Here We Go Again

 Hello? National Weather Service?  Yes, I’d like to cancel my subscription to the storm of the week club.

Yep we got more coming tomorrow night.  Hopefully it won't be nearly as bad as last week.  But this is springtime in the South.  Heh, some time ago, an obnoxious know it all informed me that maybe I needed to move away from here, but really, where are you going to move that doesn't have weather?  If it's not severe storms and tornadoes, it's hurricanes or blizzards or droughts or floods...that's the human condition.  It's always going to be something.

Here we go again also.  I found out today that one of my fellow sub-brazers has COVID again.  Poor thing, I really feel for her -- it's her fourth time having it, and when she gets it, she gets it bad.  The first time she had it, she got long COVID, and hadn't even gotten over that before she got it again.  

Speaking of work, yesterday, we were way behind on our brazing, because we didn't have any parts from tubing to braze. There is this one group leader....nah, I'm going to keep my mouth shut.  Anyway, she was calling all day long, "[Parts Stager] we need headers to line 6.  [Parts Stager], line 6 is down waiting on headers."  Really.  All. Day. Long.

At one point, I turned around and told Group Leader Shark, "Can you go back there and put some tape on her mouth? I'm sick of hearing her!"   

So, there I was, frantically brazing up parts for -- yes, her line, when I hear a noise behind me.  I turn around and see her picking up hot headers with her hands as if she were going to carry them all the way back to line six.  She had gloves on, but that's not going to keep the heat from getting through them. 

Without thinking, I said, "You're going to want a box."  As in, to carry the hot headers in.  So her hands wouldn't get burned.  Sigh...

Sometimes I'm too nice for my own good. 

By the way, the engineer known on this blog as Dude is leaving.  The plant, not this blog.  He got a better job, which isn't really hard to do given how bad things are out there.  The guy who is replacing him is all gung ho about getting stuff done.  A few days ago, he was collecting some of our raggedy, falling apart brazing jigs to fix them.  Some of the brazers were say, "Even Dude didn't do that!"  Then he told me, "If there's anything you need, just let me know."  Bless his heart.   He means well, but he's going to run into the same problems Dude did.  He's going to have to fight the front office for everything, because they're the ones who don't want to spend any money giving us what we need to do our jobs.  

I mean, there's a lot we need, but we aren't going to get it.  Even when we needed new parts trays for our brazing stands, Dude had to order just a few at a time to get them past the budget police.  Same thing is going to happen when Gung Ho tries to get us anything.  The plant really does expect us to make silk purses out of sow's ears.   

And finally, I finished reading a couple of books and have started two new ones, both of which I've read before. 

First up: 

The Book Of Three, by Lloyd Alexander. , which is the first book of the Prydain Chronicles. 

And secondly, 

Greenwitch, the third book in the Dark Is Rising sequence. No matter how many times I read these, they're still just as good. 

Of course, it helps that it's been so long, I can't remember what they're about....

And that's all I have to say about that.