The Day After

This was one of those days when it feels good to start slow.  SOWERs are usually early-starters, with the whole group coming together for devotions at 7:30am.  So breakfast and showers and all that stuff needs to be done before then.  Today’s breakfast was around 8:30.

Very little agenda today except get the laundry done, which we started right away.  We decided to have another go at the Cotton Gin Museum, and get in on the 2pm guided tour.  So we finished the laundry in the morning and we were there to send off one couple who left, circling in prayer and saying goodbyes.  With their big fifth-wheel gone, the place looks even emptier.

After lunch we drove to Burton and the museum was actually open.  This time, for the guided tour, there was a rather large crowd, so the cotton gin building was rather packed during the tour.

It would be interesting to see this one in operation, as they fire it up once a year in April for the Cotton Gin festival, ginning  a couple 500 pound bales of cotton.  It is still powered by the 1925 Bessemer engine, a two-cylinder behemoth that occupies the lean-to on one end of the building.  This engine is started by a blowtorch and compressed air, the compressor being powered by a Model-T engine in the same room.

It’s obvious that the volunteers are invested in this place.  They either worked here or are descended from someone who worked here.  Our guide was a fountain of information, sometimes so much information that it ran in several directions at once and made it a bit difficult to piece together.

But it was a fascinating tour and my engineering brain, after years of working with tiny circuits and software code, has a little difficulty imagining someone designing this enormous mass of pulleys, belts, machinery, and structure and keep it operating in a way that achieves something meaningful.  Perhaps I should have been born 100 years earlier. Designing and operating this stuff would have been fun.  And certainly easier to see. Putting a ten thousand transistors on the head of a pin takes lots of expensive equipment and you still can’t see it.  This mechanical marvel is easy to see and it it obvious when something goes wrong.  The flailing belt or pieces flying are a pretty good indication.  Nowadays, it’s just a little puff of smoke, if even that.

On the other hand, these guys worked in blistering heat, breathing cotton lint dust, and something going wrong can take your arm off. So I guess I had it pretty good.

We arrived back at camp in time to make a quick dinner before heading off to the conference room where several of us watched the movie The Long Long Trailer with Lucille Ball.  This movie gets funnier the longer we are on the road.  We recognize and can identify with many of the scenes in the movie.

Tomorrow we pull up stakes and head towards Galveston.  Since we are in the area, we booked a cruise out of Galveston, and will be at sea for seven days, stopping at Cozumel, Belize City, and Roatan.  So these updates may be a bit spotty for that time period because of no internet and no cell service.  Supposedly there is WiFi available on the ship for about twenty-five bucks a day, but, for that price, we will just go dark for a while.