My Father and me, a physical comparison at the same age

I've been obsessed over the last MONTH with efforts to create a Slide Show of my Kramp Line which I can burn to a DVD and see on Television- Ken Burns Style. I have about 600 images in the show at present. Some of the images have taken hours to create in software programs such as Adobe Photoshop Elements or Microsoft's Power Point. One such image appears below- a comparison of my father and myself at about 1 or 2 years old. We seem to share many of the same genes, for example the eyes, mouth and chin. However, my father had a deep fold in his upper lip which I did not inherit. Incidentally, the chin was great for balancing a handle and broom, a feat of which we have demonstrated for many of our descendants. My Dad could also balance a kitchen chair by one of its legs, but I think he had thicker neck muscles than I did.

There is a story regarding the picture of me in this collage. The picture is one of seven in a series of different poses photographed by a Mr. Shaneyfelt. He lived in my parent's neighborhood at Auburn Garden Apartments, Del Ray, VA. The year was 1943, and the country was in the middle of WW II. Money was very tight, and there was little work for Mr. Shaneyfelt who was a professional photographer. So, for the love of his craft and his profession, Mr. Shaneyfelt took the pictures of me and practically donated them to my mother. Wouldn't it be neat if one Mr. Shaneyfelt's kin searched his name on Google and wound up here on this site and then contacted me. I would have to tell them that the donations of Mr. Shaneyfelt's photographs to my family were priceless.

Now, I must return to my Slide Show project. Sometimes you have to put everything aside for the time being in order to reach a particular goal. I apologize to my former friends and correspondents who used to know me. But, I am almost there, just a few more days, and then I will be back to my normal activities such as eating, bathing, sleeping, and of course- blogging.

Fantastic Interests of our senior citizen's

You know there is a lot of emphasis on youth these days. Perhaps too much. Of course we want the best for our children and our grandchildren. And, we are genuinely interested in their interests and activities. Thus, we attend their soccer games, their swim meets, there dance recitals, look at their paintings on the classroom walls at PTA meetings, and on and on. However, I think we are over doing it here. What about the older persons- the grandparents. They have wonderous stories and fantastic things to show and tell. They also have wide fields of interests- maybe not so many interests and activities as when they were young and more energetic. But nonetheless, they have a whole life time of interests to talk about.

I was a little disappointed on "Grandparents day" last Spring at my granddaughter's Elementary School, that is Ron McNair, in Germantown, Maryland. We, the grandparents, sat at the back of the room and OBSERVED. They took us to the school's library and we were told what the children were reading. Very nice. But not once did the teacher ask us to stand up (even if it would be somewhat slowly) to talk about what it was like when WE were in school. What WE read as kids. What WE did after school and so forth. These young kids are missing so much I thought quietly to myself.

So, what is this entry about really? I believe we get so hung up on the kid's activities or busy ourselves so much with our own interests that we don't take an interest in what other people around us are doing. Especially those in our own families. Thus, I went to my 88 year old mother and talked a long while about some of her interests that she is or was involved in.

My mother is a wonderful artist. She painted on porcelain plates, cups, vases, and all kinds of items. And so with just minutes away from the deadline for submitting an entry on "Show and Tell" to the Carnival of Genealogy, 55th Edition, I want to show and tell of some the things which were created by the real artist in our family. God Bless her.

Mom gave me this pair of ceramic plates that she painted in 1975.

Image above: Details of Mom's painted plate- plums, apples and cherries. So good you could easily lift them off the plate and eat them.

Mom kept a book shelf in one room filled with porcelain items that she painted. And she would often say, "pick something out and take it home with you".

Genealogy anybody??

REFERENCES and LINKS:

Read the other entries in the 55th edition of the Carnival of Genealogy, "Show and Tell".

Retirement again- probably

Image: Setting traps for Mule deer on Pahute Mesa on the former AEC's Nevada Test Site, 1964. We collected tissue specimens from animals and analyzed them for radionuclide content. The quantity of radionuclides was the same as or less than that of other areas in the country. At that time, just after the moratorium on above-ground testing of nuclear weapons by the US and USSR in 1962, radionuclides in food, animals, and water was directly proportional to the amount of nuclear fallout in rainwater- thus, higher in the eastern states because of higher amounts of rainfall.

By the way, the trap failed to catch any deer, but we collected all the specimens we needed from road kills. We also had some time for boondoggling on the half million acre test site. Once I climbed down the sides of a crater left by the nuclear explosive in Project Sudan. The test was designed to study the feasibility of "digging" a Panama-like canal though central America using nuclear explosives.

Transporting Holsteins cows from Reno, Nevada, to the Nevada Test site near Las Vegas. Cooling off the livestock with buckets of water. I served my military obligation with a Commission in The U.S. Public Health Service. The Service performed a study to define the pathway of Iodine 131 as it was created during a nuclear test and then as it passed through the atmosphere to alfalfa feed and ultimately to cow's milk. No, we did not nuke the cows.

Checking a fellow nuclear worker for alpha contamination at Lynchburg, VA, during a decommissioning project.

Mapping some of the nuclear plants I have worked at as a Health Physics Technician (HP), sometimes referred to as a Radiation Protection Technician (RP). For about half the contracts, I worked as an instructor in Radiation Safety for the contract workers. I started working on the road as a nuclear worker in Fall 1983 at V.C. Summers Nuke plant. About 25 years later I am finishing up my last contract, hopefully, at Brunswick Nuke plant. Map covers sites I worked at between 1983 and 2001. Click to enlarge.
As an Instructor for use of respirators.

Tomorrow is my last day as a nuclear worker at Brunswick Nuclear Plant, in Southport, NC, near Wilmington. It may be the start my retirement- again. I said after a 5 week job at Sequoyah Nuclear plant last Fall that it would be my last job. The hardest part of my work day has been walking from the far reaches of the parking lot to my work station. So, climbing several flights of stairs to the top of the turbine deck or climbing over pipes and obstructions in the reactor building is out of the question. There are several reasons why people retire in their 60s- not the least of them, is that we ain't as young and energetic, quick and nimble as we used to be.

Tomorrow, at my retirement, there will be no dinner party, no speeches, no golden watch, and probably not even a thank you. Just "Good bye, see ya down the road". I think that is what it is for a road tech. I didn't even get an "attaboy" free meal ticket on this contract, nor did I get one for the two previous years- but my coworkers did. Yes, it is about time to hang it up. Actually, my team mates deserved a meal ticket as they spent their time and money to prepare a really delicious Easter dinner for about 60 workers. We don't stop to observe holidays- I wonder if my coal mining ancestors got off for Holidays. If they were around, I'd ask them.

I am not sure I chose this career. I believe I just flowed into it and couldn't get out. Psychologists would argue that I didn't follow my bliss. "Everyone has a choice", they say. Actually, I stayed in it for the money especially the last 15 years or so; pure and simple. To me there was no pride nor fun in the job. For most of the time, the best part of the occupation was seeing different parts of the country and meeting some very interesting co-workers. Another benefit was having a lots of time BETWEEN job contracts. I was free (unemployed) for most of my summers from May to September. When I started working on the road in early 1980s, the contracts lasted about 3 months- that was about the time it took to change nuclear fuel and provide maintenance in the plants. In the last decade, the same job has been reduced to about 5 or 6 weeks. Many of the younger technicians who had families left the business and now there seems to be plenty of demand for HPs, even for the older ones. In essence, since I wished to have more free time, I have accepted only one or two contracts a year for the last 10 years, giving me almost 6 months a year to do what I wanted. In the last decade for instance, I took month-long tours of England and Europe. Believe me it was easy to fill up my free time and I wished for more. I like to believe the reason I take a job is to slow down time, as it seems to be flying by these days. I've already fulfilled some of my dreams and now I'm looking ahead for more.

Being a road tech has not been my only career. I performed diabetes research at several institutes including Virginia Tech. I also taught biology and Health Physics at the latter. A few days ago, I was eating breakfast in the cafeteria at Brunswick Nulear Station and an in-house newsletter caught my eye. The Plant Manager wrote an inspiring "go go team" message to the workers who are here for the outage. The by-line had a picture of the manager- egads, he was a former student of mine who graduated from Virginia Tech. What a gulf now stands between teacher and former pupil, as it should be. We wanted different things.

It's the joy of the journey that counts, not the destination.

First Entry, 16 May 2007

I just bought a new super dooper cell phone yesterday. My old phone was stolen two days ago from the handle bar bag on my bicycle. I chained the front wheel of the bike to its frame so nobody could ride off with it- though one could throw the whole bike in the back of a pickup or car trunk. I was gone only 10 minutes into a Food Lion Grocery store, but it was apparently long enough for someone to lift my phone. I rode quickly back to the house; called Verizon Wireless and waded through the frustratingly long menu to finally get to a real person. She disengaged my phone number from the stolen phone. The phone will soon lose its charge and become a useless piece of metal to the slime ball who took it. I was still upset that my address book and my picture was still with the phone. The phone was 4 years old and I was about to get a new phone anyway.

I used my two year customer credit to purchase an LG/enV for a discounted price of only $50. For another $5 per month I subscribed to Mobile Web 2, which allows me to send and receive email from my Yahoo! account. The phone has a 2 megapixel camera.

My interests and obsessions are photography, genealogy, writing, and travel. Actually, I have found that genealogy itself encompasses all of these interests. So, this blog will be about my travels on the road to find long lost cousins; to discover and write down our family history; and to illustrate my travels with photographs. I hope my new phone will enable me to upload pictures and stories from the road to this blog.