Had a best friend in high school that I rented a house with my first year of college in '74 studying for a degree in metrics. He moved to Alaska the following summer and never heard from him again. I moved from MT to UT, received my UT license in '85. Decided in '87 to get my MT license for posterity sake (in hopes of moving back to MT one day) and registered to take the MT reciprocity test proctored at the UT testing center. Walked in to take my MT test and sat behind the back of a head glowing with red hair. As soon as he spoke, I knew it was Bob. He was taking his UT LS exam but was living in Illinois at the time and had flown in for the day just to take the test. Both of us had no idea the other went into the land surveying profession. Some of you might know Bob Yarborough from his occasional postings back on the old RPLS site. Bob, unfortunately, died of cancer a few years back, but I know there was some divine intervention going on that brought us back in touch. I was able to share his journey while he battled the cancer that eventually took him.
The biggest for me was sitting in my truck, on a military base, about 15 minutes after turning in my notice with my supervisor, effective in two weeks.
I had no idea what I was going to do next, only knew I couldn't continue doing what I was doing, was so burned out on construction layout and 80 hour weeks I couldn't string together two cognizant thoughts. This was 2008, and I don't have to tell any of you who were there what the job market was at that time.
My cell phone rings, is a guy I'd worked with in the past, whose company was in bankruptcy, irony of ironies a contract they'd bid on had been approved, was linked to his license, and even after being made aware of his situation still said it was his if he wanted it. One of the items he owned outright at that point was a total station, data collector and survey setup suitable to run two crews.
He hadn't talked to me in 3 years, didn't know what I was doing or where, but needed someone to train him to use the equipment. In two weeks, when the contract began. At the same military base I was sitting on at that moment.
We worked together for the next 9 months, one of the most enjoyable employments I've ever had, in the midst of one of the worst markets in my lifetime.
For the record, it was something we had both been praying about for a while.
summer of '94 I was working on a big ranch north of espanola, nm. would go into santa fe on the weekends to hang at the plaza and score some, um, combustible refreshments. one day some tourist guy is meandering around with his basset hound, and I decided to go say hi on account of having grown up with a couple of basset hounds in the house. we start chatting (him- the older, extremely creased and pressed gentleman and me- the disheveled, hippy ranch hand looking to buy weed). he mentioned he was from ohio, but had gone to school his freshman year in Sherman, Texas. wow, that's where i'm about to start my senior year (if I don't just bag it and stay out here driving fence posts in my zen quest). "yeah, my roommate that year was this guitar player hippy guy- Andy Williams, like the singer." I yelled over to my girlfriend at the time: "hey, dear, wanna meet your dad's freshman roommate?"
I once traversed the perimeter of 40 acres. It closed flat. That's what I call a "Series of self compensating errors".
Nate's post above reminded me of a road acquisition survey I made in days when we used a 200 foot steel band (chain).
There was widening both sides on a long stretch of road and I traversed the new boundaries, down south side and back up north side.
Perfect close.
However the total distance of road acquisition differed by 100 feet to the road chainage.
I did a quick check across a straight to discover I'd dropped 100 feet on both sides of road at about the same place.
Had we not had a road traverse that mistake may still be there.
A couple years ago we went to NYC during sring break to visit my cousins. One of the days we met up for lunch in Brooklyne with some old friends from Oregon who now live in Connecticut. Afterwards we're all walking along this nondescript side street and a gal stops our daughter and they chat for 5 minutes or so. We wait for her to catch up and ask what that lady wanted. Allison says "oh that was just Mrs. Jones". Her high school French teacher that year! Neither knew of the other's NYC vacation plans. To me the most remarkable thing was Allison's indifference to such a chance meeting on the other side of the continent in a city of 8 million. Of course, she was a high school sophomore at the time and there's nothing more cool or clueless than a high school sophmore.
paden cash, post: 325468, member: 20 wrote: The plum pudding incident in your link gave me the willies...
So did the first one in the examples ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchronicity#Examples ) about the scarab beetle when Jung was analyzing Kent.
My friend's grandparents supposedly met under these circumstances. He was from KY and she was from Idaho. She came from a Wyoming pioneer family and of course they were staunch supporters of equal rights for women. She wanted to go to college so she went to the University of Colorado Denver (this is 1930's). She ended up travelling to the University of KY in Lexington for a conference or academic meet or some such thing. He was enrolled at UK and they had a chance encounter there, I don't recall exactly what the nature of it was, just met for a few moments one evening. Anyway, a couple of years later, he joined the Army Air Corps before WWII and got stationed in Denver. They got set up on a blind date and married soon after.
In my former employment I worked for the government until they closed us down.
Years later I was doing a job for a client that was expanding his business and I saw a metal plan drawer cabinet outside collecting dust etc.
I asked if they wanted it, No, so it came home with me.
Lo and behold, I open the drawers to clean it up and inside was a hand written card from the drawer front of my making.
I thought the cabinet looked familiar, and here was the proof.
It's still in use for old maps, large photos, craft paper etc.
Out of all the galaxies in the universe, and planets in this galaxy, over the billions of years Earth has been here, you and I are living on the same planet at the same time. What are the odds of that?:-D
I don't know why this thread popped up on my computer this morning, but it got me to thinking about the odds of this occurring.
My son is a fairly good bowler and bowls in league play weekly, which is not unusual in itself. What is unusual is the particular scores he had for a two consecutive weeks and I have been asking if anyone can compute the odds of it happening. He bowls the identical scores two consecutive weeks in the same order he did the previous week with his second game being a 300 each week. The 300's are no fluke for him as he has almost 50 of them.
Can anyone that knows anything about bowling tell me the odds of this happening or have ever heard of anything like that. Out of 1600 pins falling, it would only take one to not fall or one more falling for this to not have happened.
Ed Killough, NCPLS
I lived in Fortine Montana as a kid. Our pastor, Pastor Smith, lived a few houses down. Fortine is tiny so everybody pretty much lives a few houses down one direction or the other. He and his family left the church and went on missionary work overseas somewhere.
Mom and dad split and we went with mom and moved to West Virginia thenMontana (fortine again) then Tennessee, and back to West Virginia. I then left West Virginia and went to visit my dad in Alabama for a 'couple weeks' Which turned into four years, not by choice, but that is a different story. We had then moved to a different part of Montana, Deerlodge, back to Alabama, Birmingham, then Mississippi, Jackson, back to Alabama and then back to Montana, Greycliff.I believe by this time (We moved so much it's hard to keep them in order) and were over in South Dakota on a trip to sell knickknacks and the like at flea markets. We were at Mount Rushmore. Just as we got there and stepped out of the vehicle, here comes Pastor Smith with his family. They were just leaving. A chance meeting for just a few moments. All the places and all the moves and we run into them at Mount Rushmore where we were all just visiting at almost the same moment.
As a side note when I sat for my survey license I had to list every school I went to in order. I asked if I could just write in the last school I attended but they wanted them all. It took me a couple days and conversations with mom to get all 20 of them in order. What difference it made to getting a license I 'll never know. But I doubt I could recall them all again.
I also had a near encounter while in Iraq. I was on my third deployment and was thinking about moving back to Montana when I got home so I looked up an old friend, Bart Loge. He was the son of the pastor that took over for Pastor Smith from Fortine Montana. I tracked Bart down online and he emailed me back and told me he had just finished his deployment to Iraq and was stateside. Turns out we were on the same base at the same time for about two weeks but we never ran into each other. If I had tracked him down just a few weeks earlier we could have met up. But it was still amazing that we both went into the military and were in the same place at the same time. Even though we never ran into each other.
What are the odds of marrying someone with your same name? Not a nickname, the real name. I know of a case where Miss Billie Joe married Mr. Billie Joe. One of them could have been Billy or William Joseph and the other Jo, but not in this case. There is a fairly short list of likely possibilities where both the male and female names are spelled identically. And, for those, one gender are the other won't have very many. Names like Cleo, June, Evelyn, Jewel and Shirley. Over the last 20 years, though, many 'new' names are used for both genders thus leading to great confusion. Morgan, Taylor, Ashton, Aidan and Skylar come to mind.
From K-12 my family moved 6 times and I attended 8 schools. That was far too many, IMO.
I know what you mean. I went to 18 different schools the other two were just repeats of the same schools. I dropped out in tenth because I was on my fourth school that year and had enough of it all I was taking more difficult classes and I'd go to one school and was being taught stuff I'd already been through but not taught other stuff that they had already gone through so I was a mess to keep up with. I got my GED instead. My shortest time at any single school was a week and a half. Then we moved again. That was Sheppard Montana. Except the school I dropped out of. I skipped a half day my first day of that one and only went back two more days after that.
...looking at the same post. Good one Bill!
My first wife and my current wife have the same birthday. Kinda strange but at least I never forget it.
When I was a kid back in the 80's we lived in southeastern New Mexico. My moms family all lived in Colorado. She was close with her parents but didn't really talk to her brother much. No real conflict between them just busy lives and lots of miles seperating them. Anyway I remember one day going to Dairy Queen and bumping into a young woman my mom recognized. Turns out it was her brothers daughter and she lived in the same town we did and neither of them had any idea that the other lived in that little town until they ran into each other at DQ. What are the odds of that 500 miles away from where they were from?
I once had a quarter of a mile turn out to be 1320.002 feet long!
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Nate The Surveyor, post: 339417, member: 291 wrote: I once had a quarter of a mile turn out to be 1320.002 feet long!
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I've found ONE section corner in all my years that turned out to be a 90å¡00'00" angle. While each section line radiating from that corner was not anywhere near 2640', the angle averaged exactly ninety after our usual 8 to 10 repetitions. I've never seen another one.
