From the K State Rodeo last night:

Creepin’ up on me.

Look, it snowed last night.  And this morning, searching through all my (generally warm-weather) shoes, I surmised that the most appropriate pair of shoes to tromp through the snow and ice were…

my golf shoes.

They do look good in all occasions, though.  Thank you Callaway, for making such a fine pair.

The past couple weeks, I’ve been inspecting post office buildings across Kansas.  At first I was excited for the opportunity to get out of the office, but after doing a couple of them I started getting tired of transcribing manufacturer and model information on panel boards.  But today was actually really interesting.  I went down to Emporia to check out their place first.  It was actually a wealth of information of mechanical systems.  Surprisingly I hadn’t seen much about what goes into a modern HVAC system in 5 years of practice.  So I had a lot of catching up to do, and this was definitely jumping in head first.  They had equipment there I’d never even heard of.  I finally saw the culmination of what mankind has invented to keep a building at 72 degrees year round.  Hoses, tanks, metal boxes, finally they make sense to me.  Plus I keep getting up on the roofs of these places.  I can’t explain why that is so cool, maybe something to do with the height and the fact that not a whole lot of other people go up there, but it is super rad.

Let me tell you something else about post offices.  They all have an inspector’s gallery, which is this elevated hallway that surrounds the workroom (and pretty much every other space), with sneaky slots to look through to make sure people aren’t snooping through the mail.  Very off limits, even to Aimee and me, and we were there to assess the building conditions.  But here’s a picture of what they look like from the outside:

See the black rectangle and circles?  They’re louvers so that the inspectors can see out without anyone knowing they’re even up there.  “How could you miss seeing the inspector in the building” you ask?  They go straight into the gallery from a special door outside! Plus the inspectors carry a sidearm because “BITCHES TAMPERING WITH THE MAIL IS A FEDERAL OFFENSE!!!”

Another interesting part of Emporia’s post office was that they rent out the upstairs for people who want small office spaces.  And one of them, maybe a lawyer or something, had his place ransacked yesterday!  I’ve never been or even seen a place that had been so incredibly upended.  Papers everywhere, furniture turned over, office supplies splayed broken on the ground… it was just like on TV.  I wanted to find out what happened so badly… but the look on our escort’s face definitely said he wasn’t allowed to talk about it.

After Emporia, Aimee and I headed over to Osage City - a tiny town in the middle of nowhere, not that it’s bad at all.  It was a charming town.  Their post office was much less complicated, but really beautiful.  It definitely needed some help with a restoration, but you could see how much craftsmanship had been put into the place, almost a hundred years ago.  In fact, when the postmistress (?) was looking for building records, she found the original construction photos from around 1914.  They dug out the foundation using mules!!!

One more post office to go, then lots and lots of data entry.  :-/

Well, new house, so I’m planting a new garden.  Since it’s late summer already, my options are slim.  So far, I’ve got lettuce, spinach, basil and peppers.  I’m planning for cabbage, but I still have to find the seeds or seedlings for those.  Anyway, here are some early pictures of Garden 2.0:

That’s not a dirt pie you see, readers.  (Although it was in the oven earlier - for sterilization.)  It’s potential.

Seedling bed

I guess you can tell I’m definitely back in Manhattan when even the basil plants are purple.

And here, something a little further along:

Poblanos - to ensure my food will have a nice kick.

More of the new garden to follow.  Don’t miss out!  Yes, it is that thrilling!!!