Anyone else suddenly craving some Rice-a-Roni?
January 5, 1933 saw construction begin on one of America’s best known landmarks, and the iconic representation of San Francisco, California… the Golden Gate Bridge. Named for the strait it spans connecting the San Francisco Bay to the Pacific Ocean, it was at the time the world’s longest (4200 feet) and tallest (746 feet) suspension bridge. While Joseph Strauss submitted the original design for the bridge, and oversaw its construction… the finished product actually bore little resemblance to his original idea. Architect Irving Morrow was the man most responsible for the bridge’s famous aesthetic design, even choosing the color for the towers, international orange. And engineer Leon Moisseiff turned Strauss’ original cantilever design into the suspension bridge the Golden Gate would be built as. Luckily for us, and most importantly, Californian motorists, Moisseiff’s design for the Golden Gate proved to be much more structurally sound than the bridge he designed with similar innovations just seven years later in Tacoma, Washington….
Picture the Golden Gate Bridge doing that in a windstorm. Forget California’s legendary earthquakes….
And now that I’ve left my heart in San Francisco, I’ll attempt to salvage my brain to answer this week’s Share Your World questions from Di!
Fancy new logo for 2023, oooooooh!
Did you stay up to see the New Year in?
I’m always awake to see the new year in…
Seven minutes into the new year, and already two missed calls!
That’s a pic I took of the phone at the Automotive counter where I routinely take my work breaks, the first one of which is always at midnight. Yes, some of us work overnights and holidays!
Are there any special occasions or events coming up in 2023 for you or your family?
Not that I’m aware of, but I generally stay out of family functions. It will be the 30th anniversary of my high school graduation which only makes me feel really fucking old. My 25 year work anniversary at Mecca (ditto). My youngest sister will turn 40(!!!) And 2023 also would have been my Mom and Dad’s 50th wedding anniversary had he not passed in 2017…
Answering this question has aged me about 25 years alone…
Do you keep a diary?
I actually kept a daily journal for almost 21 years beginning in February 1993 (Another 30 year anniversary!). After about 15 years It became more and more of a chore and something I continued only because I’d done it for so long, and I finally gave up in early 2014.
Here’s the books themselves…
It’s nice to have about a two decade span in my life, though, where I can pinpoint the specific date something occurred on by looking it up, or refresh my memory on something that happened when I was in my 20’s…
How did yesterday Sunday differ from January 1st 2022 or was there no difference?
Like most days that occur between two working nights for me, this past New Years was a lost day for me. Last year I was off the night before, but being a Saturday, I doubt it was much different. If only I’d still kept that journal last year…..
New Years Day’s a stupid day anyhow. And also a really terrible song…
Gratitude: A smile is infectious. Spread it around.
Good idea!
Evil Squirrel's Nest 
You make me wish I’d kept a journal. I’m a lot older than you are and so many things I’ve done are a blur. People will say “remember when we did…?” And I have no recollection whatsoever! It’s weird the things my head retains. I went to so many cool concerts. I wish I’d taken notes afterward.
I feel that way about the people I’ve worked with. With my job and how long I’ve been there, I’ve literally seen over a thousand people come and go off my crew over the years, and when the few of us who’ve been around for a while talk about co-workers from the past, it’s interesting who can remember who and who can’t based on individual interactions with them…. and I’m so bad with names and faces anyway. Hell, we rehired someone I had trained ten years prior (and who lasted maybe a month or two) and he remembered me and I had no idea who he was! (But I used my journal to confirm he was right!) We’ve talked before about how we wish someone would have kept a journal of the overnight crew!
With their luck Dinkum Island has an active volcano……….but then possum trots doesn’t sound like fun either. I kept travel journals for the first 20 years or so of my second marriage and I will admit it’s a riot reading “re-runs” of some of those trips but a daily journal would drive me nuts……I mean how many days can you read “got up…..had lunch….had dinner….went to bed” in a row????? Not exactly exciting. Obviously I was living in the “B” zone (boring).
Pam
There are so many days like that for me over the past ten years that it’s no wonder I stopped. It’s funny to see where my mind was at certain times, though. So many of my late 90’s entries are over half news about what happened in baseball that day!
Thanks for joining in ES! Happy New Year to you.
Glad I wasn’t on that bridge, made me feel quite queasy!! It was bad enough walking across a small suspension foot bridge in NZ and I had to turn back as I felt quite ill!
I’ve always been amazed by that video of the Tacoma bridge. A light, wooden suspension bridge I could see doing that, but a real concrete and metal one swaying like that is surreal!
🙂
Am I wrong is presuming that cartoon was from 2016? In which case, are you a freaking Seer into the future or what? I never thought Tacoma had the kind of wind that could sway a concrete bridge like that. Talk about eery!
The virus du jour that inspired that comic was Zika. Here’s the original post:
The wind that caused that bridge to sway was only about 40 mph, but a flaw in the design apparently led to the natural sway accelerating to the proportions shown…
Working in the middle of the night, on a Sunday, on New Years Day – I hope you got paid quadruple time…
Did you set off some fireworks in the middle of the soup isle?
LOL, just another Saturday night for me. Now had they made me come in on a Thursday night, they better be paying the big bucks…
interesting ^.^ and do you make those cartoons yourself?
I did make them myself when my comic was active from 2012-17.
Oh that’s awesome