So join the queue, me and you

[austin_dern]

I too want to get back to the Michigan Women's State Pinball Championship or whatever its correct sequence of words is. I keep saying it different. But there is a tiny bit of news about my upcoming transfer out of the building I'm in, part of the reorganization of state government announced back in August. The reorganization caught every manager by surprise, you'll remember, and they've been trying to work out a plan for who should go where and do what. They had recently promised a schedule by the end of December which didn't pan out.

Well. There's some news. While things are still being organized, apparently, they have space at my future office ready. It's a less convenient spot, one not in walking distance of home. But I'd done a test drive out there and found it's not horribly far away and I can go and come back by highway or surface street. And! There's a plan to have a field trip so we can all go and see the new facility and meet people there and stuff, first week of February, coincidentally the morning of the current office's lunchtime chili cook-off.

There's no real question that I'm going; fortunately so is the business analyst who's been overseeing both the projects I've been working on. My current boss advised me that at some point they'll open up listings for hiring into the regular state-employee system for this and I should jump on that if I want to be placed in a more durable spot. (Likely at lower pay, but with state benefits, which would be worth a good bit.)

So it's still not anything concrete, but at least it's assurance that this alleged move --- which as of next month will have been pending for the majority of my time here --- has some possibility of coming to anything.

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Now for pictures from a thing not moving: the cars at Ghostwood Estates at Kennywood. Instead, we moved and photographed so much. For example:

Opposite the track from the hearse is this graveyard set, complete with the broken fence to look like teeth.

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Looking back at the hearse which, turns out, to be only half a vehicle.

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The lantern-bearer is shocked by this discovery!

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Couple more skeletons hanging around, waiting for the last zaps from the riders.

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Little vase set in the oversized telephone nook. I think it flops back and forth if you hit the target here.

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Couple of skeletons sitting up beside a car that's not in service. I don't know if it was there waiting for maintenance or if it was the default standby car to put into service just in case of the most busy day ever.

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Trivia: The 25th of January, 1974, NASA headquarters directed the Johnson Space Center and the Marshall Space Flight Center to be prepare an alternate mission plan, involving a Skylab revisit, in case the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project were not flown, but that they were to use a minimum of effort and funding in planning and preparing the alternate mission. Source: Skylab: A Chronology, Roland W Newkirk, Ivan D Ertel, Courtney G Brooks. NASA SP-4011. (Besides budget-cutting, NASA had the not-ridiculous fear that having too solid an alternate plan would be taken by the Soviets as a signal they didn't really want to do the international flight, encouraging them to cancel.)

Currently Reading: The Six: The Untold Story of America's First Women Astronauts, Loren Grush.