I’m A Ramblin’ Man

With All Due Respect To Greg Allman


I’m sitting here this morning doing something I rarely do these days…WORKING.

Actual ENGINEERING WORK, if you must ask.

That’s right ladies and gentlemen—I have some paying engineering consulting work that I’m doing for an associate in Atlanta—looking into the potential cause of an accident that caused the expansion joints in some 16” diameter steel pipes to rupture in a Data Center chilled water system.

OK, you can stop yawning now…I won’t bore you with any more technical details, but aren’t you impressed?

I am, because my old brain cells, or at least the ones I haven’t killed already, are spinning around on their little synapses and neurons trying to remember things that I learned almost thirty years ago in my “Statics”, “Dynamics”, and “Deformable Bodies” classes at Georgia Tech.

Unlike the coursework taught in many classes inflicted on engineering undergraduates, I’ve actually managed to USE the knowledge gained in those fifteen quarter hours of torture many times in my professional career, but I have to admit that it’s been at least six years since I sat down and drew a free body diagram of a beam or column and it’s taken a few hours to clean the dust off of my skills.

Meanwhile, I’m also mentally preparing to make a long weekend trip up old US 17 (running parallel to I-95) between Brunswick and Savannah where we’re spending a long weekend.

There should be a number of great photo opportunities including old buildings along the route, not to mention the beauty of downtown Savannah where we’re staying a couple of nights near the river.

I’ve spent part of the evening cleaning up the hard drive on the laptop so that I have room to download photos in route.

While working this evening, the words to one of my favorite Allman Brother’s songs kept creeping into my head while I was waiting for the computer hard drive to finish defragmenting…

"Lord, I was born a ramblin' man
Tryin' to make a livin' and doin' the best I can
And when it's time for leavin'
I hope you'll understand
That I was born a ramblin' man"

You'll have to excuse me if my blogging is light for the next couple of days.

But then again, if something stupid happens in the news or I get all inspired over something I see , you’ll be the first to know.

Regards Y'all