Life inside Salem

Life inside Salem today, deep inside one of those marble ediface buildings (only I think ours, dating to the 70's is actually concrete, to save money no doubt over the Vermont marble used on some)..

It is take and grab day. No not as in the "grab and go" deli in the capitol, but when offices move, all the "surplus" stuff is lurking around in the halls, in the basement. The guy from the front desk who shall remain nameless showed me the stores. Wow, like Christmas! I found some choice parcels. Was it like Christmas, or was it more like shoplifting? Not sure, but it was fun, and in plain sight of the facilities folks too (which sort of took some of the fun out of it).

I get what a "non load bearing wall" means. OK so I heard that term on "Sleepless in Seattle", which is not exactly This Old House as far as learning construction terms. But in my old office they built walls in like 1/2 day. Metal studs (not the construction dudes, but the wall things), fill them with very thick looking insulation (it is labeled thermal and sound insulating, and - is formadehyde free too!). Then I believe they do put sheet rock over this. It is all very quick and presto changeo you have instant walls. I had no idea. But needless to say - these are *not* load bearing walls.

We have freed more parking spaces for patrons (customers? clients? claimants?), by kicking out the state employees that used to park there. Let them eat cake someplace else. Free the parking spaces and they will come! Well, I have hardly seen anyone park there -never ever more than 2 cars at one time. Maybe the word is not yet out.

Several of us in our newly "restacked" office now look out onto a lovely terrace (and closely looking might see the capitol, though for me a fir tree will, in any season, block this view, which is probably as it should be, more on that in a later post no doubt since I will be staring at it for a very very long time). So instead of facing a musty cobwebby terrace, or for some who were previously landlocked, we now face this terrace with potted trees and everything. My friend thinks I am stepping up, well maybe, just a different view. But I do understand my colleague's view on watching the trees and spacing out. When the trees are moving as when fall and rain moves in they captivate me.

I'm sure you could hypnotize state workers to do your bidding if you could find the right cypher sequence to tgigger the desired behavior.

Maybe the next Gov will need this? Or, maybe a project for future NSA cryptographers who may be reading?