A Morning at Work

Hello Dear Readers!

You may or may not know that I'm a civil engineer and I work an average of 50 hours a week.  I haven't always done this, but that is another story I will tell you sometime.   This time of the year is often a busy one because our state transportation department is preparing for those projects that will built next year.  That means we have to get all our detailed engineering plans together for them with an estimate of cost.  The work is tedious and seems to never end and in this case we are rushing.  I hate to rush because there will be errors in the work and later on they will have to be corrected.

This is my messy desk.  It is very dark outside right now and I took this picture with my phone camera.    I don't like to work in an environment with overhead lights (flourescent) so I use lamps.

When I first get to work I check a couple of blogs I follow and my email then I usually get to work.  Today's task will be finding the quantity of different types of pavement that will be needed to construct the road.  This is one of the most expensive items in highway construction so it needs to be very accurate.  I make the work more enjoyable by color coding everything.  My day usually starts by 6 am and I like being the first one here and working in the darkness of the morning.

I took a look up from my screens and this is what I saw........

The sun is just coming up over the trees.  Yes this is the view out of one of my windows.  A parking lot and the back of a motel.  But a girl can dream!  The fabulous mountains of eastern Kentucky are not more than a hundred miles that direction.  Mountains that sadly, we are cutting the tops off to make roads so that people can drive fast to get through them when in fact their lives would be enriched by slowing down to look at their beauty.  I have co workers that have left the mountains to come and work in cubicles because of the lack of jobs in the mountain regions.  Seems like we build roads but the jobs stay away.