76

Talking about jobs. I remember my last one. Between April 06 and July 06 i had a brief job at a 76 gas station in Beaverton, OR. At that time it belonged to ConnocoPhilips and owned at least partially by Lukoil of ... Russia. I didn't know until after the orientation. Then, i also found out that Chevron uses additives in gasoline that are almost as good as 76s. And the fact that not all gasoline is created equal. And why we should never buy gasoline from store stations because they accept in their tanks the lowest quality, the one that all major gasoline suppliers refuse.

At the intersection of Cedar Hills and Walker Rd. Also as told at orientation, the busiest 76 and generally the busiest gas station in the NW.

12 pumps. 2 or 3 guys per busy shifts. Convenience store.

Curiously enough that job was between two major dental works. And i was on antidepressants at the time since the last time in the hospital in 75. Mirtazapin. My prescription was 30 milligrams, as agreed with the doctor, to be cheaper for me at copay and officially i was supposed to break them in two. But i was breaking them in 4 and getting only 7.5 milligrams. And i think that was too much as well. Now i think the only benefit of that was the antihistamine action of Mirtazapin. And i was not feeling myself. I was living like in a dream.

Dr. Jeff Call of Gentle Dental did a root canal and a crown. The crown was supposed to be ceramic only but then he switched to metal and ceramic. It still has some galvanic reaction if i touch the exposed metal part of it with a fork it starts hurting really bad.

Dr. Douglas Boyd of Portland did and apicoectomy. The apparent necessity of it was an overfill to a root canal done by dr.Negru of Aloha, OR. On July 27 2006, the same day when Mr. Băsescu, the President of Romania did a visit in Washington DC and the ex-Prime Minister Mr.Tăriceanu fell from his motorcycle. The surgery went wrong and i had to quit the job. I couldn't eat solid food for several month.

Later i found out that in fact the pain to that tooth was due to an insufficiency of vitamin C and probably a periodontitis. No surgery necessary. In fact i would not be fair if i wouldn't tell Dr. Boyd tried to convince me not to do it.

But what happened in between is more interesting. Job was officially part time. But due to the very busy nature of the place and the fact that they couldn't keep nobody to work there for long time because of being so busy and hard to run all day from one pump to another, it became full time and even over time.

The only guy who was working there for a long time before and after me was Charlie. Charlie the communist with the crooked teeth. He said he was communist but had no idea of what that was. He said he was an alcoholic, he would get pissed if he didn't have his beers every day.

After job i started chatting with other Romanians over the internet out of being so homesick and lonely. Started drinking Cuba Libre in top of antidepressants and started a blog which i later abandoned.

I caught a few days with temperatures over 100 degrees. At 46 and out of shape, i thought i was going to die but i didn't.

Each pump had a printer and most of the customers were asking for a receipt. But some times the printers were jamming or running out of paper and we had to run inside to get receipts from the cashiers. And had to stay in line with the other customers, that had priority. And one day, shy at first then more bold i started fixing the printers and refilling them with paper. Soon i became unofficially the guy who did that on my shift. It was like a promotion and it gave me an ascendance over the younger guys.

They were a couple of black guys, can't remember their names now. When i was coming to my shift, around 11 AM, i was almost every time finding them with half of the printers not working and with their tongs out from running inside to get receipts. So i was fixing those first thing.

One day i decided i should try and make them fix those for themselves. So i showed them how to do it when nobody was around so many times until they got probably annoyed and started doing it themselves. But only when i was there.

But when i was coming at my shift, again they were broken.

One day one of them got fired for no big reason.

I never realized why the thing with printers was happening. But lately when i realized the impossibility of me getting a job according to my experience and qualifications, i think i started to understand.

Some categories of people are not allowed around here to do certain "more qualified" types of works which are reserved for insiders.

Resonance

It is very hard to understand from the article in Wikipedia. Let's put it simple. Let's say we have a guitar with 6 chords. Each chord has a different thickness. If it is normally tuned you can pinch one chord and make it vibrate and all of the others will stay pretty much put. You will hear only the chord that you pinched until the vibration get dampened by the friction with surrounding air.

But if you intentionally put on the same guitar or even on two different ones two chords of the same thickness and tune them to make the same sound, if you will pinch one chord pretty soon the other will start vibrate and make the same sound. It will absorb half of the energy of the first chord and they both will vibrate until will spend all the initial energy and die. We can say they resonate at a resonance frequency and that is the frequency you tuned them to.

In buildings. Especially in those made of panels. Each panel has its own resonance frequency and more than one harmonics. Most of them will be the same size but will not have the same frequency as are assembled differently depending on the contact with the frame. If you can find a way to transfer some vibration to the walls from a source at resonance, you can make them vibrate. In a building made of panels you will have practically all kind of resonances at a multitude of frequencies.

If you use a blower in the parking lot or a noisy car or a plane passes by, some of the panels will vibrate in resonance with the instant frequency of the blower that changes constantly sweeping a range of frequencies.

A multitude of scenarios can happen. Usually dust falls from the walls. Air gets pumped inside and outside the walls bringing very unpleasant odors, bacteria and fungus from the walls inside and nutrients from the normal dust inside back in the walls.

More complicated things can be imagined as some walls in the building will have different substances in it, like formaldehyde, smoke from neighbors, etc. Depending on the frequency, only some walls will vibrate and fill the apartment with a certain thing, on demand. Even the bottles under the sink with things like chlorine, 409, etc. Once i found them all with their cap loose.

Every internal organ of one's body must have a resonance, and it can be different from one person to another as organ sizes match the person's size.

Yesterday across the street somebody used a creosote sweeping log to clean the chimney. For about 4 hours the place was filled with creosote smoke and i felt terrible. Shortness of breath, knot in my throat, dizziness for several hours and ruining the rest of my day. I  think some of that smoke turned into dust and falls from the walls while vibrating.

The noise itself can be annoying in a residential area.

Last night around 11 i went to bed. I was tired and slightly buzzed as i had a glass of cheap red wine not long before. I was about to fall asleep when my wife came and opened the bedroom's window together with the balcony door.

I liked the fresh air coming from outside. I didn't like i was waking back up. Then several cars passed by. One of them made an unusual high pitch loud sound for about 30 seconds. Probably a defective transmission or a rattle. The room got filled with some very fine dust. Smelled like wood dust. I closed the window. Then i started feeling very ill. Arrhythmia when laying down. Probably systemic allergy.

I went back up and started pacing around. Every time i tried to go back to sleep i had shortness of breath and arrhythmia. I turned on the computer. Spent a couple of hours until i felt good enough to go back to sleep. Everything came back to "normal".

Right now across the street right now are blowing leaves with power blowers. If i open the windows there will be at least 50 dB flooding the apartment. But even with the doors closed my ears almost hurt although i don't hear much.

This to me is happening for at least a decade. Hours lost almost every day to it. Time ruined. Life ruined.

Today. For a few hours there will be leaves blowing in the neighborhood. Then at night creosote smoke. Slammed doors from the neighbors all day. A new week is starting.

My plan for today included applying for some jobs. Now i write in the blog.

Aquarelle

by Ion Minulescu - 1920

In the city where it always rains three times in seven days
All the citizens on sideways,
Walk by two while holding hands,
In the city where it always rains three times in seven days,
Covered under old umbrellas
Sighing, bending,
Wet from raining,
All the citizens on sideways
Look like automated puppets taken out of the storefronts.

In the city where it always rains three times in seven days
You can only hear on sideways
Steps of those who walk by two,
Counting
In their mind
The falling
Of the raindrops from umbrellas,
From the gutters,
And from sky
With the power of a cry
Giver of a life that's latent,
Useless,
Monotone
And absent.

In the city where it always rains three times in seven days
An old man and an old woman -
Looking like two broken toys -
Walk on sideway hand in hand...

Guess Who's Buzzing Today

At 4:57 PM today i came from a short walk. My neighbor at Nr.9 came down the stairs with a pair of barking dogs when i wanted to climb so i backed down. I went to the car and then to the mailbox. Exactly when i reached the car, a plane flew just above the building. I mean, not 1500 feet as the legal limit, not 500 feet, not even 300 feet but merely ... what? 150 feet maybe? It could have touched the building at Nr.45 across the alley. Almost no noise at all which means the pilot cut the engines down to idle. Really dangerous at that altitude in a residential area full of trees. It was also pretty foggy. I waited patiently two hours (actually more than two, as i forgot and then remember because of the OHSU helicopter flying more recently and really shaking the building, vibrating the walls' panels and pumping outside the dust from the walls and the mineral fiber in the attick, like every time where you have an enclosed volume within elastic walls, when those walls vibrate, the air inside is getting slowly pumped outside and the other way around.) so i can look at the history of flights on Web Track. I was curious to see what airline that was. Look for yourself and wonder. Beware that data on the site is slightly erroneous as it shows the plane flying some 900 feet SE of the building and 2700 above sea level which would be 2000 above the ground, well within legal limits. I mean i couldn't have seen it from outside near the west side of the building if it was flying as it says there, right? (It is not well shown here but the building i live in is oriented NS. That site http://webtrak.bksv.com/pdx worked right for me since i first started looking until a few month ago. Map is clickable.

Screenshot, webrak, Mountain Park, OR, Sat 12 Jan 2013 04:38:40 PM PST

Fall on Tualatin River

Clickable!

Tualatin River National Wildlife Refuge, Sherwood, OR, 2012-11-15

Tualatin River National Wildlife Refuge, Sherwood, OR, 2012-11-15

Tualatin River National Wildlife Refuge, Sherwood, OR, 2012-11-15

Tualatin River National Wildlife Refuge, Sherwood, OR, 2012-11-15

Tualatin River National Wildlife Refuge, Sherwood, OR, 2012-11-15