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As I was leaving my uncle's driveway after the second of three Thanksgiving dinners I ate this year, a shadow moved into the headlights that I realized was a dark-clad woman jumping in front of my car, her hands extended imploring me to stop. Alarmed, we rolled down the windows to find out what was wrong. She shouted to us, "SLOW DOWN!" as if for the third or fourth time, then waddled back toward the house that shared a driveway with my uncle's and vanished as mysteriously as she had appeared.

Now I will admit, I knew that this was a gravel driveway, "Not a Freeway" as the sign on her fence pointed out, and high speeds damage such surfaces. I had also noticed that although its straightness provided a clear sight-line, my car's width occupied nearly half of it, leaving scant room to dodge a child or pet that might be playing on the gravel at 10 PM on a November night. Knowing this, I can't imagine what could have possessed me to go rocketing down that driveway at a ludicrous 8-½ MPH, but fortunately that woman had been keeping watch by her door, ready to throw herself bodily in front of my car to prevent the inevitable safe passage that was about to occur.

Compared to that near tragedy, everything else seems mundane. Yesterday while I was working on the steamboat, my wrench slipped off as I was torquing a bolt on a heat exchanger. I nearly took out the 87 year old volunteer behind me as I tumbled backwards over a bench, but ended up only spilling his coffee.

On the bike ride home, I noticed some activity around the pump station for the Big Pipe sewer project. Sooner than I expected, they were pulling the mammoth 25 foot diameter tunnel boring machine "Rosie" out of the terminal shaft to barge four miles back to it's starting point near OMSI. From there it has 2 more miles of boring to do in the opposite direction. I couldn't pass up a once-in-a-lifetime chance to see a tunnel boring machine up close, so I rode on over and spent a couple hours in the cold watching them maneuver the 530 ton cutter head section onto an equally impressive, self-propelled flatbed with 22 hydraulically-leveled, steerable wheel bogeys (and 88 tires!).

PGE said they'd call me this week if I made it to the second round interviews. Annoyingly, they also said they wouldn't call if I didn't.