Chain Link

Rain, finally, but I'm ahead of this, resurrect a fire and nod toward heat, hard times come again no more. The key is staying healthy. I'm a little sore, but it hardly matters, what did Beckett say, "but my dear sir, look at the world, and look at my trousers." Sometimes at night I hear voices, just the wind and remnant leaves, but it sounds real enough. Sparring with nature is a habit of mine, I do it to stay awake, a miss-step and you die, I think that's fair, watch where you put your feet. Could I have just one moon-dance with you? I'll make you my own. Pegi sent these two maidens to find me, two of her girls, they had a shackle they needed for rigging, a common enough problem. I couldn't free it, but I knew where to get another, and that made me suddenly a genius. Sugar and spice. Consider the shackle. What attaches. I confess to the fact that I feel good. I've been blessed with a happiness. I only care about this particular moment, when the ducks rise, and the sky is clouded with birds. Short day at the museum because Pegi ran me off when someone said it was starting to snow. I took a generation of stale crackers with me, to feed the ducks. Just flurries and the roads are dry and there's a huge flock of geese at the lake. From the safety of my truck, I fling crackers out the window and take off before I get attacked. A shackle can be any coupling device, I upgraded the Cirque to a logging-chain repair link, which would hold an elephant; when rigging to fly humans I err on the side of strength, I like a ten-fold margin of error. I went in the theater later, to watch part of their routine on the hanging star, and there were three girls on the star, 300 pounds, maybe a few more (this is southern Ohio) and the link was tested to 4,000 pounds. I feel good with that. I'm impressed with the beam that a local welding company built from which to suspend people in said devices. The span isn't that great, 14 feet, but you don't want deflection under load in the middle. A simple engineering problem, and elegance always attracts my attention. I don't do metal, I'm a wood guy, so I don't know the rules. They ran a 3 inch steel pipe through a 4 inch pipe and welded them together. Why not? The 4 inch pipe is somewhat shorter, so that only the 3 inch pipe rests on the odd ledge that is 16 feet off the stage. Too much information, I know, but this is the way it's presented to me, this is what I get. The ledge is there because this was a bank, the walls are 2 feet thick, when you remodel you build to the outside, so you end up with ledges. Janitors hate ledges, because they're hard to clean and awkward. Don't get me started. Stop. That was a nice run, my job is just to clean up the grammar.