Work has been rather overwhelming lately. The casino I work at is opening a new hotel, and some of the side effects are creating some exceptional problems in my job.

I am a stationary engineer, soft of a glorified boiler operator, working the night shift - 11 pm to 7 am. The new hotel uses steam piped over from the existing boiler room to run the heating, hot water, etc.

This is not a problem, in theory, for the boiler capacity. We have big boilers. The problems have all been related to feed water supply to the boilers.

After a few weeks struggling with water flow failures, we have concluded the amount of garbage in the condensate return line warrants cleaning the strainers multiple times per day.

Since there has been NO garbage in the pipes since the boiler plant was put into service in 2002, this is a drastic change in our maintenance policy.

I have no desire to start a war over how we ended up with cut up sheetmetal, pieces of plastic, and what appears to be sand in the condensate returns. I was expecting the oil and metal chips from thread cutting - I have threaded pipes myself and know it can happen. The other stuff we just have to grit our teeth and deal with.

The long hours create big paychecks, but I would prefer sleep.

Yes, I know this is a low rate of posting on a blog. I post even less on Baen's Bar, and I used to be a little more active there. Since the Bent Bar was put in service, I have found that my normal browser is allergic to it, trying to use email just overloaded my mail program, and I never did get nntp to function correctly. I still can read the bar, just not post to it.

This particular method of communicating does work better, but needs more time than I usually have to learn the tricks to make it fun to use. Since I do not normally spend a lot of time gossiping, this resulted in a month long delay between posts.

It would have been longer, but I was reminded by someone ( Hi Sarah!) that I haven't been posting much, and I looked at my livejournal to see how long it has actually been. Oops!

I was hoping to post more often than this, maybe this winter I will find more time to do this kind of thing. Perhaps I will take some vacation - I have enough vacation time on the books to take nine weeks off if I want. I don't take much time off. This might be a mental problem of some kind, ummm... workaholic?

I did take three vacations last summer, 1 to go to a wedding, 2 for Cons. The year before I took time off to do some major, critical, house repairs. The minor house repairs keep getting put off. Take vacation time to work on house - I need to check money to see if I can do any big spending.

I have been doing a little thinking about the future, specifically the 2nd Amendment discussions, and the possibility of future governmental restrictions on what few rights haven't been infringed upon yet. Any house renovations will have to be balanced against my desire to buy some sort of firearm before some bitch outlaws them.

Thus ends my third post to Livejournal. We will see if I remember to do this again.
Scott Powers

My second post. Thanks to everybody who replied to my first post.

I do not have a lot of time to post on this forum, but I will try to blather as often as possible.

I subscribed to several conferences on baen's bar, email version. This lets me read some of the messages I used to read a lot, but I now get 150 - 200 emails a day.

Baen's Bar, Buships, Honorverse, Monster Tracks, Ringo, Sarah's Diner, Snerkers.

I really wish the bent bar was compatible with Safari.

Several years ago, I took classes on web page design and HTML programming. One of the things the instructor stressed was ALL parts of a good web page will be accessable by a computer that had a HTML application.

If it aint HTML, it aint right.

BENT BAR aint right.

When I get more time, I'll try to figure out this friends list stuff. Until then, count me as a friend to all barflies, even if I don't know how to do it.

Scott Powers

This country needs a constitutional convention, but if we get one the moonbats are going to come out of their caves in record numbers.

Items to be covered should include a method to blackball an individual politician so the clown can not ever hold office again.

An easy method of recalling a crooked politician would also be helpful.

A better way of limiting the size of government is a necessity.

I'll add more as I think of polite ways to say them.

Scott