Linda and Yoshiko took me out for a goodbye lunch, just the three of us, today. We decided to walk out to Papa-Razzi, just across the main street from our building, but they were closed for renovations. There’s another place they knew, Cafe Escadrille, a little further. We walked down there. Wow! I’m not used to being treated to lunch. Normally I get the check, not for work things of course, but there are lots of times we go to restaurants with our (grown up) kids and, you know, I’m the dad, it’s my job.
On the way back a power shovel on the construction site across the side street that our building is on was setting a big mat down over the next blast site. Linda hasn’t been watching the blasting. There are three warning whistles five minutes before a blast, and one whistle one minute before it. When I hear them, I walk down to the end of our building closest to the site and join the group of people watching. Yosh says that one blast happened during a meeting she was in at that end of the building, and a big boulder went up in the air. Usually I just see the mats — and these are multi-ton mats made of old tires, probably twelve or fifteen feet square — rippling the way a blanket does when you’re spreading it out on a bed. Today’s blast wasn’t as spectacular as the one Yosh saw, but was the closest to us of any I’ve seen. The mats off to the right of the blast area went up first, and then, a couple of hundred milliseconds later, one closer to us lifted eight feet up in the middle. It was a very satisfactory explosion.