Some days, you’ve got to move a thousand-pound table, and we’re just glad we’ve got the right tools for the job. Doesn’t have to be pretty to do the work.
Moving Furniture
Category: Uncategorized
Second Semester
Second semester astronomy experiments, both year and instructor unknown. And honestly, we’d just be taking a wild stab at guessing the particular course.
Some of these seem genuinely interesting, the sort which might show up in ASTR 201 these days, at least in some form. “Lens or Telescope Experiment,” well, that one may need a little fleshing out.
Typewriter Paper
Corrasable! There’s a portmanteau for you. We’re long past the days of typewriters around the department (though there might be one or two hidden in a closet behind other odds and ends), but paper? Can always use more paper.
Flashlight
The Observatory has been through many, many generations of flashlights. Red flashlights, of course, to minimize the loss of dark-adapted vision during nighttime telescope observations. What are now red LED sources (and bright ones, at that) had formerly been incandescent. At first large, then moderately sized, followed by a short detour into way-too-tiny.
Dropping a finger-sized black flashlight at night ensures you’ll spend a good deal of time and effort to locate it. 21 cm of extra handle ought to do the trick, like you’ve just requested the key for the gas station bathroom. At least it’s not a hubcap.
Use Minimal Voltage
Aside from the general vibe of “this is dangerous!,” this seems an odd sign.
Five-thousand volts, but use the minimum. Stick to a less dangerous danger?
Burn only when necessary? Presumably “necessary” gets defined elsewhere?
And, ooh, that blue mercury vapor. You’d think a UV warning could be number 4 on there, given its still-useful ability to sterilize hard-to-reach places. For your eyes’ sake, don’t look too long.
Hammocks
New sight on campus this semester: hammocks! Multiple locations, with very sturdy, powder-coated steel posts, studded with little orange bison heads. Six massive posts. Three little hammocks.
Some days, you just shrug and keep on walking.
New Coat of Paint
The connector’s ground floor got new flooring and paint over the summer. Just recently, new signage, too.
The first C in “Science” looks funny because there’s a little orange bison dawdling there. Look up next time you walk by.
Signage
Even during construction, it’s important to have signage for wayfinding.
Number Stamps
When in need of labeling that won’t come off for anything, stamp it directly into the material surface. No permanent marker; no paint; no adhesive sticker. We have the letters of the alphabet (not pictured) and the numbers 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 0.
Six being nine and all. That and five makes a decent-enough ess in a pinch.
Summer Construction Season
Spotted on a nearby office door. Summer is the season for construction around here, for fenced-off parking lots, for the interminable beeping of construction vehicles in reverse, for doors and paths suddenly in need of detours.
But the seasons change, as they ever do, and here we are in autumn, barreling toward winter, whose cold and wind leave us dreaming of construction season once more…