R.I.P. KV

When I was in the fifth grade I had one of those cranky-old-lady teachers who was mean. I've always had an anti-authoritarian streak in me and that year in protest I stopped reading. I read what I needed to get by in school but that was it.

In the 9th grade I was on a trip somewhere and bored and I stumbled upon a book called Slapstick. It was a weird and funny book set in the near future when gravity becomes unstable. On a heavy day gravity could pull the guts out of a horse. On a light day a man could hop to the top of the Empire State Building. Besides being a complete crack-up, the existential undertones of the book were really compelling.

After that I read any book by Kurt Vonnegut I could find. This actually wasn't all that easy at the time, I was in a small town and the nearest bookstore was 30 miles away. We didn't have a used book store, and we sure didn't have Amazon.com. But in looking for his books I stumbled upon others and by the time we were assigned to read Slaughterhouse 5 in the 12th grade I'd already read most of Vonnegut's books and had become an avid reader.

So thanks KV. You did a little good. May you rest in peace.

Big Bridge needs Big Truck

For the past few years the WSDOT has been building a new bridge linking Tacoma with Gig Harbor. It's a really big bridge and a technically challenging build. If you're into construction, it's been a cool project to watch.


They're about 80% done and at the point where they're ready to install the expansion joints. The first one shipped from South Dakota several weeks ago. It's really really really big: 70' long, 15' wide and it weighs 100 tons.

Problem is, it's so big the WSDOT wouldn't let the truck that's carrying it drive on our state roads. They had some concerns about things like bridges and overpasses that might get a little stressed out by such a massive load. So it sat, parked at the state border near Spokane while they tried to figure out how to move it.

They finally determined that in order to legally drive the beast to Tacoma, they'd have to modify the truck and add axles to spread out the load. This was a lot more than the original trucker had bargained on so he bailed and they had to hire a new hauler to take on the work. Then the state had to issue a new permit for the load.

After three weeks of reinventing large material transport, the truck is now 200 feet long, has 17 axles, a cab in the front and another cab in the back, and extra brakes. It takes up one and a half lanes and has an assortment of chase cars to escort it across the state.



The monster truck is now heading west on I-90 at about 15 miles per hour. For most of the way across the state the highway has just two lanes. Traffic is backing up behind the truck for miles. It's a slow moving vehicular parade that you can track online thanks to a GPS mounted in the cab. There's a live feed from the truck to WSDOT's website where you can watch the progress on a Google map as it uploads every 5 minutes.


For more info, check out this article in the Seattle P-I, the WSDOT bridge website, or this WSDOT page for all the geeky construction facts about the expansion joints.