Everyone seems to be busy. I don't know if it's the new fiscal year for most businesses, don't know if it's the lack of holidays, the impending holidays, but this has always appeared to me to be a time of year where people just buckle down and get stuff done. One of the driving forces of my occupation is the preventive maintenance work order (PM). Equipment - emergency generators to exit signs - is inspected, cleaned, repaired if necessary on a schedule determined by a combination of government regulation, manufacturer's recommendation, and experience. Mostly, any more, by government regulation. For reasons heretofore unexplained, we have a lot more PM's in October than most months. Last week, the fire inspector came to visit, always a means to job security and opportunities to improve. This week, we've had 22 government inspectors combing the building, looking for whatever they can find. Did you know that, in a hospital, there are regulations stipulating the number, height and distance from other objects for hand sanitizer dispensers? Glove boxes? Sharps containers? Hospital patient room walls are crowded places. Regulators (read bureaucrats with clipboards) will sometimes overlook utility for an arbitrary standard. But, I digress.
These inspections are good, they can find sometimes obvious things that we miss because they look at things with different eyes. What's not good is the tizzy that it seems to send many people into. It makes for a stressful day.
Anyway, it's been busy.
I look at the pictures we have from our trip, and of course want to explain each one, and before you know it an hour has gone by, no decisions are made, and there's a huge slide show forming in my head, with parallel thoughts of slideshows I've sat through. Sat through one, once, where the photographer had, for each shot, taken a 'portrait' and a 'landscape' version, and eagerly displayed each and every one for us. "Groundhog Day" - in slides. Over three hours.
So here's one from Sunday evening. I don't know if you've ever seen rain off in the distance, in the desert, but you can see it here, in the lower right part of the picture. Now, it's about 85 degrees or so, it's sunny where we're standing, there's a wind picking up, and you can smell the rain coming. About 45 minutes or so after this was taken (wasn't wearing a watch, on purpose!), we got some strong winds - had to redo one of the mooring lines - and about 10 minutes of big, fat raindrops, then it blew by us. At one point, there were 2 rainbows.
Only 335 days to go.
For all my blogger buddies, yeah, I miss you, too.
