Almost routine stuff at work, you know, run up the road to meet with a contractor to get a price on a project I already knew was “iffy” when I met with him. Having been in his shoes in my previous job, I told him up front, and he told me what I’d said many times myself: “That’s what we have to do. I’ll give you the numbers whether we need them or not.”

By the time I got to work the next day, the plan had changed to exactly what I’d figured, and I got to call the contractor up and give him a different scope of work, and get yet another price.

Then there’s the “five year plan” wherein I dream about doing things for my stations for the next five years, tallying up a couple of million dollars, or a bit less, in upgrades and replacements of fifty year old equipment. I make up a neat little spreadsheet with my dreams and forward it to my boss so he can add it to the division plan. Dreaming is good.

And there are technical issues, as in the utility company dumped one of my stations on its butt, and I knew before I called the utility company engineer that there was a very good chance they didn’t have a concrete finding as to the cause. We had a pleasant conversation. I typed up a explanatory email and forwarded it to the interested parties.

I drew up a circuit for another station to install, letting them swap their emergency lighting automatically between the station’s battery bank (sixty cells the size of five-gallon buckets) and the normal source from the utility company. We can’t just leave the emergency lights running on the battery because the battery bank, even though it is nominally 125 volts, actually runs a bit over 132 or 133 volts on the charger and the light bulbs are rated for 130 volts, so they don’t last long. The station guys are changing a lot of emergency light bulbs. We’re trying to fix that.

And then next week I get to spend the week in northeast Louisiana with a bunch of other “subject matter experts” doing an audit of one of our compressor stations. I have a stack of over a hundred audit items I’ll have to verify. No, it’s not hard work. The problem is that this station in not in the middle of nowhere, you pass the middle of nowhere and keep going a few miles. And I get to spend a few nights in yet another motel room.

My cats will miss me while I’m gone.