It’s been a while since I posted something, blogged? As you might assume there’s not normally a lot of real interest going on in a plow driver’s life when it doesn’t snow.
So, what’s changed you ask? Mt. St. Augustine I inswer. If you’ve been paying attention to how things get named you’ll recognize the St. part of the name and I hope, not wonder why they named a mountain after somebody’s street. In short, Augustine is a volcano and it’s decided to make itself some new realestate as it’s not a very tall mountain. . . Yet.
Archive for the 'Frosty's Blog' Category
Yeah, it’s me again. Told YA!
I kind of like this shot so like all big time journalists I think I’ll use it with my byline.
I’m back and you’d better just get used to it. You see I’ve grown up
working metal. I don’t remember the first time I was exposed to serious
metal working and I remember some pretty early things around 3 yrs or
so.
Father was a metal spinner name of George Frost. I don’t know when he
got involved in metal spinning but I have an old union card of his with
a starting date in 1933. I suspect he took up the trade as a way out of
the depression.
This pic is Dad spinning hot. Sherrie is holding torch, one of the jobs
I did for years. We spun a lot of exotic alloys, including jet and
rocket engine alloys. Many exotics can’t be worked at all without
applying heat. I don’t know what alloy is being spun in the pic except
to say it’s a bear to spin. (more…)
I’m back after a rather full week of cleaning sub-zero ice cake from alaska’s highways and biways in the Anchorage area. I won’t get into all the ins and outs of cutting cake, cleaning highway ramps, overpasses and such except to say running a grader in these conditions is tiring.
Just after thanksgiving it snowed a good 8-10" at just the right temp for traffic to pack it into cake immediately. Then the temp dropped to bare single digit highs below zero (f) lowsl. Ice cake at this temp has many qualities in common with 4140 Kryptonite, it tends to break heavy equipment sent to cut it rather than the other way around.
Fortunately there were no real adventures this week, a few ditch divers and another luminaire taken out by somebody who doesn’t think ice fog is a reason to drive less than 80 mph.
The word processing properties of the ArtMetal Radio site seem to be working more smoothly now. I don’t know if QuiQue fine tuned it or my server is running faster bandwidth-wise. Don’t really care, it’s working nicely so I’m not sitting here waiting for the next word to slowly type itself ou for some timet after I input it.
So, I’m a happy guy.
Hope the pic came out. It’s been almost a week since QuiQue told me how to insert one so there’s no telling if I got it right. (more…)
