Printing up a Storm

So this is where my husband has been spending 12-18 hours a day the past few weeks. Not exactly in the warehouse, but driving in traffic, meeting customers and getting jobs onto press.

Although I'd been up to the plant before, I always find it fascinating to watch these machines spitting out paper, hundreds of sheets at a time.

It comes off either of the printing presses and then gets stacked, so it can go into the assembly machine that makes all the booklets.

He was nervous about the status of his jobs last weekend, so we headed up to the plant on Sunday night to see how they were progressing.

He was very happy to see so much of the work boxed and wrapped up, ready to be shipped out.

These are the new presses. Yes, they are really glorified copy machines, but considering they can cost up to half a million dollars each, they do a large chunk of his business every month.

It's pretty neat to see these glorified Xerox machines compete with the big presses, and how they are creating digital printing with online ordering for their customers. It's all really great, except when H has to stay late at night and feed the *copier* more paper!

GOOD NEWS OF THE DAY: We had a pretty good (restful, work-free) weekend, and this is a short week (even if H is having late night).

Above Boston Harbor

I've traveled quite a bit for work over the last 6 years, but it's often to the same places I've been before. A few weeks ago, I was very excited to head to Boston. It's always fun & entertaining to land near the shore.

Sailing seems so quaint to me- I wish I knew somebody that sailed & would take me sometime.

What a fun little beach area- looks like a great place to take some dogs.

Getting closer to the city & seeing some very nice houses on the bay.

I'm a total dork & was excited to see the plane's shadow as we approached the airport. It's the little things that excite me.

I really enjoyed some beautiful fall foliage along the drive though western Massachusetts, but didn't get to take too many photos since I was behind the wheel. We spent the night just north of New York City, and I had this beautiful view out my window when I woke up.

GOOD NEWS OF THE DAY: We're going to San Francisco tonight- I'm sooooooo excited. :)

Ike at Work

Considering we have floor to ceiling glass windows around the entire downstairs & giant glass bay-windows upstairs, I think my office got fairly lucky by only losing 2 windows. They were both upstairs in the corner, and rain poured into our atrium down below.

The first broken window was blown in, leaving glass and huge piles of debris strewn all around the office. I can't imagine what it looked like in there with 80+ mph winds swirling around the inside.

The window adjacent to the first one in the corner was blown out of the building, so we lost quite a lot of paper and other office materials to Hurricane Ike.

This corner was our video library, where we housed all of our reference videos and crash tests. I was actually surprised they weren't totally ruined and the damage was as minimal as it was.

Now, the clean-up was another story! It was a giant mess, but we had some of our technicians in the back take care of most of the mess & put up plywood to protect the windows while we wait on the glass repairmen.

Luckily, our power came back on at the office the day after the storm. H & I would go up there to borrow the electricity, A/C and Internet. I was at work, mainly cleaning & answering phones, on Monday & back to real work on Tuesday. I'd still say that about 1/4 of our employees are without power at their house.

GOOD NEWS OF THE DAY: The Presidential Debate is still on for Friday!

Go Away Gustov!

About the first I heard of the storm on Tuesday evening. Two days before H is leaving for Cancun (under the S on 2pm Saturday). Not looking good...

By Wednesday afternoon, things are looking slightly better for H's trip, but Oh, poor Louisiana!

By the time H boards his plane, it looks like a gamble on Cancun. I told him just to go anyway & enjoy it, even if the weather turns crappy.

Things are looking better for him by Friday night, especially since he's already there & drinking margaritas!

By late Friday night, things look ever better for H, but what about me and MY trip?!?!

I'm supposed to fly home from Denver Tuesday morning & then fly out to Dallas that afternoon for work, which is supposed to be outside, East of Dallas on Wednesday. Grrr.....

I will be watching this thing closely while in Colorado, and crossing my fingers they don't start cancelling flights into Houston until Wednesday.

GOOD NEWS OF THE DAY: I'll be hiking in Garden of the Gods in a few hours!

Super Sky Stuff

Last Thursday, we had some super storms blow through town, and they made for beautiful sunsets and interesting cloud formations.

In the summer, we frequently get the afternoon thunderstorms. Last Friday, we had lots of thunder and lightening, but sadly very little actual rain for the grass.

And on Wednesday, the afternoon storms delayed my flight home from Dallas. However, we were treated to a very nice sky rainbow for our troubles.

This picture is from about a month ago when I was flying to south Texas, and I thought the coastline was beautiful.

I was actually quite surprised by how boggy and swampy the coastline looks here.

Another fun thing in the sky is the new personal entertainment system that Continental is upgrading all their planes with. It's a touch screen with lots of movie, music and information choices to keep me occupied on our flight home from Florida a few weeks ago.

GOOD NEWS OF THE DAY: I ordered a new tripod and ballhead yesterday!

I PASSED!!!

I've been waiting for 59 days for the results of my big licensing exam in April.

I'M SO EXCITED!!!! Wooohoooo!

I'm good to go on my trip to Banff now in September, start practicing my Spanish, volunteer with politics, keep playing with my camera and RELAX.

#51- Get PE License- DONE

GOOD NEWS OF THE MONTH: See above!

Off to Detroit

We're leaving the house at 5:30 this morning and headed back to the frozen tundra. I have some work up in Detroit, so we decided to make it a long weekend and check out what the Motor City has to do.

We're staying at the brand new MGM Grand Detroit, which is supposed to be really nice! After yesterday's test, I need some good R&R. I'm not a gambler at all, but H might play some blackjack.

There are quite a few cool car & automobile museums in town, and we're hoping to check out the Henry Ford Museum.

We will head to Comerica Stadium to see a baseball game Monday night to watch the Detroit Tigers in FREEZING (snowy!!!) weather.

Update: H told me he has to work Monday, so he's flying back Monday morning instead of Tuesday morning & I'll have to find somebody else to go to the game with. =((

Maybe check out the Detroit Institute of Art.

H might check out the Motown Museum while I'm at my meeting on Monday afternoon.

For sure having dinner in Greektown one night. We loved the food on our trip to Greece a few years back.

Tuesday afternoon I present the paper that I co-authored at the 2008 SAE World Congress at the Cobo Center. I've never been to the Congress before, but I'm sure all the exhibits will be interesting & I look forward to attending some of the other technical sessions where papers related to our industry will be presented.

GOOD NEWS OF THE DAY:

This is the best forecast I've seen since I started watching a week ago.

Smarter than Professional Engineer?

While I'm off today seeing if I'm smart enough to be a licensed professional engineer, why don't you take the test too? Here are a few sample problems from a practice test that I thought I'd share so you know all the *uber important* things an engineer must know ::eye roll::

Which data from the above piston diagram is necessary and sufficient to determine the shear stress in the threads at the piston rod to piston attachment?

The torsional deflection (deg) between bearing is most nearly:

The magnitude of the reaction (lb) at the left bearing is most nearly:

The maximum bending stress (psi) in the shaft is most nearly:

The temperature at State 8 is most nearly:

The actual power (hp) required to drive the compressor C2 is most nearly:

Dry saturated steam at 200 psia is supplied to the reforming plant at a rate of 5.0 x 10^6 lbm/hr. The reforming plant returns it to the steam power plant at 100 psia as a saturated liquid. The total rate of energy extracted by the reforming plant from the steam (MW) is most nearly:

Yes, you need some type of crazy degree to read this chart. It's even has a semi-appropriate name, the Psych Chart.

The old "classic high school physics" problem. This one was actually pretty easy. The rest all sucked....

The test is 80 problems- 40 breadth questions across various divisions of mechanical engineering in the 4 morning hours and 40 depth questions, which I'll take in machine design, in the 4 afternoon hours. The pass rate is around 65%, so wish me luck!

GOOD NEWS OF THE DAY: I'm such freaking happy just to have this behind me.

Landing in Newark

The last few weeks of travel for work have been BAD. BAD weather, BAD congestion, BAD crowds all resulted in lots of delay flights, cancelled flights, lost luggage and many headaches. I had flights cancelled from Jackson & Dallas, delays from Minnesota & Chicago and some mishandled luggage.

Last week, we headed out to Hartford, CT to drive to Springfield, MA and we connected at Continental's hub in Newark. I haven't flown through there in a while, but I was pleasantly surprised to have some great shots of New York City while landing on my very delayed flight, which caused me to miss my connection & again be separated from my luggage.

If you can imagine, this was also one of the bumpiest flights on a small plane I've had in a long time. All the days (at least on this day) around Newark were for very high winds, which I had the total joy of experiencing as we landed.

I really like that you can fly to Newark & don't have to mess with much of the hassle of NYC itself if you are going to New England. The area around the airport is very industrial- with lots of trains, planes and ships all moving cargo.

Made me miss NYC for a few minutes & hope that we can go back (maybe even for the NYC marathon this fall).

::waves to Amanda::

We flew over tons of cargo yards, many filled with thousands of imported cars.

I thought this was a neat shot showing how close the airport is to the ship terminal, with all it's gigantic freight equipment to unload the big boats.

GOOD NEWS OF THE DAY: After a brief battle with a very nasty bug, my sister is home from the hospital.