h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

----- Deer / Me -----
Gathering twilight. Movement in left peripheral vision. Brown body moving through headlights. Buck with good-sized antlers. Screech of brakes. Buck butt and right bumper miss by inches. White knuckles and rush of adrenaline. Quick prayer of thanks for collision avoided. And then I focused on the rest of the drive to work.
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----- It Doesn't Pay to Argue with Your Spouse -----
Allowing ~any~ conversation to spiral out of control so either or the both of you are out-of-sorts is not a good thing. Slow down and give each other the opportunity to get peaceful. Don't let the problem hang for any length of time; clear it up, talk it out, get it settled. Be mindful of the love you have for one another and that NOTHING should get in the way of that one true value. Tell each other "I love you" and say it like you mean it. Things will work out.

----- Little Lost Forklift -----
http://www.machinerytrader.com/listingsdetail/detail.aspx?OHID=7565809&
How do you lose a big yellow Sellick SD-80 forklift that weighs almost 9 tons and can handle an 8,000-pound load? We usually park it inside the Protected Area, in the "lockdown area" parking beside the Turbine Building. It wasn't there when we needed it to move a large pump motor on a metal skid, from the other side of the Turbine Building to our Stores 2 storage location. We did a drive-around inside the plant area, then I had the distinct pleasure of trying to chase it down at the "out buildings." I used our little club car to check behind the CMB, in the OCA parking lot, in the old Fab Shop, behind the QC building, between the Cooling Tower and Circ & Service Water Building (and even inside the truck bay), and all the way around at the Water Treatment Plant. No luck anywhere. So, we had to make do with our smaller Clark forklift, with half the lifting prowess.
Update: It is the next Night Shift (at the time of ~this~ writing). I asked the whole working group, after our shift brief, if anyone had seen the Sellick. Yes, came several replies. It was found parked at the Switchyard (where we distribute the out-going electricity), where some other department had used the forklift to move some pallets of equipment, and hadn't bothered to return it to us.

----- Stairway to Heaven -----
http://www.foleyinc.com/assets/uploads/boom%20lift.jpg
Back to last Night Shift. I got conscripted to run a 30-foot Genie boom lift to assist in flow balancing observations, prior to our Reactor start-up. It required fetching the boom lift from in front of the Outage Maintenance Facility (OMF), driving it to the Turbine Building southeast truck bay roll-up door, and positioning it inside near the bathrooms. One of our Engineers, a young buck whose father still works here, brought a flow-sensing monitor, its coaxial cables, the pipe mounting harness, and the transmit / receive transducers. We climbed into the "basket" of the Genie lift and I carefully raised / extended the boom. It wasn't a straight shot, so I had to weave our way in-between a hanging fluorescent, a large steam pipe, and some hanging supports. Our final destination as a T-junction of pipes, 20 feet in the air, above the bathrooms, and just below some hanging scaffold built downward from the floor above. The Engineer was a bit skittish about the movement and bouncy-ness of the boom basket, but I assured him I'd take it slow, and I let him know what I was about to do ~before~ I made any moves. He settled right in and went to work, not having to worry any longer.
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He used a clamping assembly with small linked chains and a set of adjustable hooks to span the circumference of the pipe. He then squirted some clear gel onto two separate triangular blocks (the transducers), placed them into their respective mounting brackets, and used thumb screws to lock them into place against the pipe. I asked if the slide brackets with measuring hash-marks on the bracket were to ensure proper distancing for the transmitter / receiver transducers. He confirmed it set the expected "echo" angle, as calculated for the diameter and thickness of the pipe. He then attached the coaxial cables each transducer and turned on the handheld flow sensor. It gave no readings, or erroneously low readings, for the duration of the test. The Engineer tried several configurations of cables, and even got a replacement set, all to no avail. He eventually had to concede to a loss on this exercise, so we packed up all the gear and I fished us back out and down to the ground. He conferred with others on his staff and they decided to try again later, on pipes that ran along a decking walkway on the next level up, where it would actually be easier to get at them to take the readings. Go figure.

----- Baby, You Can Drive My Truck -----
Shortly after coming down from the boom lift, we had a jump-up job for an "outside driver" to go to Labadie to retrieve a lockout relay.
http://www.railpictures.net/viewphoto.php?id=176875&nseq=5
It took me half an hour to prep the truck to leave, to include grabbing the GPS, finding a credit card, and fueling the truck before I left. I headed out from the plant, taking the dirt road that winds southeast and downward to Hwy 94. I drove along the Missouri River bottom until I crossed the bridge into Hermann, then the road meandered through rolling hills. It was late night / early morning with sparse traffic; most sections of road were entirely deserted. An hour-and-a-half later, I was at the main gate and a foreman handed me the part. He also offered to give me a quick tour of the plant, if I had time. I made time, since it was a once-in-a-blue-moon opportunity. He showed me through the turbine deck and pointed out the four identical generators, each one producing half the megawatts our single turbine pumps out to the national grid. We passed by the conveyor belts that carry in 2 ½ trainloads of coal every day; 130 coal cars per train, 120 tons of coal per car. The foreman showed me the grinders that pulverize the coal to talc powder consistency, and the blowers that then send the fine particulate matter into the burning chamber. In the burner, the fine dust is ignited and the fireball constantly burns to heat the water in the boiler tube system. This constantly flashes the water to steam, which is blown across multiple stages of turbine blades, thereby turning the generator and producing the electricity. We also stopped by the Control Room and I saw the latest in electronic automation to keep all the plant systems balanced and running within proper parameters. I thanked him for his time, then headed back to our plant. The sun was just coming up as I passed through Hermann again, and I reached Callaway an hour-and-a-half after the end of my shift. I'm glad my supervisor pre-authorized the additional travel time as being on the clock, because it was a long trip with lots of energy drinks to keep me going.
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