Rumors

 As it happens, those rumors turned out to be true.  

They did a layoff on second shift last night and shut down all of the assembly lines.  All of the temps were laid off, and some of the full time employees -- those with 8 or more attendance points.  They will only be running a few areas for the time being.  My guess is those will be sheet metal and maybe fin press.  Everything else on second shift is done for the time being, even tubing and sub-brazing.  

That in itself is a blessing in a way.  At least we won't have to come into a disaster area and literally put our department back together every morning.  How we leave it is how we come in to it -- and I'm perfectly OK with that. 

But we'll have to remember to turn our fans off at night -- because they use sooo much electricity, you know.  Heh, Stalker walked around just before end of shift, hollering, "Make sure you turn your fans off!  We can't pay the light bill as it is!"  

Someone who will remain unnamed but may or may not have been me said loudly to no one in particular, "If they'd get rid of all of those buddy hires, they could..." 

OK, moving right along, guess what happened right after I posted yesterday?  Go on, guess!  OK, I'll tell you.  It rained!!!!

Yep, you read that right.  We got nearly 7/10" of rain, which brings us to a total of 1" for the month of August.  Still well below average, but it's better than none.  Unfortunately, that means my red clay was too mucky to do any work in the yard this afternoon, so I came inside and watched Orphan Train on Fawsome.  I loved that movie when I was a kid, unfortunately the video quality was very poor.  I keep trying to remember if it looked that bad on TV.  It was made in 1979, but still...

When that was over, I turned over to Netflix and watched the documentary on the old TV show The Biggest Loser.  I used to watch that show all the time, and even back then, I knew it was setting the contestants up for failure.  They kept them isolated, they fed them, they worked them out for hours a day, but they never taught them real world skills on how to eat right and exercise without someone standing over them.  

And they never addressed the underlying emotional issues that these people were using food to self-medicate in the first place.  Most of them, as soon as they got off of the show, they started gaining their weight back.  One of the guys in this documentary is bigger than he was when he first started the show. 

If you have Netflix, I recommend this one. 

And finally, when I was watering my grass seeds, I found three cicada shells lined up on my fire pit and tried to take some artsy-fartsy photos of them.  I think this one turned out the best, but I've included the others for your enjoyment. 

This was complicated by the fact that the sun was so bright I couldn't really see what I was shooting. 

Ah, well, that's how it is sometimes.