Well, I’m back, and damn, what a good weekend to get away. Here’s what was waiting for me when I got home Friday afternoon:
That’s the street corner I live on my building is at. What the image does not capture is the dust and dirt flying in the air, timed to the rhythmic pulsing of that whatever the hell it is machine. What the image also does not capture is the noise level that was going on at the time. Everyone on the site was wearing earplugs. I found myself removing my headphones, which were playing pretty loud but not as loud as they did in my younger, more foolish days, and stick my fingers in my ears. It seemed like a strange thing to do. We’d gotten notice a few weeks ago that this was going to happen. They’re replacing the streetcar tracks for about 3 or 4 blocks of my street, they’re doing this 7/24, and the noisiest equipment would be restricted to 7-11. NoisiEST implies less noisy equipment at 3 in the morning, but I haven’t had a chance to sample that yet, as it seems that the workers have Thanksgiving off. I was hoping that the work would be done this weekend, but they’ve only finished tearing up half of the street so far, so I think I’ll be working late a few days this week… No joke, it’s painful to be inside while these machines are working. I’ll hopefully remember to take more pictures tomorrow morning – the street looks pretty funny.
I think this is the first picture I’ve put in an entry so far. I don’t think it’ll be the last, since I bought a little spy cam that isn’t really a spy cam but it’s a digital camera that fits in my pocket and takes 640×480 pictures of things that don’t move, and 640×480 abstract blurry things of things that do move. Thanks to my university physics education, I can understand relative motion means that if I move, it’s just like other things moving. Anyway, it’s fun to carry around, too bad it doesn’t work with Macs. The PC is way at the other end of the room though, so you’ll have to wait for fun stories about the weekend at the cottage.
I will say this about the pre-cottage part of the weekend: AngelA’s family does not live in Brampton. Despite many references to the city over the past year and a bit, it turns out that if one were to take a train to meet the family, and if one were to expect them to meet one at the train station, it would not be wise to get off at the Brampton stop, for if one did, this would be what awaited:
If you can look past the really small picture size that my dumb horizontal design has enforced, you will notice that the photo is slightly blurry. This is not the fault of the photographer, rather it is the artistic approach taken to give the viewer a sense of everything going dim. Anyway, in the confusion, I had to wait a while for my ride. A long enough while that I could have visited my parents in the time it took to get from door to door, but not long enough to consider that a cell phone would actually be a good thing in some limited situations. Consider this a copy of the HT home game. How many ways can you amuse yourself in a train station parking lot? Yes, the station is closed for the night. Yes, it’s cold and dark. Ok, pencils down. The correct answers were: play “balance game” on the railing on the right side of the picture, play “lonely union guy on strike who forgot his picket sign at home” and pace back and forth muttering things, play “take pictures of all the interesting things in the parking lot” and be ever so thankful that your memory card can hold 155 full resolution photos (I used 21 slots), play “lookout” while standing on the rail (also known as “balance game with cheating variant, holding onto sign”), and play “act out scenes from Footloose” (some of which done on rail for extra points). I like to say that I make my own fun, but I guess I shouldn’t always elaborate on how exactly I do that…