospital... others mysteriously evaporated before police arrived. the car had to be cut open to get the rear seat passengers out. ~There's bark damage about eight feet up the tree. I'm all for car-thieves getting killed during their escapades, but it's only luck these guys didn't kill some innocent commuters. And the tree. the tree. I get very angry on behalf of trees. It's been growing there for a hundred years.
The driver probably won't get found.... unless he's dumb enough to take his injuries to hospital and claim he got them falling downstairs.

Good night all.
"World Outside Your Window" Tanita Tikaram