We are an old pioneer town, established in 1857. We have a downtown that is three whole blocks long, although the stores are mostly empty now. Lots of the buildings, butted up against each other cheek by jowl, have the good old western style of false fronts. Such is the Newman Building.
The Newman Building has the misfortune of its cheek being by the jowl of the Academy Building. The Academy Building has a support group that wants to restore it and use it as an artistic anchor for an artsy end of the whole block. Poor Newman has no such support.
Some kind of jaws, huh? I discovered shortly after this that the decorative top of the building was not plaster as I had thought, but tin. The demolition took a long time to keep walls from falling the wrong direction.
This is the fire truck that cost us about $800K, so it is good to see it used. What for? There was no fire. I asked Chief Art and he said they would shoot water against the wall when it was ready to come down and the pressure would be enough to push it where they wanted it to go. Made sense to me.
Then I thought, "Hey, they are going to go up in the platform! I bet I could go up too! Aaaarrrrrt?" It was awesome.
The view was great! It was also as cold as a well diggers butt in the Klondike, with wind gusts of 90 or 100 mph. Give or take. I was glad I wore a jacket to work that day, and would have been simply ecstatic if it had been on my back instead of in the crew truck. Crap. Shiver, shiver, shiver.
Unfortunately, the cold wind seemed to upset a wasp the size of a Volkswagon enough that it tried to anchor itself into my arm to keep from blowing away. Dirty bastard.
Well, that was yesterday and this is today. I'm just not fond of change.
.jpg)
