The Second Rainy Day

     8:29 a.m.  Feels like eight-thirty at night.

     I've been up off and on since 4:30 this morning, the extra half-hour an artifact of using my phone as a back-up alarm set thirty minutes after the bedside clock-radio.  Fed the cats, napped, got up and made coffee and a bacon-and-egg sandwich.

     There's plenty to do today; I'm out of nearly everything and ran out of time and energy to go shopping yesterday after a morning spent trying to get caught up downtown and a forgettable late lunch at a Broad Ripple eatery Tam and I had not visited in some time.  I won't name the place -- frozen French fries, indifferent coleslaw and an adequate if over-cheesed hamburger are well below par for the neighborhood.

   Returning home, I realized I was barely keeping my eyes open, and after a little time at the computer, I went to bed.  Poor, wheezy Rannie Wu joined me; she's got a head cold, and had been to the vet that morning.

     Shortly after seven o'clock last night, I had a call from a guy at one of the major suppliers for the project that has me working such long days when the weather permits.  He need dimensions for some custom pieces, dimensions that I had been given to understand the tower crew had called in more than twenty-four hours earlier.

     They had not; they and the parts supplier had been playing phone tag.  It is a mystery to me why this would happen when everyone involved has e-mail and can communicate the dimensions accurately and unambiguously; but it did, and it fell to me to get up, go the the computer and telephone, discuss the matter with everyone concerned and sort things out.  By 8:15 p.m., everyone had what they needed and I went back to bed. These custom pieces are part of every installation using the same kind of components -- and there are thousands of them.  Everyone involved knew theses dimensions would be needed and most of us knew this was the week for them.  This should not have been a big deal or any kind of a problem.  Somehow, this project has been a SNAFU magnet and I don;t think that will change.

     Today is rainy and cold; they afternoon will be rainy and colder, with a wind advisory.  As far as I'm concerned, it's not a work day.

Didn't Beat The Rain

     Just over two hundred feet short of complete with the vertical work.  Today will be too rainy and tomorrow, well, there's a chance of snow or even ice.

     So here we are.  This should provide time to restock household supplies, do a little catching up at the Downtown parts of my job and maybe even do a little laundry.

Working Ahead Of The Rain

     Progress is being made on the big project; the last couple of work days have been spent putting things together instead of taking them apart. 

     The main effort is just a little short of half-way complete.  That's good -- but today will be followed by a day and a half or rain, or possibly two full days.  And near the very end of the tower work, we will need two or more custom-fit items that can't be made onsite; we've already called in measurements to the supplier and it's about fifty-fifty if they will be here before the rain.

     Yesterday was another twelve-hour day, though I had to take three out and get to a regularly scheduled doctor's appointment, all the way downtown.  At least it made a change in scenery.

And Today, More Of The Same

     Yep.  We are keepin' on keeping on whilst we endeavor to persevere, and you'll remember how that worked out.

     Nevertheless, we are at the stage where the boys are bolting stuff to the sky about as quickly as they can, with due attention to safety and the soft skulls of the groundlings far below, twenty feet farther with every new stick of line added to the stack.

     And I have discovered about 1500 more pounds of overlooked metal salvage!  Still not going to make any money on this deal, but we might not lose as much. 

Sunday, Back At It

     Rain all day yesterday, at times quite heavy, gave me a day off.  I spent almost the entire day on laundry and cooking. 

     The rain was accompanied by gusty winds and there were several loud thumps overnight as small (I hope) branches fell and hit the roof.

     Though it's still breezy now, the forecast calls for winds to fade to the single digits by mid-morning today, so the tower crew will be back at it, or so I hope.  The heaviest lift -- well, lower -- is done but there's a lot left to do.

And Another Twelve-Hour Day, But...

     Yesterday, the crew took the big antenna down.

     How big?  It weighs 1,300 pounds, call it 600 kg.  It's sixty feet tall and about a yard in diameter.

     Since it was mounted about nine hundred feet up the tower, there's no lifting it down with a crane; instead, the tower is "rigged" with temporary "blocks" (think of a pulley on steroids) in interesting and complicated ways, a heavy cable is string up through them, the antenna is connected to the cable with a multi-part sling that hooks into several lifting eyes built into it, and a hoist sitting on the ground chugs away.  A "tagline" connected to the antenna and coming off at an angle to the hoist cable serves to steer the antenna as it is lowered.

     Once the hoist has taken most of the weight of the antenna -- but no more! -- men working on the tower remove the multiple huge bolts that have been holding it in place, and if everything works out (there's a lot of radio chatter and specialized gesturing), the antenna is "floating" as the last bolt is loosened.

     Ours jumped a little when the final bolt was taken out -- less than a foot -- and the riggers were able to carefully push it away from the tower.  The first steps of the lowering process proceed with painful slowness; a mistake here could cost fingers, hands, limbs or lives.

     As the antenna begins to move down, strain is applied to the tagline.  Riggers keep pushing the antenna clear of other structures on the tower and if the angle of the tag and hoist lines was correct, by the time it's too far away from them to reach, the antenna is clear of everything on the tower.

     Don't forget, the antenna has to kept clear of the heavy guy cables, too!  This is trickier while it's close the tower; as it is lowered, there's more room.  But you can't move it too far out -- towers are designed to withstand huge vertical forces; the lateral loads one them are much lower, largely the result of wind.  It's much more than you might think,. but not so much you can hang a 1,300-pound antenna hundreds of feet away from the tower while raising or lowering.

     It all calls for a lot of planning and well-informed, experienced judgement before the work ever begins.  Mistakes here make headlines.

Click to enlarge.  You can see the antenna hanging to the right of the tower.  The angle isn't a mistake -- that's how the manufacturer specifies it is to be suspended for hoisting operations.

     This effort made no headlines; once the antenna was out of reach, the men working aloft rode the elevator to ground level, arriving at when the antenna was about halfway down, and went out to the area where the tagline turned skyward.  One of the ground men fired up a small tracked forklift (a large "Bobcat" with forks) and as one end of the antenna touched down, they steered it to a gentle landing, cradled across the forks.

     Unrigging the antenna and securing the cables for next week's work only took about 45 minutes.  Taking care of some four thousand feet of cable, strung through blocks 950 feet above ground, is not quite like running out a clothesline!

      It was just about full dark by the time everyone was finished.  Rain today and on Sunday?  More work, raising a smaller replacement.

Twelve Hour Day

     Yes, twelve hours yesterday, with some trouble with the big transmitter as well as the ongoing project.  I am so worn out that I can hardly string words together.

And It Keeps On

     Got a lot done yesterday, on the tower and inside the building, too.  Of course, you can do that in a ten-hour day (for the tower workers) or an eleven-hour day (for me).  They drank up all my bottled water the day before yesterday and used up the last of my coffee creamer today.  Hey, kids, guess what isn't going to be kept where you can get at it?

     Had a few interesting technical problems, too, but I think they're all solvable.

     These long days are cooking me.  I have three days of socks left, so between now and the end of the week, I need to have at least one nice, short eight- or nine-hour day.

A Productive Day

     The weather cooperated, the crew cooperated, the equipment -- well, we had to clean a summer's worth of bird's nests out of the limit-switch box for a kind of very basic elevator before it was entirely happy, but with that out of the way, it worked and we got a lot done; and when I say "we," I mostly mean the tower crew.

     Whew!

And Then Yesterday, It Rained

     Rain wiped out the work yesterday.  The tower crew got a couple of hours in and did useful work aloft, climbed down and did what needed to be done on the ground as the storm washed in, and then left.  It's a long way down and dripping-wet surfaces make it a little too easy to get there rapidly.

     This was a huge relief to me; after fighting with the front gate -- photoelectric safety monitors and a lack of shrubbery-trimming  is not a good combination -- I went home, did laundry and made a big pot of chicken soup.

     The shortcut to homemade chicken soup is cooked chicken breasts from the deli, some chicken stock, and fresh celery, carrots, onion, mushrooms, a small potato, jalapeno pepper and sweet red peppers.  Started with a little bacon, sauteed the diced vegetables in bacon grease, added the  mushrooms and chicken, sauteed them a bit, and poured the stock over.  Let that simmer a half-hour or more (more is better) with some bay leaves and whatever else in the spice cabinet that looks good (rosemary and some garlic salt, a sprinkle of parsley),  and you have soup for a day or two.  I crumbled the bacon in, then added fresh chopped onion and celery before serving.  Leftovers are in the fridge right now, waiting for later.

A Miserable Excuse For A Parody Of A Farce Of A Farrago Of A Travesty

     And Sunday, on overtime, the tower crew rearranged the deck chairs on their own personal Titanic hoist rigging on the tower.  Twice.  And load-tested it.  Twice.

     The good news is, they let one fellow go.  The bad news is, that made for another late start, which the former rigger had compounded by being over an hour late to the jobsite.  And it made them short-handed -- about a quarter of a man short by my count, though I may be too generous.

     There was also rather more interpersonal drama over the art of rigging temporary cables to carry heavy, awkward objects to and from a great height than I have learned to expect in 32 years of overseeing contractors working on a very tall tower.  Why this should be, I do not know, though I suspect the huge demands made on the available pool of talent by the FCC's two-year schedule to rearrange RF spectrum occupancy has meant some very primo prima donnas are being coddled.  They'll have a rude awakening once the effort is complete.

     Meanwhile, I spent ten hours at work and have very little to show for it that I didn't do with my own hands.  At least the tower work was a fixed-price job.

A Parody Of A Farce Of A Farrago Of A Travesty, Possibly On Ice

     Words fail me.  Eleven and one-half hours of work yesterday, for which the project had to show....a relocated hoist block.  And a hoist cable drooped so low across the private drive that it's a safety hazard, and I had to set out portable bollards.

     To be fair, the relocation is a miserable job for an experienced crew, moving heavy pieces and parts from 300 feet above ground to 900 feet, up the outside of a tower, while hauling along the free end of a heavy rope which gets heavier with every foot you climb.  It's half a normal day's work if there's nothing for it to snag on -- and we've got plenty.

     It is not, however, as much work as it was made to be.  Snarls in the winch cable, argument over rigging, so on and so forth.  Not a bit of the actual work all this is in aid of actually happened today.

     At this point, I consider it a good day if the same number of people drive away at the end of the day as drove in at the beginning.

     I wonder if Sisyphus was getting paid by the hour?