Finally

I'm finally scheduled for my first rotation. It starts October 9, and I'll be working with a squad in road design for 4 weeks. Our Office Administrator has already booked the motels for my stay. I'll be staying in 3 different motels. There's apparently some race going on the first couple weeks and I wasn't able to get my first choice of motels. So I'll finally get my choice for weeks 3 and 4. I looked online and all three motels says they have high speed internet. Hopefully it's good enough for me to play FFXI. If not, I'll bring up the PS2 and try to finish FFX-2. Got so many things to do before FFXII and Guitar Hero 2 comes out.

My second rotation is supposed to be in December for 2 weeks in bridge design, but that has yet to be confirmed. I'm also supposed to take classes for concrete and basic inspection sometime but my boss doesn't know when those are going to be.

Low tech

The asphalt part of the project didn't last long and I didn't get as many hours as I was hoping for. Only got 12 hours when I was expecting like 25. I wasn't too bad though. Had to be out on the project by 8am, very relaxed and warm mid 70's degree weather. When there was nothing left except the asphalting, the project manager would take over an send me home, which was usually around 5pm. This manager was really nice, if there was something interesting going on somewhere else on the project, he'd send me out to observe. He would tell me about the decisions he made regarding the project and made sure that I knew what was going on. The contractor had to go pave somewhere else, so they left after placing 6 miles on shoulders on the inside of the highway. They dirt crew will come in now and do the grading and other work for the outside shoulders. The paving should start up again in 2-3 weeks.

The project was 40 miles west of the office. Just 2 miles outside the town of Kingman. I rarely went into town, because I had everything with me in the truck. One day the pavers quit early, so the manager took me into town to show me the mini concrete plant that there. I was amazed how small the operation was. All the plants that worked in in-town was totally automated with computers. To fill a truck it has to batch twice. There's only two people working. The batch man and the driver. The batch man's father actually owns the company. When there's multiple loads, the batchman will drive a truck and meet the driver halfway, trade trucks and return to the mini-plant where he'll load the truck up again. The weighing of material is done manually and all the tickets are hand written. It was interesting to see how everything actually worked. There was laid back fun feeling being at that plant. Probably helped that both the workers were young.

Asphalt

Starting next week I'll be sent to another project outside out our office. It's an asphalt paving job 30 miles west of my office. They asked for help, they need someone to run gradations and a ticket taker. The Russian engineer will run the gradation while I'll have the joy of taking tickets. This is what I did last summer as an intern. I'll even be working with the same contractor, and it might even be the same crew. It's really simple, something, you have the bottom of the totem pole do. You just walk beside the paving machine, taking tickets when the dump trucks arrive and calculate the yield. Not sure if this project will have the same hours as last summer which was 6am-8pm. I will be a very expensive ticket taker. They want me on the job by 8am Monday, but that's for preproduction.

I finally finished playing Final Fantasy II: Soul of Rebirth and watching Justice League. Good timing since I won't have time to watch anything on this project. I might have time to play games and read though. I managed to read 17 books last summer as a ticket taker, but I had some help though.

I have more back up batching to do today. I enjoy batching because it gets me out of the office and allows me to play games. I can play games at any time, but I don't feel right playing my DS in th office. I prefer to read books, it looks better.

Back up

Yesterday, I had to come in early to batch some concrete. We have a new batch man, and apparently he's the only one. So he has to work several different projects. Yesterday there were multiple pours at the same, so I was called in to help out. The first pour was t 7:30am, and the second and last pour was at 4:00. There was some difficulties with the pour and I actually managed to get some overtime. I have absolutely no idea what project I was working on. I just know how to fill out the ticket books. Other than this, I only did 20 minutes of work, had to check same numbers.

I've been discussing the rotation with my boss, since he finally got some information on it. He's still trying to gather more information and said he'll get back to me on Tuesday. After discussing it with his boss, the Metro Engineer, the Metro Engineer said that he doesn't want us gone for 4 weeks at a time. And that only 2-3 days is required for each section, claiming that it's mostly a waste of time. The black guy told me that the previous engineers, said rotation is all about meeting people, and that they had fun, but actually did not learn much technically. This sounds fine for me and I would like to work in Topeka for a while, because it's close to Manhattan. I want to attend some Japanese dance practices.

I recently added two Tachikoma to my desk decoration. They stand next to my HWT from Gunparade March and bobble-head shisaa. I felt kind of funny sitting at my desk building toy robots. I got several more GITS SAC figures, because they came with DVDs, but I think I'll just stick with decorating with robotic looking toys.