High Five

You gotta love highway art! I pass this thing every time I go to the Sierra’s for work. And I always say, “oh yeah, I need to get a picture of that”. Well, I finally did.

Today is a rare day off for me, and I’m actually spending it up here in the Sierra’s. Shaver Lake to be exact. I had a meeting yesterday (Monday) in Fresno at 7:45 am. So I drove down to Fresno Sunday night. Tried not to fall asleep in the meeting, and then we were all off for what SCE calls a job-walk. SCE is replacing the “skyline” (the uppermost wire/cable on the transmission towers [the big steel ones]) with a Fiber Optic cable. This is suppose to help improve the communications that will travel this cable. SCE is replacing this on three of their transmission lines. Of course they told me this only on Wednesday, last. Anyway, they invited four companies to submit bids on the project. (SCE outsources most of their construction work now). So this meeting was for them. Me, the archaeologist and JJ (that’s what I’ll call him) the Biologist were invited just to help give them an idea of what they will be encountering and what types of “things” they will have to avoid. So after the boring meeting that had nothing to do with me, we all got in our trucks and drove off to some of the locations that they will have issues with, i.e. difficult terrain, cultural/bio issues, access (some of the towers they need to get to are in citrus groves and trucks don’t fit). One funny thing, well, it’s funny now was that I was the only one who didn’t have 4-wheel drive. *grumbles and swears about how the rental company continuously screws me over* Anyway, I didn’t have any real problems but since everyone else did have 4-wheel drive, they were driving up the freshly graded dirt roads with lots of rocks and loose soil quite slow. Now if any of you know about 4-wheel driving… when you don’t have 4-wheel drive and have not quite bald yet highway tires…. You need to have momentum to get uphill on loose soil. Needless to say, I think I scared the crap out of the guys in the truck behind me. JJ was in the rental crap mobile with me, so we were having a grand ole time thinking about those guys behind us getting the dirt storm of the century from my constantly spinning wheels and having me stop and wait for the trucks ahead to get farther ahead so I could floor it up the hills. So our day ended in the orange groves east of Fresno, and I then drove up here to Shaver Lake.

Because I technically worked on Saturday (picked up the rental crap mobile), Sunday (driving down to Fresno) and Monday, I have today off, mostly because I will be working up here Wednesday straight through to next Thursday.

So here I am, with a day off in a tiny resort town in the mountains. So what did I do? I slept in till 10:30 of course. I went to the little museum in Camp Edison, which was just built last year. Of course it was closed. Only open from Thursday-Sunday from 11-3. So I decided to drive up to the lake. Parked in the overflow/turn out area and walked around the lake. Well, not very far, the lake is HUGE! I tried to find a spot that didn’t have any garbage nearby, or people. That was an impossible task. My word, there is a lot of trash around the lake, it’s disgusting. You can smell it rotting, yuck! I sat down near the water on a rock and tried to read a book for a while. But then the afternoon clouds came in and I got cold. So I drove back into town and ordered a pizza for lunch (and dinner), and now I am sitting outside at the little coffee shop drinking an iced chai and eating pizza. The lady who owns the coffee shop also owns the little grocery store and wood carving shop that are all connected to each other. I am sitting on the coolest wood patio table. They have some pretty cool outdoor furniture, to bad my sister and I have no money to buy some of it. Her boyfriend owns the restaurant across the street (really good food). Anyway, this is the only place with wireless Internet… I think the only internet in town. So here I am. Not sure what to do with the rest of the day… If I wasn’t by myself it would have been nice to rent a canoe/kayak and go play on the lake. But I didn’t want to go out there by myself.

Tomorrow will be all work and no play till next Thursday, so I best be off to enjoy the rest of the day.