John Callan wrote:

> We'll there's not much point in grading the others...whatcha gonna do with
> them?  Are the large ones any more useful than the mediums?  As my good friend
> Galen Brown says...and I don't think he originated it, ..."parts is parts".

Well, I don't rightly know, John. I guess it has to do with how you clean things
up at the end of the class. Mulch is mulch. But I do remember my grandfather
telling me about the young engineer (my earliest young engineer story) at the CC
camp that failed the course on oak stump irradication at Millard Filmore State
Park in Moravia, NY. I also remember my stepfather telling me that you should act
in all ways as if something was going to blow up without notice. Which came in
handy one day when a derelict at the Greyhound station in Detroit wanted me to
give him a tip for warning me that the toilet was going to blow up... which it did
not on that visit. I guess I was raised to suspect toilets and bombadiers both.

My modest adventures with explosives were inside a building and had to do with
excavating a large hole in bedrock. I got to drill, set, pack, and blast. We had
this heavy net woven of steel cables that we would set over the field with a front
loader and then go into the next room over and let her go. The net usually was all
jumbled up afterwards. We then proceeded to go at the larger chunks with sledge
hammers. I learned a lot about busting stone at this job and did not regret moving
up to ditch digging in frozen ground. I think I graduated.
--
][<en Follett
SOS Gab & Eti -- http://www.geocities.com/~orgrease
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