Yes, our property is quite dry, but remember, Noah lived in the desert too.
Where it almost never rained, and people thought he was crazy for building a boat. (The size of a soccer field.)
There are at least five reservoirs where I can take my boat fishing with in a 1 Hour drive. At 14’ it’s easy to tow.
Since I have been an engineer our company was called on to inspect structures after major earthquakes three times in about 25 years. (Remind me to tell you about condemning the 4-story bordello in San Francisco sometime…)
Now, I am 60 miles from the major earthquake zone. But we are only about 300 feet above mean sea level, on the eastern edge of a huge valley.
It’s actually about sea level out in the middle of the valley, and there is a big swamp. It used to be a lake, until they built dams and made reservoirs in the mountains to the east of me 100 years ago.
If California ever has that apocalyptic earthquake the San Joaquin Valley is possibly going to become an inland sea once again (as it was for thousands of years before the last Ice Age.)
With all the glaciers and ice caps melting, I feel like boat building will become of great interest in the future.
So, I started out fixing cars in the summers, while I went to a state university. I studied industrial technology, mechanical and manufacturing engineering, and computer programming.
I was hired before graduation, and went to work for a big lumber company that sold thousands of trusses. They pre-fabricated framing for a good deal of the town I live in, and a part of the larger one next-door to me (where they were located.) I detailed the walls and trusses. (Later I would do the same thing for an aluminum company for almost 5 years.)
The lumber co had a primitive CNC system and I learned how to program it. I worked for other companies over the years, and I also learned to program other machines like gang-torch cutters, tubing benders, sheet metal presses, and self changing punch presses.
Eventually, I went to work for a structural engineering company 22 years, where we designed a lot of public buildings. Back in the early Pentium days I became their computer guru and ended up building their whole computer network up bit by bit.
I was in charge of all of the computer drafting operations, and if someone needed a serious graphic problem solved, they came to me.
The Buchanan Science Lab in Clovis is one of the last (and smallest) buildings that I drew before I retired. This is a very strange experimental system which used plastered or sheathed hollow Styrofoam blocks, filled with rebar and concrete. It is the only building I ever did with that strange system, but it has a normal (mostly hidden) interior structural steel frame and roof. I did all the structural drawings and minor calcs. Circa 2015
This is the largest job I ever worked on: The twin Rincon Towers in San Francisco. I drew only the exterior towers’ aluminum framing systems, which support all of the glass, and the arched aluminum crown work of the structures. Circa 1985
