Below are the 5 most recent journal entries recorded in Dick Williams' LiveJournal:

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Thursday, April 5th, 2012
5:53 pm	Called back - knew they couldn't live without me Took 'em four days to realize they couldn't live without their temps - got a call this afternoon from my temp agency recruiter asking if I could return to the never precisely named distribution center north of Liberty and just off of Missouri 33. Will return for a three week engagement April 23rd to May 11th - along with several other temps who've worked there in the past. They need stock handlers with prior experience to free up their regulars for some special project - usually moving one part of their bins and stock to another location. In this case it must be a lot of stuff that needs to be moved and I'll surmise the work conditions will be somewhat unsettled. Glad I left with good feelings and relations - always the best way to part but not always the way it happens. I'll get my yellow box cutter back for 3 weeks. And my pants that are torn and ripped from snagging on the conveyors will get some more rips and tears. Did a driver shuttle today - Belton to the airline that you didn't know has scheduled service in and out of KCI - Seaport Airlines. Seaport has four flights in and four flights out of KCI daily - and you can get to Harrison, AR, Memphis, TN and Salina, KS on Seaport. My customer was flying to Salina to pick up a truck that he'd then take to Orlando. Where's their terminal at KCI? Well you better know in advance because there is no signage that you'll find for Seaport. Don't go to Terminal A, B or C. Not even close. They operate out of a small building on Mexico City Avenue just south of the large Fed Ex hanger/warehouse - it's signed for Signature Flight Support which is the Fixed Base Operator or FBO serving General Aviation at KCI. Signature has a waiting lounge in their terminal and Seaport has a counter inside Signature. They fly the Pilatus PC-12 aircraft and that's going to be unlike any plane you've flown in your airline life. A single engine, turbine powered, big prop, pressurized plane with single seats either side of the center aisle. Crew of two, pilot and first officer, the PC-12 seats 9 and cruises at 280 knots with service ceiling of 30,000 feet. Range is an impressive 1560 nautical with restricted load but darned good stats for a single in commercial service. Oh yeah, stall speed of only 64 knots and a take off roll of only 2400 feet - short field capable. In fact the Pilatus Porter, also a single engine turbo-prop, was used in the Vietnam era for flights in and out of the Laotian mountain top airfields know as Lima sites so there's long family history of short field operations. Swiss built - rugged- it's advertised as a multi-use aircraft and even billed as a recreational aircraft but that's pretty high priced recreation. Mitt Romney and Donald Trump style. Price new or used is between 2 and 3 million. Used ones fetch 100% of their original value. Not bad. Anyway just reading the website gives me the itch to take Seaport out to Salina and Greyhound back - will see how the two skeds match up . $80 out and about $50 back I think - $6 cab ride on the Salina end of thing so for $140 or so it'd give some braggin' rights about flying Seaport and a very neat turbo-prop. Wish I had a real "need" instead of just an itch. But I fear this one is pure "want" and no "need" which makes it a harder sell - even to self. 0 Web checks for all the above: Seaport Airlines: http://www.seaportair.com/ Signature Flight Support - KCI: https://www.signatureflight.com/Locations/Pages/fbo.aspx?Loc=MCI Pilatus PC-12 aircraft: http://www.pilatus-aircraft.com/#10 scroll down for a video tour of the aircraft and stats Flying magazine review of the PC-12: http://www.flyingmag.com/pilot-reports/turboprops/pilatus-pc-12-ng-next-big-thing This is interesting - the how and why of Seaport flies to Salina: http://www.seaportair.com/docs/pr/slnfourmore.pdf The gist of it - a four year, 1.5 million dollar, subsidy under the Essential Air Services program. Some consider EAS a prime example of pork barrel politics - others consider it life blood for the communities served. I'm gonna say pork barrel - Greyhound out of KC serves Salina pretty decently -two buses a day on the I-70 route to Denver - Salina is not exactly cut off from the outside world. No rush on my getting there - the service is firm for the four year term of the EAS subsidy. KCI can't say that for service to ATL or any other city in the fickle air market. Dick Williams MKC (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, April 4th, 2012
11:16 pm	What's Next - again? Done at Halmark - last Friday ended a successful three month run and with a short acknowledgement at the nightly startup meeting the sup thanked "The Adeccos" - sounds like a singing group from the 60s - and the rest of the crew gave a round of applause. I worked Aisles 22, 23 and 24 for the last time and turned in my box cutter and audit stamp. I'll miss that box cutter - after you've worn a box cutter on your belt for three months you get pretty used to it. No lie - I'd reach down on weekends to see if it was there and when getting into the Saturn it feels odd not having to route the seat belt around the holster I used for my box cutter and black magic marker. Real he-man tools - a box cutter and a magic marker. I thought I did pretty good - caught a couple of compliments from the regulars and this was touching and most unexpected - a tip. One of my co-workers came up to me a week before the gig ended, handed me five bucks, thanked me and said "They don't pay you guys nearly enough". A first - a temp being tipped by another employee but it was heartfelt and I accepted it and thanked him for it. Used the tip for a tilapia dinner one night at the small cafeteria in the plant. Normally I carried lunch in my cooler but I ate in the cafeteria a few times and it was pretty good - open for all three shifts and manned by dual use staff that also worked the plant floor in other jobs when the cafeteria was closed. Big task now - keeping the weight off that I dropped while doing stock work - very much harder than losing it is  keeping it off once the nightly physical activity ends. I had experience with that in October and November when I was off before resuming work in mid December. Gonna try . Need to re-up my membership at the Platte County "Y" - we seniors get free short term membership that I think can be renewed; a benefit from a county tax directed toward Seniors . Even so it'll be hard to duplicate the six hour nightly workout of a stock handler. I did get invited to repeat the Educational Testing Service temp work I did last summer. We assist the college professors in town to grade the essay sections of the Advanced Placement exams . That will be in June and I can do two sessions vs the one I did in 2011. That was a fun assignment and I'll be in better shape for it this year. Even though handling essay files doesn't sound very physical it can be for the unfit. Lots of jumping up and hustling to provide the essay "readers" a new folder of essays then moving boxes of exam folders from floor to table - it kept me hopping last year. That was the job with the long days and a continuous stretch of 10 days so lots of overtime. And a free lunch and snacks on break. I had a use or lose airline voucher that would die on me in a couple of weeks so used it for a one-way flight to Chicago on March 24th. I was in the city less than 24 hours but made the most of it with an afternoon at the Art Institute, a movie and an overnight stay in the Chicago Hostel. That was my regular "bed" in the trucking life and I enjoyed the brief return to the feel of that work - chances now and then to spend time in an interesting city and sample the local sights. Return to KC was on Amtrak Sunday. I booked too late to get the Chief and its zippy seven hour sked CHI-MKC so ended up on the two train combo - CHI-STL on what Amtrak terms Lincoln Service then STL-MKC on the afternoon River Runner. Interesting that on both trains my seatmates were Oriental exchange students. First a girl from PRC attending college in STL and the Missouri leg seatmate was "Jang" a pleasant young guy from South Korea enrolled at Warrensburg. Fact learned - in Korea Kia is pronounced key-AH - second syllable emphasis. We do more key-ah - equal emphasis. Big deal but who knew? I asked Jang how he ended up in Warrensburg, MO and he's here to improve his English and had heard that the Midwest was recommended as a better place to do that. He picked well - Warrensburg is a small Midwest college town for sure. Not sure why the big crowd on the River Runner. Ridership has been getting better and better over the years I've ridden the cross state train but a sold out train was very unusual for a non-holiday and non-Oktoberfest weekend. Good to see and I'll give some strokes to the Missouri legislature for funding the River Runners. Mostly state funded thru MODOT which is much more rail-aware now than in the past. Big confab here in KC this Friday concerning passenger rail with he head of the Federal Railroad Administration speaking. Doing a few driver shuttle runs around town - not many - a few a month but sort of fun talking to guys still doing the work I left behind and hearing their war stories of problems sot of affirms my decision to leave that behind last May. No likely I'll return to it. I am doing a few groundwater monitoring sessions with daughter Kate, the geologist. I took a three day class in groundwater monitoring - sampling - last October and even though I haven't pursued it very hard I've still got a finger in and have helped Kate do several wells here in the area. Would cost a couple of thou to get some equipment together to do it on a contract basis and I need a vehicle better suited for it than anything we have in the stable so I haven't made a firm decision to get in but also haven't abandoned the idea. Would prefer to be somebody's "on-call" technician rather than set up the tax accounts and so forth to do it on a true self-employed, head of company basis. Easier to be a contractor and just get a 1099 at the end of the year as i did in trucking work. Clean and simple. Not sure how much work there would be and that's ok - not looking for full time anything - but would like enough to keep current in procedures and provide some meaningful income when I did a day's work. Pending. Charity walk coming up Saturday April 21st, 2012 for EarthDay and it's called EarthWalk . See they save resources by eliminating the space between Earth and Walk so it's EarthWalk. Benefit for Bridging the Gap and I've already coerced enough family into contributing that I've reached the $100 fundraising threshold for a free shirt. Brad Moore will be walking the walk with me. Brad was in SM South High School in 1982 and worked for us when Gay and I owned and operated the Charlie Chan Restaurant in Metcalf South Shopping Center. Talk about improbable ventures! Anyway Brad found me a few weeks ago and we've had fun trading emails about the Charlie Chan era. Brad - all grown up now and an architect in Johnson County - formed a Facebook group for our former crew members and rounded up quite a few of them so that's been a lot of fun. If you're a Facebook person and want to look in on the chatter that's at: https://www.facebook.com/groups/257291481025807/ . The group is "open" meaning it's visible to all. For info on EarthWalk visit http://www.firstgiving.com/earthwalkkc/earthwalk-2012 . At the moment I'm easy to spot on the Donation page. When you scroll down that page I'm in third place as fundraiser and my posse the "Chan Crew" is also in third in the team category. You can tell this is not a major event as all individual amounts and the total raised is modest. But it's a good organization and cause. Come join me if you'd like a pleasant 5K walk along Brush Creek in the Plaza area Saturday April 21st. Last year it was cold and windy - gonna be better this year. Images:  "Boats on the Beach at Etretat"by Claude Monet 1885 and lower right - The  Charlie Chan Restaurant 1982 - "Mrs. Chan" - Gay Williams over at the fryer.   Far cry from the 40 ton trucks you used to see here. Happy Trails from the sidelines of life Dick Williams Kansas City MO (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Sunday, February 26th, 2012
12:10 am	Marching into March Another offer to continue and another "yes". My current time at the big plant was to end February 29th, 2012 but I was offered the opportunity to stay thru March and accepted. Nothing else in particular going on and the weekly deposit is pleasant so instead of one week it's back to five weeks to go. Actually slow the past two weeks - post Easter and not yet moving Mother's Day so the shipping and stocking season precedes the actual season by about six weeks. It's sort of funny - to me Easter is over with and for the rest of the world it's still a month away. And i'm a temp! What would I be like if I were a lifer. I mostly enjoy the work, the physicality of it and the feeling of doing something. Having worked with words and highly abbreviated words and jargon all my working career in the NWS my two later gigs in trucking and now factory work have a heft and feel to them that seems more tangible -the best would be actually building something. My dad built roads and bridges and I envy him the permanance of his work. I'm sure some of the culverts and right of way he worked on in the 1930s is still in use - if not the actual pavement the alignment of the road and the cuts and fills that make up road building. I'd like that but most of us are destined nowadays to create ideas and word pictures and "transmissions" - ephemeral stuff that lasts about six hours in the case of weather products or maybe a day in the case of news articles or a tad longer - a few days if lucky in the unpaid world of blogs and journals. Great sky show tonight - hope you saw it. The moon, Venus and Jupiter in conjunction forming a showy acute triangle in the evening twilight that continued for another couple of hours into the nght. I am basically a non-believer - that's evolved over many years and I'm slightly apologetic for it - don't advertise it and and am not an advocate for it but I am in wonder of the natural world. In total awe and disbelief. The easy route would be to see it as divinely created - that's so much easier route to rocks and lichens and sycamores and goats and man. Infinitely easier to wave a finger and "create" it all so the true awe inspiring route to this universe and our life-filled planet is the harder, slower route of physics at work - natural processes and time. There's the true miracle. i get hung up on some things and devote hours of idle time to imponderables and themes that have no resolution. One current fav is the idea of the multiverse - multiple universes - not just galaxies but a multitude of universes and true infinity. Infinity is really big - I get hung up on the infinite and the minuscule at the same time. One outcome of infinite universes is duplication of you and of me and of everything with each fork in each road having different outcomes in a different world. If I drop a crumb and it falls slightly to the left of the grout line on a tile floor there is without doubt another world - identical in every way except that idential person- that "me" dropped a crumb and it fell to the other side of an identical grout line. Multiply that silly opportunity for different outcomes by every crumb, every grout line and every "me" and you can see only infinity can handle it. It's a curse when one starts wondering about such things - truly a curse however that denotes someone bestowing a curse and has religious overtones so it's not a curse - it's a very bad self-inflicted mental issue. Lord let there be another "me" without such a defect. Oops, there i go again. Praying or beseeching orcalling out to a higher power. Hard habit to break. New end date at the Distribution Center - March 31st, 2012. Five week countdown underway and it's possible I stay another week or two - if asked - to assist with the end of the Mother's Day rush. It is a compliment to be asked to extend or return and I have seen over my four months that many temps are not automatically extended or allowed to return. Temps don't get any routine feedback from the sup - just being kept in place is the feedback. If you're still there and get extended you're doing ok. Sky Show again Sunday with the moon, Venus and Jupiter in conjunction - then the moon leaves the scene but Jupiter and Venus will draw nearer and nearer one another for another three weeks so the slow pas de deux continues through March. What A Wonderful World. Take every fork in every road. Confuse and confound the multiverses you inhabit. rjw/mkc (Comment on this)
Sunday, February 5th, 2012
12:20 am	2012 Rolls in and Life Rolls On Yes, a new journal entry - a rarity by now. Now nine months post-driveaway and living ok without it. The thought returns sometimes about easier money and frankly a lot less work than warehouse work but then I recall the reasons for leaving and and thoughts of renewing my Medical and returning to the road subside. I'm still temping and in fact back with Halmark in the same role I had in Aug/Sep 2011 - stock handler in the big distribution center just off I-35 and just north of Liberty, MO.  I was asked if I'd return to Halmark in mid December to do Zone Maintenance work - janitorial within the areas of the center where orders are filled and I agreed to do a short two week stint in December leading up to their December break. Halmark shuts down their operation for the week between Christmas and New Years so that was short and I agreed. Training for ZM, Zone Maintenance, takes about 2 hours versus 3 weeks of working in a training mode for Stock Handler although the former is a bit too short and the latter about a week too long. Basically we pick up discarded cardboard and keep the work areas free of empty boxes. The selectors work at a very fast pace - too fast for me to envy any part of their job - and when they empty a box or cardboard "tray" of cards they simply toss it in their work aisle. The ZM crew collects those, flattens them and some are recycled for use in shipping orders out or they're baled and recycled. ZM also sweeps and pulls trash but no bathrooms, sinks or break rooms. It's janitorial work and like everything in the plant done at a pretty fast pace. There are no easy jobs in the Distribution Center on the plant floor. Few jobs even have a chair associated with them - you work walking or standing and the only time off your feet is during breaks and lunch. For someone accustomed to working seated for the past 43 year while in the NWS or doing driveaway the standing and walking was a new world. The ZM crew attends the same start up meeting that the Stock Handlers attend and both were under the same sup and Group Leader at that time, mid December.  After 3 of my scheduled 10 shifts in ZM I was noticed by the Group Leader who summarily shifted me back to my former role as Stock Handler for the duration of my two weeks. That effected a $2 pay raise per hour and back to my former work of moving cartons of cards from a conveyor line to rows of sloping racks or if the rack system was full for that particular card number the unopened carton was placed on the floor as "surplus" and would be used later to fill the bins.  It was familiar work from Aug/Sep and even with 3 months away from the work I was back in the routine of it immediately. I was assigned to a busy aisle and had no time to ease back into the work - it was all out rush and keep the cartons moving all night that first night back in stock work.   Before the Christmas break my Adecco contact asked if I'd like to work into the new year as stock handler and I agreed but asked to cap it at 2 months, Jan and Fe, b so as to keep my options open. And frankly, very frankly, at my age two months of working 40 hours a week is enough so here at the 4th of Feb I'm about half way through that two month commitment.  There are three of us from Adecco working in stock and we are all sked thru end of Feb.  Mother's Day is a major card giving occasion so we all 3 anticipate being asked to stay on beyond Feb 29th. Still mostly enjoy the work and I'm still on the best possible shift, 2nd shift from 1500 till 2330. Gives me morning and early afternoon for mom-care and things I need to do. I'm  home by midnight and up around 7 or 8 usually. Elmer, our Chihuahua like the routine also since he gets up to greet me when I get home at midnight and he snacks while I snack and we play tugger with one of his toys at the top of the stairs for about five minutes. We both look forward to the nightly rituals.  We're in a winter without winter here in KC this year. We have not yet had an inch of snow  - about 3/4 inch a month ago and rain this weekend but no true snow cover. Very unusual and the longer our snow-less winter goes on the more unusual it becomes. Drove to work with the car windows down a couple of days last week - it's colder now but basically we've not had winter weather this year. What's next after this stint? Well it's possible I'll take a couple of extra weeks if offered  - or maybe not. I don't want to work three months straight . The work is still pretty physical and tiring even though it's beneficial with regard to weight, blood pressure, pulse rate - all the things that are easy to measure. I could pass a DOT physical now I'm sure but no reason to unless the slight, slight itch to return to the escapist, gypsy life of driveaway trucking elevates to an all out urge or even "need". Then we'll renew the Medical Card. Otherwise it'd be a waste of $42 and I can only get a one year card since I'm still on HCTZ - diuretic for BP.  Even though I'm below 140/90 I'm not far below it and the combo of meds and activity is needed to keep it where it is - around 130/80.  That's Dick's medical report for now and the update on the World of Work Tour.  The Tour aspect has sort of stalled since I'll soon complete four months at the same job - spread over a seven month period.   rjw/mkc   Current Mood: calm (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Friday, September 16th, 2011
11:07 am	Tour Extended Friday 9-16-2011 - My tour at Halmark has been extended twice. The original assignment was to end August 31st - they extended that to Sep 16th and just yesterday i was asked to extend till the end of September which I agreed to do.  I was off for one week - just after Labor Day in order to 1) work on 2010 taxes and 2) take a 4 day long weekend trip to Atlanta to visit daughter Alicia and her two kids.   So I'm now at the end of the first extension and will begin my  new final two weeks Monday. I'm still on 2nd shift - 1500 till 2330 Mon to Fri and the pace varies night to night. Tuesday was light, Wed and Thurs heavy loads and glad to exit the plant floor at 2330 and be headed home. Really weary  last couple of nights.  Still enjoy the work - it's physical - it's different from anything I've done -the money is better than most temp jobs and the activity level is good for everything - knee, blood pressure, weight. All have benefited from it and my job will be to try to maintain the benefits when the work ends.  I know that won't be easy - especially with respect to the weight loss which is  now about 15 pounds.  I lost some ground during the week off and that'll likely be the case in October.  Dick Williams MKC later - Friday night is unique in that things typically wind down and the stock handlers get about an hour with no cartons but this Friday something went haywire in the warehouse and a bunch of stuff came down the line very late - in my case too late to get it all processed before the end of the shift. First time in my six weeks that I haven't gotten my lines cleared  - I had two aisles and both were moderately busy  all night with around 400 cartons total to work. Didn't like to see the final 18 cartons remaining on the line but some other lines had more and it would be explained to first shift Monday as to why work was left over. First shift still won't like it since each shift is expected to get its work done - can't always happen when there are mechanical problems on the preceding shift.   (1 Comment |Comment on this)