Howdy, y'all, and welcome to the Awsome Blog for the month of August, 2008. This month, Mark's got some hot pants and Building 8 gets some big new toys. But first, this OSHA safety reminder!

Hard hats: use 'em or lose 'em. Doug C., our long time foreman and heavy equipment operator, was operating the Kubota excavator without a hard hat. Technically, this is fine, since the operator's cage on the excavator is much stronger than any hard hat, but while not paying attention, Doug's hard hat slipped from it's resting place next to the cab and into the hydraulics that control the side-to-side movement of the boom, where it was immediately crushed. Doug thought his hard hat was missing for almost two whole days before I pointed it out to him. I don't think he's replaced it yet, but his head is probably hard enough to not really need it anyway.

So these are my new hot pants. Notice the hole on the left knee. While I was torch cutting on Tuesday, August 19, a spark landed in the frayed cotton strands around a tiny hole on my knee. It immediately ignited, and blazed for maybe half a minute before I noticed it and put it out. I wasn't injured at all, but my knee looks a little funny since a bunch of hair was singed off. Of course, this hasn't stopped me from wearing these pants to work. On the contrary, I wore these pants for the rest of that week. I consider the hole to be a sort of 'clear badge of courage.' Besides, this is the third time an article of clothing has caught on fire while I was wearing it. I'm almost used to it by now. It's just the risk that comes with the job. You know what they say, when you play with fire... uh... you're bound to light up at some point I guess. It's something like that, anyway.

Moving right along to other news, check out this beast! This is the first of two rental machines to arrive at Building 8 in August. This is a Case 821E. It is a wheel loader, so called for having a front end loader with four equal-sized wheels. The bucket on this thing holds almost four and a half cubic yards of material, lifts more than 20,000 pounds, and weighs almost twice that. The tires are about five feet tall, and the floor of the cab is about eye level for me. It has been jokingly suggested that this would be capable of flipping an F-350 like a pancake. This was not well received by the Building 8 bigwigs, however, probably due to the fact that our leader, Phil D. owns a very nice and shiny black turbo diesel F-350. Here it is shown filling in the area that used to be the concrete ramps that led down to the loading docks. All the concrete was ripped out and now the area is being filled back with dirt to be sealed with new concrete later. Nothing we had already would really be able to handle the job, so we got this thing. All it has to do is dump some dirt and then pack it down by driving over it. It seems pretty simple until you realize that it has enough power to make even seasoned heavy equipment operators nervous.

On Monday, August 25, I was given the task of jackhammering out the loading docks on the north end of the east wall. These loading docks are in some places just a slab of concrete a few inches thick, and that comes out easy enough, but in other places, the concrete is several feet deep. Breaking that up with only a 60-pound jackhammer seemed like a fruitless endeavor. I basically spent the entire day on it and got almost nowhere. So, to speed things up a little, this Case backhoe was brought in. This particular unit was chosen because it had the option of working with a hydraulic jackhammer attachment instead of the usual scoop bucket. The jackhammer alone is almost as tall as I am, and did more work in an hour than I did in an entire day. This is an amazing machine to watch at work.

Here to operate these machines is Bill D., of Austin, Texas. Bill was here briefly before, but had to leave for a while. Now he's back, and should be staying with us for a long time. You can sort of see him in the cabs of both of the new Case machines above. This month's issue all came together at the last minute, so I forgot to take a good picture of him. I'll be sure to have one for next time.

That's all for this month. Almost nothing really interesting happened, which is partly why this post is so short. The other reason, of course, is procrastination. I was actually so bored this month that I went to onemanga.com and started reading all the manga that were completed and under 15 chapters. About 80% were romantic comedies, (something you'll probably never see in an American comic book) and of those, about 80% were unreadably bad. Fictional women can be so dumb sometimes. If a guy is a jerk, you should stop talking to him, and you should absolutely not tell him your secrets. Apparently this is something fictional women can't figure out. Anyway, a few of these manga were really good. If you're bored, email me about it and I'll recommend a few. See you all next time.