First of all, my mother had her birthday today, so Happy Birthday, Mom.

Now that the important stuff is over, I get to talk about my life. It's been a long three weeks. I've been trying really hard to get together a side project that will greatly benefit all you readers as well as working a full day. It's been a little rough, losing sleep and all, but I've managed to keep in together. I've actually gotten a lot of stuff done. I shall try to cover all of it in the following paragraphs.

The lead photo this week is of Tom D., a man noted for being short, bald and always moving. I've never seen him slow down for a minute. Everyone here at Building 8 is absolutely convinced he even sleeps in fifth gear. In the picture he is using a propane torch to cut off the guard rail around the roof of a structure that used to support a 4,160-volt transformer and contain a restroom. By the time Tom started cutting off the rails, the transformer had been disassembled and removed. All the copper had to be separated out from the steel and other various glue, tape and wooden supports inside. In the end we had several hundred pounds of copper that will be recycled at about three dollars per pound. And that doesn't include all the copper we got from the huge cables that distributed power throughout the building. The total must be three or four tons so far. We were told initially that this would be put towards Marie Callender's Pie Month (whole pies for $5.99 in October), but I've heard since then that we will be getting a new forklift instead. This makes me a little sad, but Tom was just happy to be using that torch. I think he pretended to not be all excited to be using it, but as soon as he had the chance, he was cutting away whatever he could with it. It was really totally unnecessary since the hand-held band saw actually did a better job.

On Sunday the 21st, the Building 8 team went to the home of Mario D., an immigrant from the Philippines who will soon be working with us. Mario had invited us and a few others to his home for lunch that day, and we were more than eager to accept because he is a dessert chef at Disney Land. Now he's not just the guy that mixes the batter. He's been doing this for so long that he's now basically a manager in this department. He tells the other dessert chefs what to make and he finishes them. After hearing about his impressive qualifications, of course we were ecstatic to join him for a meal. He even made his specialty for dessert: the Dream Cake. Here is a picture of one piece of this cake. The bottom layer is brownie. Between the brownie and the cake (the dark stuff in the middle) is a layer of caramel. Yeah, it's really thick. In the middle is chocolate cake, and the rest is chocolate mousse. The icing is basically a shell of dark chocolate, and the garnish is shavings of milk and white chocolate. To make a long story short: IT GOOD.

This next section is entitled Fun with Backhoes. It is divided into two parts, identified by the two pictures I have of Doug C. using the John Deere backhoe.

Knock, knock! Housekeeping! You know how when you enter a restroom there should be an immediate turn to the side so that people standing outside can't see in at any angle? Here Doug is using the backhoe to destroy the wall that once provided this shield. We needed a good room to store tools that we could lock, so the bathroom with its thick doors and heavy locks was an obvious choice since it's being ripped out anyway and all the plumbing has already been removed. The only problem was that little wall stopped us from getting all our shelves, tables and heavy equipment inside. Fortunately the wall wasn't that tough, and Doug mad short work of it.

Remember that structure Tom had so much fun cutting up? Well here it is after Doug ripped out most of the walls and ceiling. The roof was six-by-two tongue-and-groove Douglass Fir, and was really quite difficult to get out since we were trying to save it, but once that was gone, it was over for the restrooms. Not many things are able to win an argument with a backhoes 'stinger.'

In other news, I purchased some web hosting space for my domain sockninja.net, and I hope to have a site running there soon. I will also move my blog there, since the custom blog system WordPress has a custom feature that will let me automatically email registered readers of my blog whenever I post a new update. I'll let you guys know when that's up, but it could be a while.