(no subject)

Today at the close of business we all received a terse email from our ex-CEO, announcing that our current CEO had resigned effective immediately after a violation of our company's ethics policy, and our ex-CEO was now our CEO again.
None of us have any idea what happened, including people who know both of them personally.
Tomorrow I'm taking the ethics course as a baseline, so we can diff it against the ethics course content in four months, to get some idea of what happened.

(no subject)

Monty only gets to go out on walkies at night in devastation zones, because that way she's less likely to get in a fight with another dog.
We were out walking between the new sewage plant and the recycling plant that burned down the day before, in the park that was made from the old sewage plant, after dark, when Monty, who is DYING OF HUNGER ALL THE TIME, turned and snapped at something in the grass. There were some thrashing sounds and she backed off very quickly, then sat down staring intently at the grass, and proceeded to start smacking her lips and sticking her tongue out and making weird mouth noises.
She'd tried to bite a fist-sized western spadefoot toad.
There was another smaller one just up the path. We urged that one to safety before she got there, because she is hungrier than she is smart.


There's a museum just south of where I work, that is open from about 10 to 2, friday through sunday, and it's open that much because Boulder County offers a tax forgiveness program to elderly people in exchange for them volunteering to do things like be docents in weird museums.
The guy who collected all this stuff was a very successful turkey farmer, who liked buying: player pianos, fancy antique cars, and steam-powered agricultural equipment.
I was in heaven.
I took way too many pictures.
I will be content with posting these.
This is a recording player piano.

As in, you stick a blank roll of paper in it, and you play your song on the keys, and it creates a player roll that you can then stick in another player piano.
I had no idea such things existed. I thought player piano rolls were only made by automated punch machinery.

THIS player piano includes two drums and a tambourine in the case, and let me tell you what, they give a whole different sound to a song.

Most of the pianos were functional and the docents fired them up.
I don't think any of the cars or steam engines were functional.

In about 2002, I was driving from Leadville to Denver and saw a dead straight white line across the face of a large mountain I know somewhat well. The snow had collected in a large number of crevices in line with each other: at one point there had been a road there. I spent a year or so looking at topographic maps and exploring the areas around where I thought the road existed, and after finding a minor ghost town up a washed-out trail, I found one end of the road. It was a grueling bike ride: a few dozens of meters on the narrow rock-filled remains of the road, then off to carry the bike across a rockfall that had entirely erased the road, or in one case, scramble across a steep rock face where maybe they'd had a bridge.
When we were young, our parents told us that when we were poking around old mine sites, we should LEAVE WIRES ALONE because they might be attached to electrical detonation caps for explosives, and det caps are plenty capable of killing people. My brother and I lived in some fear of wires as a result, but after a couple of decades of poking about around and in old mines, we never saw anything dangerous, so eventually it became somewhat of a joke.
Well, there were a bunch of blue wires tangled about in the wreckage of an old collapsed building right beside the road snippet, and there was also an old finger-jointed wooden box that said "DUPONT DITCHING DYNAMITE" on the side, and I backed right off and left it alone and turned around, because I didn't want to be within half a mile of that. The whole mountainside was a giant avalanche waiting to happen, after all.
But, nearby, on my way back down, I found two pieces of steel wire that had been braided together, with a hook on one end so it could be hung, or possibly, so something could be hung from it. I don't know. Anyway, this weekend, at my grandmother's 101st birthday party, my aunt said she'd found the wire and a note in the bottom of a drawer at my grandmother's house, and gave it back to me.


So, yeah, my grandma is 101. She's still talking, but the time between repetitions of stories is down to about 15 minutes.

(no subject)

Okay, I misspoke.
This lovely thing took second place in the first-ever Indy 500, in 1911, averaging 80 miles an hour over the course of the race.
It doesn't have front brakes. Like, at all.
I can't even.
But what a glorious looking machine.