Rain Falling on Parched Earth

Rain is a rare and beautiful commodity this year.  At the sight of a storm rolling across the valley, I dragged a folding chair out onto my front stoop and waited for the storm to reach me.

Came first a cool breeze ruffling my hair.

Then a small darkness fell over my house.

Then rain.

The scent of rain kissing parched earth is like no other.  The only near equivalent is a love song.

I sat even as rain sprayed against my arms and swept across my face.  The rain did not last long, but the vital touch of it put a shine to the whole of the prairie before me.

And when the sun emerged from the clouds, the scent of wet earth became the smell of grass and sagebrush.

Then arose birdsong.

—Mitchell Hegman

Another Lesson Learned

After nearly thirty years working on construction sites, I dropped my tools and settled into the office of an apprenticeship training facility.  It did not take me long to discover an unexpected difference between the work environments.  Put plainly, people working outside the construction world don’t operate with any sense of urgency.

I soon discovered I needed to prod people in other “office” environments to get things done.  I found myself sending out a lot of “reminder” emails and placing a lot of follow-up phone calls.

I was truly shocked by this.

As we brought in new people from the field and plunked them in our office, I gave them this advice: “Don’t expect to get things done as you do on the construction site.  People on this side of the door are not in a hurry.  You might need to push a little more.”

I suppose the difference in responsiveness makes sense.  In the construction world, we usually operated on a strict timeline for project completion.  And everyone associated with a project shared the same goal and the same timeline.

To successfully bring a building up from the ground, you need answers as soon as questions arise.

Bottom line: You can’t stand around waiting for answers and get something done at the same time.

—Mitchell Hegman

The Sight of Me is Scary

For the first few weeks of life, fawn deer are well camouflaged and almost odorless.  Given these traits, they instinctively lie motionless on the ground if spooked or in the vicinity of a predator.  I have approached within three feet of a fawn in this state.

After a few weeks, fawns replace this defense strategy with a polar opposite one: panicked flights to safety when feeling threatened.

Yesterday, I learned what really spooks this highly mobile type of fawn.  Apparently, the sounds of construction are not of much concern to fawn mule deer, but the sight of a certain Mitch Hegman initiates wholesale panic.

After working on a few of my sunroom’s framing details for a couple hours (running a skill saw, hammering, operating a drill), I stepped around the corner of my house, less than ten feet away from my work, and found twin mule deer fawns bedded down alongside the house.  

While the noise I made when framing had not troubled the fawns, one sight of me caused what can only be described as a fawn deer explosion.  One of the twins jumped away to the north.  The other bounced off to the south and stopped at a distance to evaluate me before a final flight away.

I managed a photograph with my smartphone before the fawn veered away.

 

A Fawn Deer Pausing After Bouncing Away from Me

—Mitchell Hegman

Drone Swarms

I don’t celebrate all advances in technology.  More precisely, I don’t appreciate certain uses of new technology.  Following are the first two lines of an article I read in The Sun:

“ISRAEL used the first ever drone swarm deployed in battle to hunt down Hamas terrorists, it was reported.

The drones have no human input but instead link together using artificial intelligence to seek out their targets.”

In plain English, Israel dispatched robots to fly out on their own for the purpose of hunting and killing people.

Deeper in the article, I read this:

“The basic idea of a drone swarm is that its machines are able to make decisions among themselves.”

I think this is a line we should never have crossed.

Did I expect to see this line crossed?

Yes.

If you are Country X and your drones are on the hunt, I suppose this might sound wonderful.  But Country X is not alone in seeking to use drone swarms.  At present, Israel, the UK, Russia, the United States and China are tinkering with this technology.

This not a good operating space for some of the aforementioned countries.  For now, I am mostly afraid of the humans behind the killing robots.  But the more autonomous and efficient the killing machines become, the more we should fear the machines themselves.

—Mitchell Hegman

Source: https://www.the-sun.com/news/3222879/israel-first-ever-drone-swarm-hamas/

Knee Walls

My friend Luke and I determined the layout and then constructed knee walls for supporting my sunroom’s glass.   The layout proved tricky.  The curved glass added a weird, somewhat difficult to envision, dimension to the task.  In the end, our final measurements seemed to work.

Just the same, I used screws to fasten to the top plates on the walls.  This will allow me an opportunity to remove the plates and use other materials of different thickness if we are off  by a fraction of an inch. 

          

An Aluminum Rafter in Place (For Layout)

Framing the Knee Walls

Walls Up

—Mitchell Hegman

Jewels and a Jewel Beetle

Off and on throughout the weekend, we processed two fifty-pound bags of sapphire gravel down at the lakeshore.  The gravel originated from a mine located on the opposite shore of the lake maybe six miles distant from our lakefront by way of the water.

Spoiler alert: the bags—purchased from a shop on York Road operated by the mine owner—are “seeded” with sapphires to ensure every bag has a few.  Seeded or not, finding a sapphire is finding a sapphire.

There is no downside.

In addition to finding jewels in the dirt, a flying jewel beetle made its way to our gathering and landed on my brother-in-law, Terry.  Jewel beetles are nothing less than spectacular.  They are something akin to a custom-made hotrod compared to the standard pickup-truck-type beetles typically waddling around at our feet.

Jewel Beetle

Me Processing the Gravel

Sapphires (and Other) Findings

—Mitchell Hegman

Hole in the Wall

Early yesterday morning, in preparation for fully enclosing my sunroom addition with glass, I got to do the most satisfying task for the entire project.  Using a Sawzall and a skill saw, I sawed a hole in the wall where, thirty years ago, I framed the rough opening for the door.

Between the plywood sheathing, a framing stud, and polyurethane foam, the section of wall I carved out held together remarkably well.  Kicking the chunk of wall free felt surprisingly good.  I giggled as I peered out through the hole after I shouldered the mass free.

After successfully opening the wall, I used the section of wall to temporarily seal the opening again.  I fastened the chunk back in place with a few screws and then stapled cardboard over that to better stop the inflow outside air.  I can easily remove the section just before the glass seals out all other access to the room.

I would have loved this stuff at the age of eight or nine.  And, actually, it feels pretty good now.

Hole From the Inside

Hole From the Outside

Hole Replaced and Covered with Cardboard

—Mitchell Hegman