Wednesday, January 21, 2009

What I did during the fall semester home.

So I know this is quite belated, but I am doing it anyways... This past fall I had 2 jobs. My main job was working for the City and County of Broomfield in the Parks Department for the Horticulture Division. I had such a blast. I got to drive and operate many pieces of equipment.
The first and primary thing that I drove was a Ford F-350 with a hydraulic lift bed.
My Pretty Truck :)


The next thing that I "drove" more like steered... I wasn't the one controlling the speed or the brakes, just the direction. Is what we called the CASE. The CASE is a front end loader pretty much. It was really fun to be able to see what construction workers saw when they were up that high.
Ok so towards the beginning of October we found out that we needed to clear a space to put solar panels for our building. We also needed to lay sod in one of our parks, So we cleared a spot in front of our building where the panels were going to go. Our foreman decided that it would be a massive project for our division to do. So we rented a sod cutter, because one just wasn't enough, and the one we had didn't work very well either, and we cut, rolled, loaded, unloaded,and laid sod. It was a pretty intense workout. My forearms had tons of little cuts on them, they stung so bad! So after we got all the sod that we needed for our parks, and people's houses and such we needed to clear up all the little strips of sod left from cutting and the sod that was never cut, so what better way than to get out a tractor, skidster (bobcat), and the dingo. All of the seasonals in my division were trained on the tractor and the skidster, I was the only one that really used the dingo. So here are pictures of the bobcat, and the tractor that I drove and operated.

I was also able to drive and operate a trash truck! It is a Ford F-55o Diesel engine. I first learned how to use it because it was the easiest way to get rid of the roses that we were chopping down for the winter. We didn't want to get stabbed by them 40 million times. Then after we did the long stretches of roses we went and worked on a shrub bed along side the Aspen Creek fence line on Aspen St. We didn't want to take lots of truck loads so... we used our "chip" truck with the chipper attached. I sadly wasn't able to get a picture of it, because it was being used. I learned how to back it up into the parking space, and realized that it isn't the best idea to take it into narrow, small parking lots. It takes a long time and a lot of patience to try to manuver yourself around and ya, not the brightest move on my part. This truck is an F- 350 Diesel engine.The trash truck...

My second job wasn't as exciting, I worked at the Flatirons Mall in The Children's Place. Not too exciting... I liked my other job way better.
Hopefully I was able to catch you up to at least December 2008 in my life. I will hopefully post more often.