Safety Third

This is a story about safety bricks.

Rest easy if you are unfamiliar with safety bricks.  To my knowledge, they are used in only one location worldwide.  As it turns out, that location happens to be the very house where I was invited for Thanksgiving dinner.

When I arrived for dinner, I walked around an island countertop in the kitchen to set a bottle of wine on a clear spot near the back of the counter.  I nearly tripped over a wooden crate filled with four bricks.  The crate rested on the corner of an area rug and occupied the center of the walking space between the kitchen table and the counter.

“Whoa!” I called out to Randy, the person occupying in the house.  “What’s the deal with these bricks?”

“They are to keep people from tripping,” he responded.

“Wait?…what?...how does that work?”

“The carpet curls up at that corner.  I put the bricks there so people don’t trip.”

“But…the bricks…you know…I almost…” I sputtered.

Randy, sensing my confusion, removed the bricks.

Sure enough, as soon as traffic patterns in the kitchen shifted people back to the table, people began tripping on the lifted carpet.

Eventually, Randy placed the box of bricks back on the carpet.  Traffic patterns began to flow uneasily around the bricks, but nobody tripped.

Safety bricks.

Safety can be a curious thing.  In this case, something about the conspicuous nature of the box worked.

As a point of fact, almost tripping is not tripping.

The lifted carpet did not catch attention properly, but the bricks worked as something of an attention-getter.  A safety barrier, if you will.

Maybe safety isn’t always what you think it is.  Or what you think it should be.

Posted immediately below are a couple photographs I captured of the safety bricks with my smarter-than-me-phone.  Below those, I have posted a video of Mike Rowe (of Dirty Jobs fame) explaining his “Safety Third” concept.  In a way, safety third is something akin to the box of bricks.

Safety Bricks

Safety Bricks

—Mitchell Hegman

Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u1lcVo1Zshk

We Are Not Constructing Buildings

Several years ago—back when I worked as a training coordinator at the Montana Electrical JATC—we hired a new instructor to teach apprentice electricians.  The instructor, just as me, came into our program from “out of the field.”  In other words, he was a construction electrician about to be thrown into an office environment.

Within a couple days of hiring the new instructor, I sat with him to give him something of a job orientation.

Early in our conversation, I told him this:  “There is something you will notice right away about working here.  Something you won’t like.  I am talking about working in an office and working with other people in other offices outside this one. This is not like construction.  You are going to notice that people don’t respond when you talk with them, call them, or email them for something.  You are going to need to push a little more than you are accustomed to.  You really have to follow up on stuff.  A lot.”

“Seriously?” the instructor asked.

“Yep.  This is going to frustrate you.  We are not constructing buildings anymore.  The sense of urgency will not be there.  Nobody is worried about holding up a concrete pour or scheduling an expensive crane.  When you really think about it, decision making at construction sites is efficient by necessity.  Not so here.  Sometimes, it take a long time to get simple things done. ”

“Is it bad?”

“Well, bad might not be the correct term.  Just noticeable and not like the environment you are coming from.”

Not more than three months later, the instructor reminded me of this conversation and said, “You’re right, Mitch.  You really have to push to get things done here.”

Recently, I have been repeating this same conversation with myself.  This after sending out a series of follow-up emails after previous follow-up emails in an effort to nudge together a continuing education training course I have now been working on for, literally, several years.

I know how this office stuff works.

—Mitchell Hegman

Sticking With a Thought

Regularly, during the course of an ordinary day, a thought will strike me and I will take time to write it down—specifically thinking this will be a blog or, at a minimum, the spark for starting a blog.   More often than I would like to admit, I will wake the following morning, read what I jotted down the day before, and think: “What in the hell was I thinking?”

I will crumple the paper I wrote my thought on, pitch it into the trash, and take off in a new direction with a blog.

Such was the case this morning.

Almost.

Today, I have decided to stick with a normally discarded thought.

Ladies and gentlemen (with apologies), I give you yesterday’s thought:

Maybe part of the problem is that normal Americans don’t pack up all their stuff and move to Denmark.

—Mitchell Hegman

A Criminal Bird

Police arrest a crow for the robbery of a fine jewelry store.

The stolen jewelry is found in his possession.

Not long after his arrest, the bird ends up before a judge at a bail bond hearing.  A court-appointed public defender petitions the judge to allow the crow to be set free on bond.  “He’s always been a good crow,” the crow’s lawyer says of his defendant.

“There is a lot to consider here,” the judge remarks as he pushes back in his chair, pondering.  “Franky, I have a few concerns about your crow.  First and foremost, I think he is a flight risk.”

—Mitchell Hegman

Madness

What if madness is not smoldering within war’s twisted heaps of metal?

Not found on a bloody knife tossed from a highway overpass?

Not a single upturned high heel shoe discovered in the woods?

What if madness is not the malicious threat echoing electronic on voicemail?

What if madness is now soundly sleeping within an infant under soft blankets in the room next to you?

What if madness is rooted in group consensus?

What if a madness is a single, immutable tragicomic function?

—Mitchell Hegman

A Joke about Musicians

While listening to SiriusXM, I heard a program hosted by David Amram, the American conductor and composer, and singer-songwriter Steve Earle.  While introducing one of the songs the pair had selected to play, Amram told Earle his favorite joke about musicians.

Here is the joke:

FATHER: “What do you want to do when you grow up, son?”

SON: “When I grow up I want to be a musician.”

FATHER: “You can’t do both, son.”

—Mitchell Hegman

Communication Towers

PART I

We are attended by communication towers standing upright on high points all around us.  Some towers blink red lights.  Some reside in darkness.  All of them emit waves and pulses of energy that pass right through us and confirm who we are.

PART II

We stand at the edge of an unseen ocean.  Though we cannot feel them or hear them, waves break against us all day and all night.  But the machines around us sense and understand the ocean of waves.  Some of the machines dance when the waves wash over them.  Others sing.  Others begin to dance or walk away.

PART III

We are awash with signals and yet we have stopped talking with one another.

—Mitchell Hegman

An Observation

The first thing through the door when you arrive and the last thing out the door when you leave is your attitude.

—Mitchell Hegman

Advice

I try to limit how much unsolicited advice I give to people.  But I will make an exception on this particular bit of advice:

Don’t attempt to build a 1000 piece jigsaw puzzle on your dining room table if you live with a cat that likes to knock stuff off the table.

—Mitchell Hegman

Trying to Relate

I really enjoy (mainly because I don’t have an actual life as do most other people) watching shows about paranormal investigations.

You know, ghost stuff.

On a recent episode of one such program, an investigator suggested that talking to spirts and trying to relate with them was the best way to successfully experience a paranormal event.

I gave that some consideration.

I think I am going to have to start relating with my neighbors before I tackle the ghosts.

—Mitchell Hegman

Two Rules

Rule #1: Life will find a way to thrive in the harshest conditions.

Rule #2: Humans will find a way to make for harsher conditions.

—Mitchell Hegman

A Five-Alarm Sunrise

Yesterday morning, we experienced another of what the writer Barbara Kingsolver aptly describes as a “five alarm” sunrise.

The whole sky seemingly set on fire.

The sunrise was enough to send me out the door with my smarter-than-me-phone so I could capture a couple photographs.

For those wondering: Yes, I was half-naked.

—Mitchell Hegman

My Premise

I often operate under the premise that I may be both misguided and wrong-headed in my thinking.  I suspect you could call this self-doubt.  In strange way, this stance can be liberating.  I don’t need to carry a spear to defend and hold my position.

—Mitchell Hegman

Similarities

Somewhere around six years ago I replace the flooring in my kitchen with a design of my own.  The design featuring a dark faux wood band about a foot off the outside edge of the floor.

Hold that thought for a bit.

Desiree Tito Mariano lives in Manila.  By the most direct route, that’s 7,080 miles from me.  She lives in the tropics.  Me in the Rocky Mountains.  Huge cultural differences lie between us.  Our language is different. 

I could go one with our differences, but our similarities are far more interesting.

We both go to bed at 9:30 at night and rise at around 4:00 in the morning.  Our dietary habits are the same.  But our strangest parallel is found in our kitchen floors.

When I first saw Desiree’s kitchen floor, I was shocked.

She had my design!

When I asked her about the floor she said she designed it herself and had it installed at about the same time as I installed mine.  Stranger yet, she wanted to use tiles of a color similar to mine, but her late husband wanted white.

My Floor

Desiree’s Floor  

—Mitchell Hegman

Joe Arridy

An I.Q. score of 70 is considered low.  Joe Arridy peaked at an I.Q. of 46.  Such a score placed him at a moderate level of mental disability.  Joe lived his entire adult life (brief as it was) with the aptitude of a six-year-old.

False confessions of murder are a weird, but proven, part of our criminal justice system.  There are many documented cases of men and women, pressed by police investigators, confessing to crimes they did not commit.  Back in 1936, the combination of low intelligence, suggestion, and duress led Joe Arridy, age 20 at the time, to confess to the rape and murder of a 12-year-old girl in Pueblo, Colorado.

Mostly, this confession seems result of an overly-ambitious sheriff named George J. Carroll pushing Joe into a false admission.  Sheriff Carroll is also notable for having a hand in breaking up the notorious Ma Barker gang.  Sheriff Carroll, in a jurisdiction far removed from the crime, found Joe wandering around a rail yards of Cheyenne, Wyoming.  The Sheriff, working on information spread throughout the region, quickly decided he could tie Joe Arridy to the rape and murder.   

Oddly enough, another man, Frank Aguilar, had already been arrested in the jurisdiction where the crime occurred by the time Joe Arridy was hauled in.  Eventually, an elaborate confession was cooked-up to show Joe Arridy as an accomplice to the crime.  Joe eagerly, innocently went along.

The state of Colorado executed Frank Aguilar for murder in 1937.  Prior to his execution, he confessed to raping and killing the young girl.  He also admitted he had never met Joe Arridy.

In spite of all this, Joe Arridy ended up on death row.  Up until this time Joe had lived a life of constant neglect and abuse.  Joe, a simple and gentle soul accepted death row as he accepted everything.  He really didn’t think about it.

All the guards and inmates on death row liked Joe.  He brought happiness to a dark place.

I end this story with a telling paragraph from “The Happiest Man on Death Row,” an online post by Emily Thompson:

Roy Best, the warden, lobbied tirelessly to save Arridy’s life. He visited him daily on Death Row and have him a red toy train to play with. “He was as happy as any child with something he always had longed for and never expected to have,” said Best. On Christmas Eve of 1938, Best even brought Arridy home to play with his nephews. He – as well as most other people – knew that Arridy was truly innocent of the crime for which he had been charged. On the 6th of January, 1939, Arridy was led to the gas chamber with his toy train still in his hand. “A wreck! A wreck! Fix the wreck,” Arridy cried out with glee as he played with his train one last time, pretending to crash it into the cell door. He requested ice cream as his last meal and didn’t comprehend that he was about to die. He didn’t even understand the meaning of the gas chamber, telling the warden: “No, no, Joe won’t die…”

Joe Arridy died at the age of 23.

In 2011, 72 years after his death (and following years of petitioning by many people), Joe Arridy received a full and unconditional posthumous pardon from Colorado Governor Bill Ritter.

 

—Mitchell Hegman

Sources: Wikipedia, Morbidology (Emily Thompson), verywellmind.com

Random Facts

—When double rainbows occur, the colors of the second rainbow appear in reverse sequence.

—One World Trade Center is 1,776 feet tall for the purpose of referencing the year the Declaration of Independence was signed.

—The scientific term for brain freeze is “sphenopalatine ganglioneuralgia.”

—People with a habit of posting their fitness routines to Facebook are more likely to have psychological issues.

—Herring fish communicate by using flatulence.  

—There are more tigers captive in the U.S. than exist in the wild worldwide.

—Mitchell Hegman

Source: https://www.thefactsite.com

From the Air

Flying overtop a place is nor more real than reading about the place by the light of a bedside lamp.

Flying over a landscape you are, quite literally, removed from it.  Mountain peaks fall away and valleys are reduced to simple shadows.  Rivers shrink to threads.  The strongest wind cannot reach you.  Birds have become too small to matter.  There is no scent of pine.  No horses on the hills.  No fences to follow.  No dust to roll out from under wheels.

Held high in the air, you have but sky and the earth below as a whole abstract thing.

Posted is a photograph I captured from an airplane as I flew from Seattle to Helena a couple weeks ago.

—Mitchell Hegman

A Blank Slip of Paper

Normally, my dreams are meaningless and crazy.  Not entirely so a recent dream I had.

In this dream, I found myself in a spacious room conversing with two students of architecture.  The two students were in something of a debate about the best approach to the process of design.  One of the students, a young man with long blonde hair in a ponytail, remarked: “I like a blank sheet of paper in front of me at the start of a project.  I begin by just staring at it.”

Oddly enough (here is where we launch into a more Mitch-like dream sequence) the other student, a tall young women with exceptionally short hair, started sliding all around the room inside what I can only describe as a spiral loop of pipe.

“I never begin with a blank slip of paper!” the woman loudly proclaimed as she slid past us. 

Before I or the other student could respond, I snapped awake from the dream.

For a long time a lay in my bed, puzzled by what the young woman had said.

What did she mean?

If not a blank sheet of paper…what?

After considering a few angles on what she meant, I decided she meant that all ventures, big and small, begin with more than empty space or blank slips of paper.  Rather, the space for creating things is filled with all the bits and pieces of what we admire, appreciate, or find beautiful and inspiring.  We begin with skills and ideas we have learned from others.  We begin with all that appeals to us.  Really, we start with the entirety of our knowledge at that point in our life.

That is no blank slip of paper.

—Mitchell Hegman

Career Day

Aside from the fact I can’t hold a tune, can’t read music, don’t play any musical instruments, and have never written a song, I always thought I would make a good songwriter.

Or landscaper.

—Mitchell Hegman

An Expensive Crab

About a week ago, while shopping, I leaned over a seafood display at a local grocery thinking I might purchase some king crab.  At nearly $35.00 per pound, the package I found attractive would have cost me about $50.00.

I whistled aloud and then pushed away from the seafood.  I bought some mangoes instead.

Turns out $35.00 per pound is pretty cheap.

On November 7, a single freshly caught snow crab fetched $46.000.00 at a Japanese fish market auction.  The crab weighed 2.7 pounds and measured 5.7 inches across the shell.

The record sale came at the opening of the season at Tottori port.

The crab—nicknamed “five shining star” for its size and shape—was purchased by Tetsuji Hamashita, president of a Japanese fishery wholesaler.  The crab will simply be shipped to a restaurant in the Ginza shopping district of Tokyo, along with all the other nameless crabs.

“I know it’s extreme. But it’s the custom,” noted Hamashita. "We came to this year's first auction hoping that we would bid the world's highest price again.  I believe it is a good crab filled with meat."    

Purchasing the first and best crab caught on the first day of crab fishing season is considered a status symbol.

—Mitchell Hegman

Sources: UPI, CNBC

Photo: Geddy Images

A Plant

My sister and brother-in-law, Tony, moved into a huge old house on Granite Street in Butte, Montana, something over twenty years ago.  They started remodeling the big old place, room by room, the year they arrived.  Even though my sister passed earlier this year, Tony has decided to continue the room by room progression.

Tony came to visit me yesterday afternoon.  We sat at the island counter in my kitchen, chatting about the remodel.  He is presently renovating a couple rooms he only rarely visited in the house.  In our conversation, he told me about a recent exchange he had with the remodeling wizard he uses on all his projects.  Following is the opening conversation they had on the first day of remodeling for one of the rooms:

Remodeling Wizard: “I didn’t know you had a plant in that room.”

Tony: “I have a plant?”

Remodeling Wizard: “You had a plant.”

—Mitchell Hegman    

Tony has a video blog (vlog).  He is presently sharing his adventures in remodeling his old house.  Here is the link to his latest vlog post: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QYjkvaKKZw8&t=269s  

State Abbreviations

I friend shared this video of Facebook yesterday.  I found it hilarious.  Hopefully you will also enjoy.

—Mitchell Hegman

Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dLECCmKnrys

20 Pounds of Cat and 1 Foot of Blanket

Though I never gave this any thought until yesterday, every house has a softest spot.  I mean soft in the literal sense.  Maybe the spot is the pillow on a certain bed or the cushion on a certain chair. 

Wherever that spot is, a cat is sure to find it.  Yesterday, without thought, I made a new softest spot in my house.  I did this by folding up a throw blanket and placing the 1 foot thick result on my sofa.

Within an hour, my cat found the new softest spot.

Posted here are a couple photographs of my cat being melted by the soft spot.

—Mitchell Hegman

Button

Several years ago, I randomly met a woman from the United Kingdom.  We small-talked for a few minutes and then parted ways.  Walking away from this chance meeting, I found myself enamored with—of all things—the woman’s accent.

“Man,” I thought to myself, “If I could, I would marry her accent.”

I seriously had not considered the rest of her, but I totally fell for her accent.

Something similar occurred yesterday.  At midday, I called a technical support line for an educational portal.  I needed help in managing dashboard settings associated with some continuing education courses I offer.  While sorting through an issue I had encountered, the woman talking with me informed me I need to locate a “save button” to the right of a settings box we were working on.

But she didn’t say “button.”

She said “butt-Ton.”

Like an extra, super-powerful “t” had been assigned to the end of the word.

She said “butt-Ton” several more times as we sorted out my issues.

After we finished talking, I dropped off the phone and sat there thinking how much I liked the way she said butt-Ton.

Just gorgeous.

If it were possible, I would marry the way that woman said butt-Ton.

—Mitchell Hegman

Molly and Me

Posted today is a selfie I captured with Molly.

Molly is a chickadee.

As a point of fact, Molly might be a boy bird, but I can’t really bring myself to call a chickadee by a boy’s name.  That, and I really have no idea about the sex of my local chickadees.  I don’t know a boy from a girl.  I read somewhere that males have a larger black bib in their coloring.  Not particularly helpful.   

Molly and I are pretty good friends.  She and a half-dozen other chickadees are regulars at my birdfeeder.  Of all the birds, Molly is by far the friendliest.  Maybe the hungriest.  She flutters around me—practically pushing me aside—whenever I pour more seeds into the feeder.

Molly will readily perch on my fingers and take seeds from my palm.

As you can see from the photograph, she is not camera shy.

—Mitchell Hegman

High Maintenance

I can’t help it.  I’m from Montana.  When I hear the term “high maintenance woman,” I don’t think about a bejeweled woman strutting around in stiletto heels.  My image is of a woman who fixes a leaky kitchen sink faucet or attaches the snowplow to a four-wheeler and clears the drive after a blizzard.   

—Mitchell Hegman

Lana’s Song

Lana made wings from fallen willow leaves

and tied back her long graying hair.

She intended to either fly or perish trying.

And she jumped from a sea cliff,

thinking she might be a bird when the moist air lifted her.

But then she began to fall though.

She would have fallen into waves  

flexing against stones below

had not the clouds turned into galloping horses.

Had the horses not swept in and caught her by the wings.

Had the horses not carried her into the sky.

The sky quieter than she ever dreamed possible.

—Mitchell Hegman