Seattle Skyline

With the photo for this post, I’m reaching back towards a sunnier, happier day. This photograph was taken last September, near the end of a summer long drought in Seattle. It was a brilliantly sunny and warm day. Was this week in Saint Louis sunny and warm too? Not so much.

It has been grey all week-long. Occasionally, the unrelenting grey was punctuated with falling precipitation, running the gambit in form. It has been a long dull week, with only a couple of events of note to report. The first one, was a good one, I received my bonus. Our bonuses are calculated as a function of our base pay, influenced by how well the company did last year. The company had a very good year lat year. The current hub-bub about the 787 will be reckoned with next February. So, consequently bonuses were very good too. Unfortunately for me, I had already effectively flushed my money down the toilet last fall, when I had a new sewer line put in. The money did a touch-and-go today in my bank account.

The other notable event for this week is the sequester. This event has no promise of goodness, but so far, it doesn’t look like it will have any immediate negative effects. We are still hiring. My boss was in Seattle today, to greet a new employee on his first day. Also, in his stead, one of my other co-workers interviewed another prospect.

The fact that both events occurred on a Friday is an artifact of our company’s culture. We are a company composed of and ruled by engineers. But it is the bean counters, the accountants, who really rule the roost. Our work week begins on a Friday and ends on a Thursday, all so the bean counters can balance the week’s books, without having to work Saturdays. Personally, I kind of like this arrangement. It makes Thursday feel like a faux end of the work week, speeding the arrival of the approaching weekend.

I was wondering how I would wrap up this post, when Anne called out a relevent factoid. In 1900 engineers reversed the flow of the Chicago River.  Prior to its reversal, hundreds of people were dying in the City of Broad Shoulders each year. At that time, sewage from the Chicago River was flowing into Lake Michigan and contaminating the city’s drinking water. The Chicago Ship and Sanitary Canal preserved the city’s water and provided a route from the Great Lakes to the Mississippi River basin. The relevance of this factoid comes with our planned trip to the Windy City. Of course there is just one little downside to this engineering feat, Chicago’s waste is now sent south to us in Saint Louis.