bug goes crunch: January 2007

bug goes crunch

Monday, January 15, 2007

ice storm


i feel beat. last night (or more accurately, early this morning) i slept only a little, tossing and turning some but mostly just lying there, waiting for tree limbs to crash down on the house. i was not completely disappointed. the ice storm was not as severe as the one from nine or ten years ago, maybe in part because not enough flimsy branches had grown back in the meantime, but i had that same sick feeling. although i've loved severe weather for as long as i can remember, and still do, ever since becoming a homeowner there is sometimes this nagging feeling that the physical plant, as it were, is going to sustain an inconvenient level of damage. now that the ash trees are gone there is really only the old honey locust in the backyard, with its tangled knots of craggy branches that make such beautiful shadows in the moonlight, on a snowy night (at least that's the way i remember snowy, moonlit nights), the honey locust having dropped an uncountable number of branches, and bits of branches, through the years with their wind and rain and, on occasion, ice. as it turns out there was a pretty massive branch that came down last night, missing the house completely and taking with it instead the comcast cable, which of all the wires that could have come down happens to be the one least missed (thank you, digital subscriber line). and what with the expected deep freeze tonight and through the next couple of days we can expect the ice to stay around, so there is some likelihood that more branches will come down. to be sure, i was just standing outside a minute ago and heard, in the distance, the all-to-familiar slow cracking sound, followed by the louder snap, the whooshing and then the dull thud, followed in turn by the clattering tinkle of the bits of ice scattering themselves across the frozn lawn. that is what i listened to last night, for what seemed like hours, instead of sleeping like everyone else in the house.

so this morning it was an interesting ride to the office. as warm as it has been, the ground was really not frozen at all so no ice built up on the roads, which was nice; really the only hazards were the low-hanging branches all along red oak and brooks street, and the occasional frozen debris in the street. of course there was the ever-present threat that several hundred pounds of wood could fall, suddenly, onto my head or at the least, in my path. but that didn't happen.

and it made work a little better, because work has been something of a pain for a month or more, in ways i can't fully explain, but have something to do with feeling unappreciated or unrecognized or something like that, feeling as though i'm toiling away at all the little things that nobody else wants to do, and that the more interesting, higher-profile jobs are going to others while i become less and less plugged in to what's really happening. which is partly bullshit, partly just perception i mean, but still it feels real enough. i am actually really liking being involved in the u-m capstone design course, which i was kind of flattered into taking on and is a little crazy and out of my area of expertise - the environmental engineering groups, for whom i have become the consultant/mentor, are going to be doing some sort of remedial investigation and abatement design for contaminated groundwater, whereas i am really a surface water guy. but still, the point is for them to get some exposure to how consulting works, and i can certainly do that, and the interaction so far, here at the very beginning of the term, has been enlightening. so i look forward to that.

but one thing i'm really torn about is this project for modeling the surge effects for this gigantic tunnel they'll be building in d.c. to store combined sewage. we have poised ourselves to do something innovative, to make use of a modeling approach that has been developed right here in ann arbor, at the u, by my former advisor and one of his better doctoral students of recent decades, and i really want to get involved in the project, and so far it has been a struggle to find a role, but thanks to the persistence of a colleague who is quite a few years my junior, and something of a shining star in the office (that is to say, to a cynic, the competition), and also a friend, i've been included in the meetings so far.

so the doctor of philosophy has been brought here from brazil, where he has already begun adapting his model for the idiosyncratic boundary conditions of the proposed d.c. tunnel, and today we met for a couple of times, and the second meeting was really remarkable, to be sitting there while he discussed the details of his code, and the solution technique, and the innovative two-component pressure description that handles the transition from free surface flow to pressure flow as well as a preissman slot, but can also handle subatmospheric pressures which the preissman slot cannot, and to talk with this brilliant scientist and converse about some of the more intractable problems of hydraulics, and the subtleties of numerical schemes, with him talking to me as though i was i knew what i was talking about (which i did, actually), was refreshing and invigorating and validating. even if i can't get them to buy me a decent computer, at least for an hour today i felt like i knew something.

it's going to have to hold me for a while, i think. but i have my students, too. that is pretty good. and i have to get that damned poster together for the disinfection 2007 conference in february. oh my...