qpmarl blog

I got back from Orlando, and my mom was in town on her way from PA to WY. My grandma was there too because she was in PA also.

I just found out that my next job has been pushed back until December 15th, so I have nothing to do until then. My mom convinced me to come with her to my grandma's to help her for a few days.

It's nice. I got a lot of family up here, so I'm seeing a lot of people I haven't seen for a while.

I'm not sure exactly what I'm going to help my grandma with. I'll probably try to do as little as possible, but it's nice to just hang out with Grandma.

I've come down to Orlando for Thanksgiving along with my brother Thomas and sister Karen. We all got together at my sister Marie's house. It was a pretty good dinner and visit and all. I've stayed a few days longer than Thomas and Karen - I'm still here in fact.

Today I went and rode the waterslide that I built last year - I had to leave for another job before it was completed, so I didn't get to test it out with the rest of the crew. It's pretty cool.

This is an update on the Generator/Fire incident.

I guess that the generator just ran out of gas, which is bad because it's diesel and it was under heavy load at the time - and it a huge generator.

But there's a rumor floating around that a 'possum got into the wiring and got fried. It's probably not true, but it's a good story anyway.

The 'possum featured on the left is from TGS, featured on the homestarrunner.com/tgsmenu.html - check it out.

Tonight, we were working late. The waterslide is all built. We were just cleaning it with some scrub brushes and a pressure washer (Tomorrow we will do some touch-up paint).

We were working kind-of late in order to get all the cleaning done tonight. We did the outside slide first and moved inside just as it was beginning to get dark. Inside there are nice, big lights - so the loss of daylight isn't a problem.

So we're inside, almost all done, and we're spraying water all over the place. The fiberglass, the steel structure, the concrete floor, the stucco walls, the windows, and everything else near the slide (including us) is soaking wet.

This isn't the first time we've done this and everything in the room is waterproof (It is a pool room after all). There are a few things that aren't fully installed yet, but any exposed wiring should not be connected to a power source.

Anyway, all of a sudden the lights start flickering. These are massive, high powered lights and there several dozen of them - it's pretty much daylight in there. So now it's like a rave with some massive strobe lights as we're washing the slide. Then the lights start going out completely - in banks. All the lights on the east side go out first, then the next ones over and so on until all the lights in the pool room are out.

So we get some flashlights out and keep working - we are in no way responsible for the lights.

As I'm working on scrubbing a section of fiberglass, I hear one of my co-workers yell something - it's really hard to understand each other because we have a gas powered pressure washer running in there and the sound reverberates such that it's impossible to understand anyone who's not right next to you anyhow.

But I thought that I heard someone yell something about fire. So I get down off the lift that I'm on in order to check it out. I can kind-of smell some smoke, but it's not heavy and I don't see any flames or anything. I start walking towards the west end of the building where the other guys are.

Then one guy comes back and says "No, it's not a fire, it's the generator". I'm thinking that it must be related to the lights, but I didn't know they were on a generator. From outside, you can see heavy black smoke pouring out of the back of the building and it smells like diesel smoke. We are in no way responsible for the generator. We go back to work and finish up using our flashlights.

As we are wrapping things up to head back to the hotel, a police officer appears in the parking lot and starts asking us about what's going on. We have no idea. He says that the fire department is on the way.

About this time, we also notice that the surge tank (or whatever the thing is that the pool guys were filling earlier) still has a hose pumping water into it and is now overflowing onto the ground. This is also absolutely not our responsibility.

The security guard who is supposed to be on duty (The have 24 hour on-site security) is nowhere to be found and the cop is unable to contact him.

So the Fire Department shows up (and maybe a few more cops or something). And we take off for the hotel which is just on the other side of the interstate. As we are pulling into the hotel parking lot, we notice that there are news helicopters circling the area (like vultures).

At this point, I'm a bit disappointed that we'd left because with the news people interested and due to the fact that we were the only people around when the incident occurred, we could have been on the news - eh, whatever.

So tomorrow, we may get blamed for setting the building on fire or destroying the generator or something (They'll probably be looking for someone to blame and they already don't like us very much).

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