On your mark, get set...

Early breakfast. 

Put up the circus tent along with 14 other family members.

Poked around at a few antique stores in Lake Odessa, Michigan

Railroad bike

Bug sprayer with glass reservoir and soldered construction.

Hay tongs?  The lengths of the linkages are a well tuned mechanism.

Boom sticks.

I don't run into original 25-20 and 32-20 Winchesters very often.

This tooled into the gas station while I was filling up the minivan.  I must agree with Richard Prior in Silver Streak, this vehicle, "is a piece of...well, you know."

A poster of Grandpa Jake.  This is the front panel of the bar.

I got a surprise update on my cousin's employment status.  One of the upper mandarins...the kind with a title that is more confusing than informative...was gaining headcount and needed more square footage.  She informed the contract programmers that they were going to have to move.  My cousin (the team leader) told her that they would talk it over and give her a plan in the morning.

Apparently, that was not the right answer.  After twenty years he was fired the next morning.  Apparently contractors are an expendable commodity.  My cousin's post mortem was that he did not exhibit the proper degree of obsequious respect that the mandarin demanded as her due.   I have noticed that people who have actual job content do not fixate on markers and artifacts of status.  Just saying.

Seeing the handwriting on the wall, two other co-workers resigned.  So the department lost three-of-the-four contractors who knew how to make the creaky, hobbling, legacy computer systems talk to Perl and the other bright, shiny DB front ends.

His new job has the same pay, same benefits and one-third of the work load.  The new job does not have 50 year old Cobol applications and 7 track, asynchronous tape storage devices.  Maybe the mandarin's department can pick up that job content.  Not!