Taking the Long Way Around

This post will be something of a mixed bag. Rather than my usual direct focus on one topic, I'm going to hit a few different things. It's kind of a queue-clearing type thing you might say. I have a couple other posts in mind, but I need the time and ambition to do them justice, which I don't have available to me currently. They will be done this weekend, though. I'll get back to that.

This week was a brutal work week. They are after us, on top of us, and all over us to get us up to that elusive goal of 300 guns a day. Engineers are working on the problem with lousy parts that we get from the machine shop. And our cell is still being worked on with the intention of turning us into instruments of mass production, with mixed results so far. They seem to have fixed the headspace issue that has been making bolt fit the logjam, but there's still a problem with the firing pins and the pre-fire reading they give. So now the bolt building area is the clog in the drain. Guess where I worked in the cell today.

That's right. I was moved from my cushy bolt lock spot over to building bolts, and it was harsh and sucky. I've done that before, and it isn't the actual building of the bolts that sucks, because once I get into the rhythm it isn't so bad. It's making them, having them then fail pre-fire, and having to rip them apart and try a new pin that makes it fucking suck. That isn't my fault, but if you know me, you know that something like this will make me crazy. Plus, it's frustrating to have people waiting on you while you just can't get the goddam thing to give a good reading. By the end of the day I was going a bit cuckoo, which was commented on by Jim (the bolt-fitter). I've been the 'quiet one' in the cell since I started, and today I was cursing up a thunderstorm, which he thought was hilarious. Me? Not so much. But as aggravating as today was I toughed it out.

At the end of today we did somewhere in the neighborhood of 130 guns, which considering how much I was struggling with the bolts, isn't so bad. If all the bolts I made today passed pre-fire, we would have been well over 200 guns. Well, maybe next time.

By the time I got back here afterwords I was exhausted. Yesterday I just crashed. I sat down to watch a little TV, and never even made it to 5:00. The next thing I knew it was 9:00, so all the things I wanted to do with my afternoon/early evening went down the tubes. I was bound and determined that would not happen today, so I forced myself to keep moving, even though I was dead tired.

Then I went to Borders. Exhaustion has put me behind schedule on Chapter 4, but during lunch some day or other this week I took a look through the notebook pages, and the Kim scene was smaller than I thought it was, and the concluding Alyssa scene isn't terribly lengthy either. The distance could be made up. The mission today was to hammer the crap out of the material as hard as I could hammer it. The Kim scene went down hard. It never stood a chance. Then I plowed right into the Alyssa scene, and even though I fell short of finishing it, I did enough so that tomorrow sometime I should be able to slam it out and meet the goal. That's pretty damn good.

Tomorrow a 20 year tradition comes to an end. I'm going into work for 5 to 10. Up to this point I've never ever worked on my birthday, and in fact I've gone to great lengths to avoid shifts on that day, but being as I'm still new there, and being as overtime money is hard to turn down, I said I'd come in. Saturdays are usually easy money, and I get out early, so it's really no big. After that I'm heading back to Massachusetts, where the promise of a chocolate cake has drawn me like a moth to the flame. As usual, I don't have any huge plans for my birthday, and I'm short one special person to celebrate it with, but there never needs to be hugs plans for me to enjoy the day. It's my day, and even if there was no one in the world to wish me a happy birthday I would still treat it like it's special.

One of the things I always do come birthday time is take stock of myself and my life, which is one of the two posts I have planned to write, which I will find time to write sometime this weekend. The other is something a little more fun, which I've been thinking over about since Jen left, which I'm going to try and fit in somewhere this weekend, too.

At any rate, happy birthday to me! Woo hoo.