Change - The New Fronteir in Everyday Ramblings

This is a current view from the edge of the vacant lot next door to one of the houses down at the end of the dead end block that my place fronts on. It is pretty green considering that we are moving into fall. You can see the Gingko tree in the foreground to the right. There are two of them and I bet there is a story about their planting.

I think they are beginning to prepare the lot to build on it. A couple of weeks back a man came with a small piece of heavy machinery and ripped out a whole bunch of ivy and other overgrown vegetation that was growing over a boundary fence which is how this particular view became available.

Across the street the work on the Under Armor building continues. They have been at it for over a year. It is the slowest project I have ever seen. They are placing windows now. There will be lots and lots of windows.

Next to that the crews are gung ho getting the artificial field in and the new track prepped and laid. It is pretty astonishing how much work they are doing on this field. They are putting in huge drainage pipes underneath. It was originally a streambed, a gulch that they filled in with 1850’s garbage to make sort of level.

And the transitional housing down on the other block is going up really fast. That is the place being built on the site of a former gas station that had very bad toxic leakage and had to sit fallow for something like 30 years.

Because I don’t drink Diet Coke anymore (yippee!) I never go to the convenience store down there anymore (double yippee!) so I have to make a point of checking on progress there even though it is only a block away.

I feel the weight of our unique history here as I watch all this change unfolding so close by.

We don’t know why, the official line this morning was that there was a large electrical component failure yesterday morning at the institution for which I work. It is weird because we are in multiple locations, sprawled all over the area but the outage affected the whole system.

There was a major hacking breach the day before and we don’t know if that was involved. All our patient care areas have backup generators but as a number of my coworkers discovered, the academic and non-hospital areas do not. Two folks on my team that work on the hill were without power for five hours yesterday.

Phones were down, the network only worked in random locations; we were spared, we had a big surge and our screens went dark and then came right back on. This did not affect my apartment a block away.

It could have had something to do with all the construction. We just completed a building, this weird skinny tall research building on the hill, or the three new buildings going up on the South Waterfront or it could have been something more sinister or it just could have been incompetence.

My heart goes out to all those folks who came in from outlying areas for appointments and surgeries that had to be rescheduled.

Change can hit us hard when we least expect it.

Last updated September 22, 2016