2 Engineers Retired

I am guessing that everyone has a “Big Hill” in their lives.  That little area or thing that you know could be made better or easier but instead we put our heads down and power through rather than take through the trouble to fix it. Check out how high the markers are ! In our case, on our challenging road, it is the Big Hill.  In fact the Big Hill is what makes the road challenging.  The Big Hill is big (hence the name) but more importantly it is darned steep.  Too steep for the county road people to consider it a proper road.  Too steep to do without a bit of a running start.  Too steep to get up when icy.  Just plain steep. And worse than plain old steep the actual pitch of the road varied.  Now, for all the complaining that pretty much everyone does when they travel on this road, it is orders of magnitude better than it was when we built here.  Then the road was twisty in addition to steep and variable, and the surface was cru...

Well – we ran out of rocks… Okay – there are still rocks somewhere on our property but we ran out of ones that were close to the road and the right size, and obtainable without really scarring the landscape forever.  And we did get  layer along side the causeway on both sides – though the top was lower than the road surface.  From there the idea was to put on relatively coarse gravel out and over the layer of big rocks.  All was well ?  (maybe?) As it turned out all was not well.  We talked to the experts, our local sand and gravel guys, who know this stuff and they advised that more big rocks would be advantageous.  They can stack better and higher than the coarse gravel and will improve the stability.  So – we had them bring in another 3 truckloads of big rocks. A dump truck's worth of rocks to deal with It is way easier to build up edges with truckloads of rocks rather than trailer-loads of rocks.  No surprise I gu...

The Kingston area is well known for its prisons.  Some are tucked off on lesser roads or highways near to the city as one would expect – but there are a few that are, or were, right smack in town.   One of these is the historic Kingston Pen. Surprisingly lovely stonework (main gate as seen from Inside) The Kingston Pen is a magnificent and imposing looking structure on the waterfront within Kingston city limits.  Kingston Pen was British North America’s first penitentiary opening in 1835, about 30 years before Confederation, making it about 180 years old.  The initial name was the “Provincial Penitentiary of the Province of Upper Canada”. It initially held both men and women (though separated) and the youngest inmate was a mere 8 years old !!!   Of course that was a very long time ago.  Also a very long time ago one punishment – solitary I suppose – involved putting the inmate into a h...