USMB Coffee Shop IV

[Ringel05]

Fairly decent amount of sleep last night though still not as interrupted as is healthy, but I sure can empathize with those of you having trouble sleeping or staying asleep. Shoulder still very painful and I'm not seeing any improvement in mobility in the last couple of days. I may have to break down and see a doc. I hate that.

Oh no, wait another two or three weeks at least. <sarcasm off>
You need help with reducing the nerve swelling Foxfyre.

Weird how someone thinks they need to bring a knife to your bar Ernie. Don't you hand out silverware with meals?

This is Alabama. Most men carry a knife, but damned few reach for it when asked to leave a bar.

I tend to bring a bazooka to a knife fight..........

 

[Foxfyre]

Fairly decent amount of sleep last night though still not as interrupted as is healthy, but I sure can empathize with those of you having trouble sleeping or staying asleep. Shoulder still very painful and I'm not seeing any improvement in mobility in the last couple of days. I may have to break down and see a doc. I hate that.

Oh no, wait another two or three weeks at least. <sarcasm off>
You need help with reducing the nerve swelling Foxfyre.

Weird how someone thinks they need to bring a knife to your bar Ernie. Don't you hand out silverware with meals?

This is Alabama. Most men carry a knife, but damned few reach for it when asked to leave a bar.

I tend to bring a bazooka to a knife fight..........

 

[Ringel05]

Fairly decent amount of sleep last night though still not as interrupted as is healthy, but I sure can empathize with those of you having trouble sleeping or staying asleep. Shoulder still very painful and I'm not seeing any improvement in mobility in the last couple of days. I may have to break down and see a doc. I hate that.

Oh no, wait another two or three weeks at least. <sarcasm off>
You need help with reducing the nerve swelling Foxfyre.

Weird how someone thinks they need to bring a knife to your bar Ernie. Don't you hand out silverware with meals?

This is Alabama. Most men carry a knife, but damned few reach for it when asked to leave a bar.

I tend to bring a bazooka to a knife fight..........

One of my favorite scenes in the movie.

 

[peach174]

Morning all

Monday morning smile.

 

[Hossfly]

Morning all

Monday morning smile.

 

[Hossfly]

 

[Foxfyre]

I got a giggle out of this one:

 

[Nosmo King]

My beloved Pittsburgh Pirates are playing at a .603 clip here at the All Star break! That's a big deal for me as I have always been more of a baseball fan than a football fan.

"But Nosmo," you might well ask "You live in Ohio just a stone's throw from Pittsburgh, you earned a degree from The Ohio State University. Football is part of your cultural DNA!"

And, of course you would be right. No human being can be born and raised here, paid attention to what goes on in this part of our great nation and not be enthralled with football from Pee Wee leagues to the NFL. But baseball has a special nook in my heart.

That's the way I felt in the dog says of August 1979. The Pirates were rolling then too. Willie Stargell lead the team that adopted the song "We are Family" all the way to the World Series.

I was working in the steel mill in neighboring Midland, Pennsylvania on my way to my senior year at OSU. I worked in a section of the mill that made agricultural discs. You've probably seen them. The array of dome shaped discs farmers drag behind a tractor to cultivate their fields. Some of them are notched like gears, some of them are smooth, but the all have razor sharp edges to penetrate the direst soil and create furrows for planting.

These discs are, or I should say 'were' made practically by hand. The process begins with a coil of steel. You may have seen coils of steel on flatbed trucks as they are hauled from factory to factory. A coil stands about four and a half feet high and just about as wide. As the coils are formed from a single ingot, a lot of heat is used just to stretch them out and flatten them down to the desired thickness. Once they are finished, a huge overhead crane lifts them from the end of the line. The coils are still red hot and look for all the world like a giant car cigarette lighter. Some mill workers would put their lunch of a TV dinner (still packaged on an aluminum tray in those pre-microwave oven days) into the center of the hot coil and in five minutes time, the dinner was ready to eat.

So the coil was left to cool before it was turned into agricultural discs. Again, a huge overhead crane would deposit a coil at the head of the disc making line. The steel band that kept the coil from springing open was cut with bolt cutters. That's pretty damn scary right there! The end of the coil was then threaded into the machinery and the first step in the process began. The steel passed below a gigantic die press which stamped out flat discs with the regularity of a heart beat. BOOM, BOOM ,BOOM, BOOM!

The first human to be subject to serious injury was the guy who had to make sure the die was cutting a full circle. I want you to try a little experiment. If you have access to an adding machine, imagine the paper tape as a coil of steel. Now, take about a foot of the paper tape out and cut 1.5 inch circles in it as closely as you possible can. See all that scrap? Imagine it as steel. And imagine those sharp edges moving along on both sides of your body. They threaten to slice you in half at every movement.

Our man at the head of that line, not only is he surrounded by the scraps of steel after a circle has been punched out of it, but he also has to feed those circles onto a series of steel rollers that takes the circular cut steel discs into a furnace. They emerge from the furnace white hot. Literally white hot. That's where the second and third humans working in this industrial hell are stationed. The first of the two has to take a white hot (have I mentioned the steel is now white hot?) and place the disc upon a massive die that is dome shaped. Once the disc is balanced there, he nods his head. Shouting or any other verbal cue is useless due to the din of the machines.

Upon seeing the nod, the second of the pair steps on a foot pedal that releases the press. Now, this press is about the size of a modest two bedroom Cape Cod cottage. It falls with a thud that could upset any earthquake detectors within 50 miles. This forms the recognizable dome shape of the agricultural disc. Then, the man on the foot pedal must peel the white hot disc from the die and place it on another array of steel rollers that takes the disc into yet another furnace.

So this massive press is placed between two gas fired furnaces which heat steel to white hot color and temperature. Maybe, just maybe the lousiest job in the whole steel mill, or so I thought.

After the discs come out of the second furnace, they slide down a metal ramp and into a bath of oil. This tempers the discs to the desired hardness. Of course, as you would expect, white hot steel piling up in a vat of oil has hazards all tis own. The oil heats up, smokes like George Burns at a cigar convention and eventually explodes in flames. That's where I came in. My job was to monitor the oil and, if it should catch fire, pull a lever that released live steam onto the vat of oil to extinguish the fire.

All day I would sit above a vat of smoking, dangerously close to catching fire, dirty, greasy oil. That makes a young man think. Think about his future and how to avoid doing this for the next 30 years. Well, that and baseball.

I grabbed one of the finished discs and, in yellow construction crayon wrote "Made in Pittsburgh Home of the 1979 World Series Champion Pittsburgh Pirates" Of course it was August and the pennant races were still going full tilt. But I was young and ever so optimistic. An optimism born of working summers in a steel mill.

 

[saveliberty]

Nosmo King Clift notes:

I love baseball slightly more than football and worked in a dangerous steel mill.

 

[Foxfyre]

I got up early,I went back to bed, and got up again a few hours later.
I just finished reading ' Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance . So I started reading some of Kant's, critique of pure reason. But when I got to page two I started floundering. It is too difficult to read straight through like a book. You need to ponder each sentence, so I gave up and started reading, 'The Tao of physics'. It is more readable, and I got through two chapters today.

Trust me. Kant is NOT fun reading, and in my opinion is best done in a study group where your eyes are less likely to cross and the ARRRRGHs of frustration are at a minimum. Certainly no good for pleasure reading. Unless you have some compelling reason to really dig that stuff out, I would recommend a good summary from a source you trust. I HAD to read Kant. I didn't enjoy it.

 

[Foxfyre]

My beloved Pittsburgh Pirates are playing at a .603 clip here at the All Star break! That's a big deal for me as I have always been more of a baseball fan than a football fan.

"But Nosmo," you might well ask "You live in Ohio just a stone's throw from Pittsburgh, you earned a degree from The Ohio State University. Football is part of your cultural DNA!"

And, of course you would be right. No human being can be born and raised here, paid attention to what goes on in this part of our great nation and not be enthralled with football from Pee Wee leagues to the NFL. But baseball has a special nook in my heart.

That's the way I felt in the dog says of August 1979. The Pirates were rolling then too. Willie Stargell lead the team that adopted the song "We are Family" all the way to the World Series.

I was working in the steel mill in neighboring Midland, Pennsylvania on my way to my senior year at OSU. I worked in a section of the mill that made agricultural discs. You've probably seen them. The array of dome shaped discs farmers drag behind a tractor to cultivate their fields. Some of them are notched like gears, some of them are smooth, but the all have razor sharp edges to penetrate the direst soil and create furrows for planting.

These discs are, or I should say 'were' made practically by hand. The process begins with a coil of steel. You may have seen coils of steel on flatbed trucks as they are hauled from factory to factory. A coil stands about four and a half feet high and just about as wide. As the coils are formed from a single ingot, a lot of heat is used just to stretch them out and flatten them down to the desired thickness. Once they are finished, a huge overhead crane lifts them from the end of the line. The coils are still red hot and look for all the world like a giant car cigarette lighter. Some mill workers would put their lunch of a TV dinner (still packaged on an aluminum tray in those pre-microwave oven days) into the center of the hot coil and in five minutes time, the dinner was ready to eat.

So the coil was left to cool before it was turned into agricultural discs. Again, a huge overhead crane would deposit a coil at the head of the disc making line. The steel band that kept the coil from springing open was cut with bolt cutters. That's pretty damn scary right there! The end of the coil was then threaded into the machinery and the first step in the process began. The steel passed below a gigantic die press which stamped out flat discs with the regularity of a heart beat. BOOM, BOOM ,BOOM, BOOM!

The first human to be subject to serious injury was the guy who had to make sure the die was cutting a full circle. I want you to try a little experiment. If you have access to an adding machine, imagine the paper tape as a coil of steel. Now, take about a foot of the paper tape out and cut 1.5 inch circles in it as closely as you possible can. See all that scrap? Imagine it as steel. And imagine those sharp edges moving along on both sides of your body. They threaten to slice you in half at every movement.

Our man at the head of that line, not only is he surrounded by the scraps of steel after a circle has been punched out of it, but he also has to feed those circles onto a series of steel rollers that takes the circular cut steel discs into a furnace. They emerge from the furnace white hot. Literally white hot. That's where the second and third humans working in this industrial hell are stationed. The first of the two has to take a white hot (have I mentioned the steel is now white hot?) and place the disc upon a massive die that is dome shaped. Once the disc is balanced there, he nods his head. Shouting or any other verbal cue is useless due to the din of the machines.

Upon seeing the nod, the second of the pair steps on a foot pedal that releases the press. Now, this press is about the size of a modest two bedroom Cape Cod cottage. It falls with a thud that could upset any earthquake detectors within 50 miles. This forms the recognizable dome shape of the agricultural disc. Then, the man on the foot pedal must peel the white hot disc from the die and place it on another array of steel rollers that takes the disc into yet another furnace.

So this massive press is placed between two gas fired furnaces which heat steel to white hot color and temperature. Maybe, just maybe the lousiest job in the whole steel mill, or so I thought.

After the discs come out of the second furnace, they slide down a metal ramp and into a bath of oil. This tempers the discs to the desired hardness. Of course, as you would expect, white hot steel piling up in a vat of oil has hazards all tis own. The oil heats up, smokes like George Burns at a cigar convention and eventually explodes in flames. That's where I came in. My job was to monitor the oil and, if it should catch fire, pull a lever that released live steam onto the vat of oil to extinguish the fire.

All day I would sit above a vat of smoking, dangerously close to catching fire, dirty, greasy oil. That makes a young man think. Think about his future and how to avoid doing this for the next 30 years. Well, that and baseball.

I grabbed one of the finished discs and, in yellow construction crayon wrote "Made in Pittsburgh Home of the 1979 World Series Champion Pittsburgh Pirates" Of course it was August and the pennant races were still going full tilt. But I was young and ever so optimistic. An optimism born of working summers in a steel mill.

Isn't it mdk who is from Pittsburg? (I'm getting so forgetful in my older age.)

But anyway, love your Coffee Shop blogs Nosmo. But I just saw this photo recently, and had to post it in response:

 

[Hossfly]

My beloved Pittsburgh Pirates are playing at a .603 clip here at the All Star break! That's a big deal for me as I have always been more of a baseball fan than a football fan.

"But Nosmo," you might well ask "You live in Ohio just a stone's throw from Pittsburgh, you earned a degree from The Ohio State University. Football is part of your cultural DNA!"

And, of course you would be right. No human being can be born and raised here, paid attention to what goes on in this part of our great nation and not be enthralled with football from Pee Wee leagues to the NFL. But baseball has a special nook in my heart.

That's the way I felt in the dog says of August 1979. The Pirates were rolling then too. Willie Stargell lead the team that adopted the song "We are Family" all the way to the World Series.

I was working in the steel mill in neighboring Midland, Pennsylvania on my way to my senior year at OSU. I worked in a section of the mill that made agricultural discs. You've probably seen them. The array of dome shaped discs farmers drag behind a tractor to cultivate their fields. Some of them are notched like gears, some of them are smooth, but the all have razor sharp edges to penetrate the direst soil and create furrows for planting.

These discs are, or I should say 'were' made practically by hand. The process begins with a coil of steel. You may have seen coils of steel on flatbed trucks as they are hauled from factory to factory. A coil stands about four and a half feet high and just about as wide. As the coils are formed from a single ingot, a lot of heat is used just to stretch them out and flatten them down to the desired thickness. Once they are finished, a huge overhead crane lifts them from the end of the line. The coils are still red hot and look for all the world like a giant car cigarette lighter. Some mill workers would put their lunch of a TV dinner (still packaged on an aluminum tray in those pre-microwave oven days) into the center of the hot coil and in five minutes time, the dinner was ready to eat.

So the coil was left to cool before it was turned into agricultural discs. Again, a huge overhead crane would deposit a coil at the head of the disc making line. The steel band that kept the coil from springing open was cut with bolt cutters. That's pretty damn scary right there! The end of the coil was then threaded into the machinery and the first step in the process began. The steel passed below a gigantic die press which stamped out flat discs with the regularity of a heart beat. BOOM, BOOM ,BOOM, BOOM!

The first human to be subject to serious injury was the guy who had to make sure the die was cutting a full circle. I want you to try a little experiment. If you have access to an adding machine, imagine the paper tape as a coil of steel. Now, take about a foot of the paper tape out and cut 1.5 inch circles in it as closely as you possible can. See all that scrap? Imagine it as steel. And imagine those sharp edges moving along on both sides of your body. They threaten to slice you in half at every movement.

Our man at the head of that line, not only is he surrounded by the scraps of steel after a circle has been punched out of it, but he also has to feed those circles onto a series of steel rollers that takes the circular cut steel discs into a furnace. They emerge from the furnace white hot. Literally white hot. That's where the second and third humans working in this industrial hell are stationed. The first of the two has to take a white hot (have I mentioned the steel is now white hot?) and place the disc upon a massive die that is dome shaped. Once the disc is balanced there, he nods his head. Shouting or any other verbal cue is useless due to the din of the machines.

Upon seeing the nod, the second of the pair steps on a foot pedal that releases the press. Now, this press is about the size of a modest two bedroom Cape Cod cottage. It falls with a thud that could upset any earthquake detectors within 50 miles. This forms the recognizable dome shape of the agricultural disc. Then, the man on the foot pedal must peel the white hot disc from the die and place it on another array of steel rollers that takes the disc into yet another furnace.

So this massive press is placed between two gas fired furnaces which heat steel to white hot color and temperature. Maybe, just maybe the lousiest job in the whole steel mill, or so I thought.

After the discs come out of the second furnace, they slide down a metal ramp and into a bath of oil. This tempers the discs to the desired hardness. Of course, as you would expect, white hot steel piling up in a vat of oil has hazards all tis own. The oil heats up, smokes like George Burns at a cigar convention and eventually explodes in flames. That's where I came in. My job was to monitor the oil and, if it should catch fire, pull a lever that released live steam onto the vat of oil to extinguish the fire.

All day I would sit above a vat of smoking, dangerously close to catching fire, dirty, greasy oil. That makes a young man think. Think about his future and how to avoid doing this for the next 30 years. Well, that and baseball.

I grabbed one of the finished discs and, in yellow construction crayon wrote "Made in Pittsburgh Home of the 1979 World Series Champion Pittsburgh Pirates" Of course it was August and the pennant races were still going full tilt. But I was young and ever so optimistic. An optimism born of working summers in a steel mill.

Nosmo, let me tell you about pain. I started rooting for the Buccos in 1948. Growing up, I had an argument about why the man in each position was the best in the National League and the Pirates would start out like Gangbusters and end every season in last place. Then came 1960 and you know the rest of the story. "We had 'em all the way!"~~"Gunner" Prince.
My great uncle worked for Bethlehem Steel for over 50 years and had a lifetime Pirates pass which I put to good use. The one thing I was always amazed about steel workers is how after work they seemed to be able to drink 4 gallons of Iron City beer and never take a leak. Amazing.

 

[peach174]

I got up early,I went back to bed, and got up again a few hours later.
I just finished reading ' Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance . So I started reading some of Kant's, critique of pure reason. But when I got to page two I started floundering. It is too difficult to read straight through like a book. You need to ponder each sentence, so I gave up and started reading, 'The Tao of physics'. It is more readable, and I got through two chapters today.

Trust me. Kant is NOT fun reading, and in my opinion is best done in a study group where your eyes are less likely to cross and the ARRRRGHs of frustration are at a minimum. Certainly no good for pleasure reading. Unless you have some compelling reason to really dig that stuff out, I would recommend a good summary from a source you trust. I HAD to read Kant. I didn't enjoy it.

Kant?
I thought that Tao of physics was done by Fritjof Capra.

 

[Nosmo King]

My beloved Pittsburgh Pirates are playing at a .603 clip here at the All Star break! That's a big deal for me as I have always been more of a baseball fan than a football fan.

"But Nosmo," you might well ask "You live in Ohio just a stone's throw from Pittsburgh, you earned a degree from The Ohio State University. Football is part of your cultural DNA!"

And, of course you would be right. No human being can be born and raised here, paid attention to what goes on in this part of our great nation and not be enthralled with football from Pee Wee leagues to the NFL. But baseball has a special nook in my heart.

That's the way I felt in the dog says of August 1979. The Pirates were rolling then too. Willie Stargell lead the team that adopted the song "We are Family" all the way to the World Series.

I was working in the steel mill in neighboring Midland, Pennsylvania on my way to my senior year at OSU. I worked in a section of the mill that made agricultural discs. You've probably seen them. The array of dome shaped discs farmers drag behind a tractor to cultivate their fields. Some of them are notched like gears, some of them are smooth, but the all have razor sharp edges to penetrate the direst soil and create furrows for planting.

These discs are, or I should say 'were' made practically by hand. The process begins with a coil of steel. You may have seen coils of steel on flatbed trucks as they are hauled from factory to factory. A coil stands about four and a half feet high and just about as wide. As the coils are formed from a single ingot, a lot of heat is used just to stretch them out and flatten them down to the desired thickness. Once they are finished, a huge overhead crane lifts them from the end of the line. The coils are still red hot and look for all the world like a giant car cigarette lighter. Some mill workers would put their lunch of a TV dinner (still packaged on an aluminum tray in those pre-microwave oven days) into the center of the hot coil and in five minutes time, the dinner was ready to eat.

So the coil was left to cool before it was turned into agricultural discs. Again, a huge overhead crane would deposit a coil at the head of the disc making line. The steel band that kept the coil from springing open was cut with bolt cutters. That's pretty damn scary right there! The end of the coil was then threaded into the machinery and the first step in the process began. The steel passed below a gigantic die press which stamped out flat discs with the regularity of a heart beat. BOOM, BOOM ,BOOM, BOOM!

The first human to be subject to serious injury was the guy who had to make sure the die was cutting a full circle. I want you to try a little experiment. If you have access to an adding machine, imagine the paper tape as a coil of steel. Now, take about a foot of the paper tape out and cut 1.5 inch circles in it as closely as you possible can. See all that scrap? Imagine it as steel. And imagine those sharp edges moving along on both sides of your body. They threaten to slice you in half at every movement.

Our man at the head of that line, not only is he surrounded by the scraps of steel after a circle has been punched out of it, but he also has to feed those circles onto a series of steel rollers that takes the circular cut steel discs into a furnace. They emerge from the furnace white hot. Literally white hot. That's where the second and third humans working in this industrial hell are stationed. The first of the two has to take a white hot (have I mentioned the steel is now white hot?) and place the disc upon a massive die that is dome shaped. Once the disc is balanced there, he nods his head. Shouting or any other verbal cue is useless due to the din of the machines.

Upon seeing the nod, the second of the pair steps on a foot pedal that releases the press. Now, this press is about the size of a modest two bedroom Cape Cod cottage. It falls with a thud that could upset any earthquake detectors within 50 miles. This forms the recognizable dome shape of the agricultural disc. Then, the man on the foot pedal must peel the white hot disc from the die and place it on another array of steel rollers that takes the disc into yet another furnace.

So this massive press is placed between two gas fired furnaces which heat steel to white hot color and temperature. Maybe, just maybe the lousiest job in the whole steel mill, or so I thought.

After the discs come out of the second furnace, they slide down a metal ramp and into a bath of oil. This tempers the discs to the desired hardness. Of course, as you would expect, white hot steel piling up in a vat of oil has hazards all tis own. The oil heats up, smokes like George Burns at a cigar convention and eventually explodes in flames. That's where I came in. My job was to monitor the oil and, if it should catch fire, pull a lever that released live steam onto the vat of oil to extinguish the fire.

All day I would sit above a vat of smoking, dangerously close to catching fire, dirty, greasy oil. That makes a young man think. Think about his future and how to avoid doing this for the next 30 years. Well, that and baseball.

I grabbed one of the finished discs and, in yellow construction crayon wrote "Made in Pittsburgh Home of the 1979 World Series Champion Pittsburgh Pirates" Of course it was August and the pennant races were still going full tilt. But I was young and ever so optimistic. An optimism born of working summers in a steel mill.

Nosmo, let me tell you about pain. I started rooting for the Buccos in 1948. Growing up, I had an argument about why the man in each position was the best in the National League and the Pirates would start out like Gangbusters and end every season in last place. Then came 1960 and you know the rest of the story. "We had 'em all the way!"~~"Gunner" Prince.
My great uncle worked for Bethlehem Steel for over 50 years and had a lifetime Pirates pass which I put to good use. The one thing I was always amazed about steel workers is how after work they seemed to be able to drink 4 gallons of Iron City beer and never take a leak. Amazing.

The bars were open 24 hours a day. Steelworkers worked round the clock shifts and their thirst had to be quenched at 7:00 in the morning, 3:00 in the afternoon and 11:00 at night.

But pain? I watched Sid Bream slide across home plate in 1991 and then the Pitates languish through twenty years of losing records. In 1997, the Freak Show kept me on the edge of my seat through mid-September when they were finally, mercifully eliminated.

Pop used to score primo tickets from paper salesmen trying to close deals with his print shop. But Pop was a Yankee fan and only took me along to Forbes Field as a means of making me happy for an afternoon.

 

[Nosmo King]

My beloved Pittsburgh Pirates are playing at a .603 clip here at the All Star break! That's a big deal for me as I have always been more of a baseball fan than a football fan.

"But Nosmo," you might well ask "You live in Ohio just a stone's throw from Pittsburgh, you earned a degree from The Ohio State University. Football is part of your cultural DNA!"

And, of course you would be right. No human being can be born and raised here, paid attention to what goes on in this part of our great nation and not be enthralled with football from Pee Wee leagues to the NFL. But baseball has a special nook in my heart.

That's the way I felt in the dog says of August 1979. The Pirates were rolling then too. Willie Stargell lead the team that adopted the song "We are Family" all the way to the World Series.

I was working in the steel mill in neighboring Midland, Pennsylvania on my way to my senior year at OSU. I worked in a section of the mill that made agricultural discs. You've probably seen them. The array of dome shaped discs farmers drag behind a tractor to cultivate their fields. Some of them are notched like gears, some of them are smooth, but the all have razor sharp edges to penetrate the direst soil and create furrows for planting.

These discs are, or I should say 'were' made practically by hand. The process begins with a coil of steel. You may have seen coils of steel on flatbed trucks as they are hauled from factory to factory. A coil stands about four and a half feet high and just about as wide. As the coils are formed from a single ingot, a lot of heat is used just to stretch them out and flatten them down to the desired thickness. Once they are finished, a huge overhead crane lifts them from the end of the line. The coils are still red hot and look for all the world like a giant car cigarette lighter. Some mill workers would put their lunch of a TV dinner (still packaged on an aluminum tray in those pre-microwave oven days) into the center of the hot coil and in five minutes time, the dinner was ready to eat.

So the coil was left to cool before it was turned into agricultural discs. Again, a huge overhead crane would deposit a coil at the head of the disc making line. The steel band that kept the coil from springing open was cut with bolt cutters. That's pretty damn scary right there! The end of the coil was then threaded into the machinery and the first step in the process began. The steel passed below a gigantic die press which stamped out flat discs with the regularity of a heart beat. BOOM, BOOM ,BOOM, BOOM!

The first human to be subject to serious injury was the guy who had to make sure the die was cutting a full circle. I want you to try a little experiment. If you have access to an adding machine, imagine the paper tape as a coil of steel. Now, take about a foot of the paper tape out and cut 1.5 inch circles in it as closely as you possible can. See all that scrap? Imagine it as steel. And imagine those sharp edges moving along on both sides of your body. They threaten to slice you in half at every movement.

Our man at the head of that line, not only is he surrounded by the scraps of steel after a circle has been punched out of it, but he also has to feed those circles onto a series of steel rollers that takes the circular cut steel discs into a furnace. They emerge from the furnace white hot. Literally white hot. That's where the second and third humans working in this industrial hell are stationed. The first of the two has to take a white hot (have I mentioned the steel is now white hot?) and place the disc upon a massive die that is dome shaped. Once the disc is balanced there, he nods his head. Shouting or any other verbal cue is useless due to the din of the machines.

Upon seeing the nod, the second of the pair steps on a foot pedal that releases the press. Now, this press is about the size of a modest two bedroom Cape Cod cottage. It falls with a thud that could upset any earthquake detectors within 50 miles. This forms the recognizable dome shape of the agricultural disc. Then, the man on the foot pedal must peel the white hot disc from the die and place it on another array of steel rollers that takes the disc into yet another furnace.

So this massive press is placed between two gas fired furnaces which heat steel to white hot color and temperature. Maybe, just maybe the lousiest job in the whole steel mill, or so I thought.

After the discs come out of the second furnace, they slide down a metal ramp and into a bath of oil. This tempers the discs to the desired hardness. Of course, as you would expect, white hot steel piling up in a vat of oil has hazards all tis own. The oil heats up, smokes like George Burns at a cigar convention and eventually explodes in flames. That's where I came in. My job was to monitor the oil and, if it should catch fire, pull a lever that released live steam onto the vat of oil to extinguish the fire.

All day I would sit above a vat of smoking, dangerously close to catching fire, dirty, greasy oil. That makes a young man think. Think about his future and how to avoid doing this for the next 30 years. Well, that and baseball.

I grabbed one of the finished discs and, in yellow construction crayon wrote "Made in Pittsburgh Home of the 1979 World Series Champion Pittsburgh Pirates" Of course it was August and the pennant races were still going full tilt. But I was young and ever so optimistic. An optimism born of working summers in a steel mill.

Isn't it mdk who is from Pittsburg? (I'm getting so forgetful in my older age.)

But anyway, love your Coffee Shop blogs Nosmo. But I just saw this photo recently, and had to post it in response:

Thanks, Foxy! We used to have what was called the "June Swoon". Two or three weeks prior to the All Star break, the Buccos looked like the Murderer's Row of the 1927 Yankees and the whole Tri-State area would think that this is the year.

But, come mid July and the Pirates infield would look like a little league team and the outfield would be busy running into one another in pursuit of a fly ball.

By the way, don't forget the "H" in Pittsburgh!

 

[gallantwarrior]

I just had an awkward telephone conversation with my sister. She is a globe trotter and I worry about something happening to her in far away places, and I realized I had no idea what to do if something did happen to her. So I asked her for information about who to call and she gave me a list of phone numbers of her closest friends, and
the name and number of the executor of her will. Now I will know what to do.
It was a difficult conversation, but one I needed to have in case something does happen to her.

Tough conversation that most people don't have...and regret only when it's too late.

 

[gallantwarrior]

Foxfyre, I am going to go with you have type of pinched nerve or it is enflamed. Some type of stronger anti-inflammatory would most likely do you a lot of good.

Disclaimer: I am only a doctor or a cat on message boards.

Chiropractors work wonders with pinched nerves, I would marry mine if that were possible...oh, wait...it is now, isn't it?

 

[gallantwarrior]

Up with the lark again. (or in my case, the seagulls) I have not been able to sleep for over an hour and it is still only just gone 7AM. The seagulls are a problem here as they open the rubbish bags and throw the contents all over the street. The council have given us strong bags they cannot tear open but the seagulls seem to have mastered how to pull open the Velcro sealer and climb inside the bags. Oh well, I don't begrudge them a few crusts even if I have to clean up the mess.

Seagulls? Have you tried bears instead?

 

[gallantwarrior]

News just in...they have charged two people with starting the fire that destroyed 55 homes and 44 other structures up here near my place. They were burning brush without a permit, without properly clearing the area first, and then left the fire unattended. They are liable for up to twice the cost of fighting the fire, which initial estimates count at $8 million dollars.

 

[gallantwarrior]

Gotta love google earth!
There is an old Navy base just south of my property. It was a hopping place, training naval aviators during WW II and again, Korea. Now, the trainees drive over from Pensacola and 4 T-6A's practice touch and go landings 8 hours a day, 5 days a week.

The first photo is circa 1943, the second is the same area but current from Google Earth.View attachment 44482

View attachment 44483

Way cool! There are a couple of those T-6's owned and operated here. You can always tell when someone's running one, too...what a sound-of-power!!