Snubbin the Rooster...

Howdy, friends and fam.

I'm feeling much better today. No headache and although I'm still crappin like a goose, I'm not doing it nearly as often!

Today was going to be the day we were supposed to do what was planned for yesterday. I get to the site an extra half hour early, only for the work to start up an hour late. At 8:30, the hammering starts off. I won't bore with you with geotech lingo, but for an hour, they're driving the pile, then monkeying around with it...tweaking this, tightening that, etc. Well, at 9:15 or so, they had a whopping 3 meters of pile (approximately 10 feet for all of the non-metric folks out there) and were starting to get a hang of things when a phone call comes in..."Leave the beach area immediately, collect your belongings and get off the site." It seems that the local labor unions weren't happy about the project and were coming to "protest". When one thinks of unions protesting, picket lines generally come to mind. Not so much here. Two weeks ago, they had a protest that consisted of a group of angry union folk driving a pickup truck THROUGH the site fence, overturning tables, and destroying equipment all to the background melody of shotguns and rifles firing in the air. This time around, the site managers planned ahead and had about 100 riot police on standby, carrying shields, gas masks and AK-47s. Pretty cool group of dudes. We bailed from the site and hung chilly at the hotel, playing cards and watching bad Latino music videos for about 3 hours before we got the call to return to the site. Apparently, when the band of marauders approached the site and saw all the five-0 sporting machine guns and riot gear, they pulled a 180 and headed back to the union barracks. By the end of the day, the pile was in the ground, albeit half crooked, and the entire gang made it home safe and sound.

What does all this have to do with "snubbin the rooster", you might be wondering right about now. Nothing yet, but I'm getting there. So, a post or two ago, I mentioned that I've been having trouble sleeping. Well last night, I had a great night of sleep going until about 4 am...that's when it started...cock-a-doodle-doo...over and over and over again. A warped-sounding cock-a-doodle-doo. The best way I know how to describe it is to picture a normal rooster cock-a-doodle-doing like we all know and love from the cartoons, but instead, the rooster is snorting it out like a pig, but the pig is sick. Horrible. Absolutely horrible. This went on straight from o4:00 to the time I was supposed to wake up at 06:00. I got a sense that the rooster was getting tired, but that joker didn't stop. Then after about 10 or 15 minutes he got his other rooster buddies fired up so it became a chorus of roosters singing their song like a broken record. I gotta give that rooster an 'A' for being punctual, but if I ever meet that son-of-a-%$@!* face to face, he's going to have more to cock-a-doodle-doo about than just the sunrise. I'm convinced that Alice in Chains wrote their song "Rooster" while staying in room 305 of El Condado. It all makes perfect sense now, and here I used to think you had to be entranced in a drug-induced stooper to make sense of them songs. All I know is that if Mr. Rooster keeps up his trix, Mr. Zajac is heading back to El Christopher Columbo where I can handle the occasional late night city street car alarm or even the occasional sound of gunfire...not a 2 hour marathon of roosters squawking.

Wishing you all a peaceful night's sleep.

Scotty