Food For Thought

I hate to use such an old cliched title like that but it does fit. I know a lot of you garden, growing anything from just a little to most of your own food so I thought I'd give you a little more incentive to grow more or be very glad you grow what you do. See those four layers of orange racks towards the back there with all those boxes and pallets of stuff stacked on them? If you buy much from a grocery store, that is your food. And this building is just one of it's many stops on it's way to you. This is the distribution center that I have been working on since April. We are adding two separate warehouses which, I believe but don't hold me to it, will consist of around 500,000 square feet. This is the dry storage; the freezer and cooler areas are about done. Now, despite the horrible muddy conditions you see, the areas where the food actually is stays pretty clean. We had installed some partition walls to cover the food from the elements before the roof was on but they are approaching time to pour the floors here so we took the walls down. I have never seen any rats here but we have found many snakes.

These are the tilt up panels that I foisted upon ya'll so much earlier in the year. After we stand the panels up the steel workers come in and raise the steel inside, working to our panels. Every once in a while they will put the steel up first but it is usually done this way, in my experience anyway.

You see two rows of horizontal steel here, between the columns and little dots all along the top of those beams? those little dots are 8"x 8" steel plates embedded in the panels and they weld the structural steel to those embeds. This holds the panels to the building. The embeds have little "legs" protruding into the concrete so they won't pull out.
Although the crew here is great, the conditions suck! Mud everywhere and it's cold. I have been hoping and praying something would come up to get me sent to another job; any job. It's going to be 15 degrees here Friday! That's just nuts. Oh God, why couldn't I get sent somewhere else! So, today while I was rolling around in this 5' deep ditch, trying to wrestle 3' fittings onto 16" diameter Schedule 40 PVC pipe (because our company thinks for some reason we are now plumbers) the boss comes out and tells me I'm being sent back to Red Diamond tomorrow! Glory, Hallelujah! Yes! Yes! A heated building, running silly punch list! That art degree paid off! WoooHooo!