Long days, short nights

I've been out of the office most of the past 3 weeks. It's wierd, but kinda nice to be in for a whole week this week. The bridge I was on for 2 of those weeks was really neat. And I got to do some climbing stuff I hadn't done before. Hopefully I'll get to keep doing that.

I was on the Burlington-Bristol bridge. It's really high, and fairly narrow, having been built in the 30s. And I was hanging out outside of the roadway area, on a 12x12 bottom chord, some 50 feet above the water. It really only raises for very large boats.


Here's the view from where I was on the bottom chord:

Pretty cool stuff. But we were working 13+ hour days, getting back to the hotel at 9, going to dinner and getting back by 11 in time to fall into bed to get up at 6:30 the next morning. That's not so much fun. But I have a full week of comp time now, after both weeks out there.

Oh, the places you'll go...

So this is where I got to go last week for work. Yeah, it's big...

It's the Robert C. Byrd Green Bank telescope in West Virginia. Over 400 ft tall. The dish is over 2 acres in area, about 300 ft across. There's lots of fog in the morning, and the mountains all around just make it an awesome thing. The last morning there I went up to the dish, and to the receiver room all the way at the top and took some pictures. Very cool.

View from the dish

View from the top of the telescope