architects, missiles, and bowling

I got paid to not be on Whidbey Island for half of this week. Thursday, I was fully intending to take a vacation day to head down to Seattle for Ryan's intern presentation to his firm on his Rural Studio project. After asking my boss for the day off to do that, I was informed that since it was an architectural presentation I wouldn't need to take vacation days and that it would just count as training. So I got paid to get a free lunch and watch Ryan's presentation. Just some of the perks of my job :) It was a really great presentation and I'm really glad I was able to be there. There were probably about 50 people or so there from the firm watching the presentation, and they were all really impressed and interested in the project.

Friday all of the Officers from the 4 Navy Bases in Washington were getting together for the day at the Kitsap submarine base. We met up and went on a tour of a facility that they are currently constructing on the base to store big bombs and missiles and such. It was only about 1/4 of the way done, but when it is completed it'll be about the size of a Walmart and buried about 20 feet underground. It was amazing how much steel and concrete was going into the structure to make it safe to store explosives. There is only one entrance to the underground storage, and it couldn't be any larger than a 5' x 9' door. If there was anything explosive that required a bigger space to get into the building, we have a deal with the Russians that they would be aloud to come inspect it. Since we don't want the Russians to see what's going to be inside this facility, we made sure we could prove to them that there was nothing larger that 5x9 going inside of it. Another interested element of the building is the escape route. Since there is only on entrance into the huge structure, there is also an emergency escape route. It is a rather steep tube filled with marbles that leads to the ground level outside. In the event of an emergency, the inhabitants could pull a cord letting out all of the marbles and crawl up the tube to escape the building. I'm not sure if i fully understand the function of the marbles, but apparently they have wasted thousands of marbles to test the escape. After our tour and a lunch a few of us went bowling. Having not bowled in quite some time, I was pretty impressed with my ability to win!

Back in Seattle Friday night, we went out with several people from Ryan's firm and ended up bowling again. To my surprise, I did quite well again, winning one game and coming in second on the other :) I think perhaps I should stop while I'm ahead now.