Thursday the sixth was our last day at building 1. Finally that ordeal is over for us. I didn't hate the place, but we were remodeling an office, and as far as I know, office work is never fun. In our case, we spent two days labeling all the outlets in all the cubicles identifying the breaker each one is on. We had to get on our hands and knees and crawl under each desk several each time a new breaker was switched off so we could find all the outlets on each breaker. This was tedious. When we tried to spice things up by racing to find the outlets that had been turned off, I bruised my knee while diving under a desk, and at the end of the day, my elbows were raw from rubbing on the stiff office carpet. After we were all done, we found out that none of it had been necessary. The up side to all of this is that I clocked 120 hours in building 1 and I will be paid for each one. This will fund the replacement of my DS, which I haven't played since E3, on the account of it being autographed.

After we left building 1, I had a really great week. The first good thing that happened was last Saturday I took a walk to get myself some dinner and sort of wandered into a sushi place about three blocks away from where I live. I got a spicy tuna tempura roll and a chicken teriyaki bowl. I am used to getting at least two items of a sushi menu and the combination being one meal, but in this case each one was large enough to be a meal on its own. Thinking I was ordering for two people, the people at the restaurant packed two bowls of an excellent miso soup with my order, and all of that was only $16, or 19 after the tip. Now I was really hungry, so I ate all of it, but I did share one of the rolls with my roommate Zach, and I was really full afterwards. Man it was good to have some sushi after so long. I haven't had any since I left Mississippi. I look forward to a trip to Haru, my favorite sushi place in Jackson.

The next great thing that happened was Sunday when my best friend of so long ago, Stephen D. of Austin, Texas showed up for the meeting. He had arrived the previous night and will be staying for at least a month, probably two or three, to work on building 8 with me. Stephen and I were born four days apart (I'm older) and basically grew up together until I moved away when I was eight. Naturally, I was ecstatic to be reunited with him. We spent a lot of time catching up, and I was happy to see he hadn't changed much since I'd last seen him. In this photo here, he is relaxing before lunch in the lunchroom at building 8. Sorry about the poor color in the picture, but my phone's camera is kind of sucky. Maybe I'll get a real camera soon.

Since we were back at building 8, we had to finish pressure washing the ceiling. This has been our huge, laborious project since the beginning, and we were still not done, due to lack of people and then due to our hiatus to work on building 1. Pressure washing the ceiling, unlike pressure washing a sidewalk, is a very wet project. When everything you spray is overhead, water and dirt is bounced back at you, and no one ever comes down dry. Also, there are three people in a very small basket on the end of a boom 20 to 30 feet in the air. Everyone has to watch everything around them so no one gets sprayed directly (which at 3750 psi could be lethal) and the driver (me) must be watching above, below and all around so he doesn't run someone's head into a pipe or beam on the way up into a really tight spot. The result is a long, wet, bumpy ride that is fun only for the first hour. We did this for four days solid. Finally we finished on Wednsday, and we packed up the pressure washers for hopefully a very long time. To commemorate the completion of this project, I took this picture. This is the boom lift we used to reach the ceiling and Aaron F. of Tampa, Florida that joined us last week. Aaron is a pretty cool dude, and has been fun to work with so far. The lift, which we call the Snorkel, after it's brand, is so far my favorite of all the lifts, being the biggest overall and the fastest of the gasoline-powered lifts.

The MCCP 'bigwigs' purchased (lease-to-own) a brand new scissor lift, shown here. It is an electric lift, and at top speed is a good bit faster than the Snorkel, but at its top height of over 30 feet, you wouldn't want to take it around at top speed. I got to drive it around a bit, and it is actually quite a bit of fun. It's not as maneuverable or as fast as the golf carts we keep around the project campus, but even at it's lowest position, the basket is elevated enough to give the driver a very empowering feeling. To put it in perspective, imagine the lowest car you have ever ridden in, and then imagine riding in an 18-wheeler. That's the kind difference I'm talking about. I'm about 6'1" or 2" (I forget), and my head does not reach the middle bar on the basket. Tom D., who is about a head shorter than me, is eye-level with the floor of the basket. Even so, I still like the boom lifts better. Being able to swing around adds a tremendous amount of flexebility on the ceiling, and the Snorkel can actually rotate it's box.

We started our next big project: knocking out all the windows on the roof of the building. This particular window was right in front of a pillar, so I kicked it. All the glass up here is wire glass, so it won't usually break into big chunks, but tiny shards will go everywhere. Everyone that worked on this so far has gotten myriads of tiny pricks on thier arms and hands, despite leather gloves. These windows were a part of the original structure over 50 years ago, so the caulk used to hold them in place is now hard as rock. Initially we were using a hammer and chisel to chip away all the caulk around the sides and bottom of the windows and then sort of lever them from the bottom, and then drop them down and pull them out, since the top can't come straight out. We got really tired of that, and gradually got rougher and rougher with the windows. Of the three guys working on this over the last two days, I was the most violent with the windows. After this particular window, we got harnesses and safety ropes and stood on a narrow truss over a 30-foot drop to kick the windows out from behind. The second day we worked on this, we didn't even take a chisel up with us. Once we got to the ends of the row we were working on, the windows were blocked most inconveniently such that one person would have to stand on a truss eight inches wide with nearly nothing to hang onto and hold a wrench to hold a nut still while a person standing on the roof would unscrew the bolt on the other side to remove the brackets around the window. We unanimously decided this was a bad idea, so I got behind these windows and just destroyed them, flinging their broken chunks with my kicks and punches out onto the roof, while trying my hardest to not drop any out on my side onto the concrete three stories below.

Finally, the last great thing that happened before publishing this post was this morning when we went shopping for clothes at a local thrift store, Lincoln Thrift, sort of a Goodwill wannabe. I didn't get any clothes, but among all the trash I saw this gem: the original NES Max Controller by Nintendo. I guess thrift stores do have their place in the world. Now, I have no idea whether it is in working condition or not. There was a sign saying you should test all electrical items before purchase since there are no returns or refunds, but it's not like they had a working NES there for me to plug into and test my controller. If they had one, I would have probably gotten it, too, but there wasn't even a non-working one that I saw. My brother has an NES at my home, so hopefully we will be able to hook it up and test my new controller then. If it doesn't work, I'll just get Shigeru Miyamoto to sign it the next time I see him.

There. That was a long post, with lots of pictures. I still didn't manage to get it done in less than three weeks, but I hope it was worth the wait.

Also, I was told to ask the Sons of Thunder (you know who you are) to please return to building 8 during your winter break. We miss you guys. You, Bruce Lee, and John Lee Supertaster. Please visit as soon as you get the chance.

PS - Was it really all that long ago when this was absolute fiction? That is incredibly cheap! Suddenly I feel old and nostalgic.