A Day in the Life of a Civil Engineer – Days 34 through 38

In an effort to catch up on my postings due to attending the APWA conference, I’m combining all last week into one post then following up tomorrow with the first two days of this week.

Days 34 through 36

Day 34 was spent attending the APWA conference in Denver. You can read a short summary of my day on the post before this one: 2011 APWA Conference – Day 2. There are a couple extra items I probably should have added to this post, but they really deserve a post by themselves so will write something up later this week.

Day 35 was also spent at the APWA conference – I also need to summarize this day on a separate blog post.

Day 36 was spent traveling back from Denver. Before leaving, I tried to take a lot of photos around the Capitol building. You can look through my photostream on Flickr here: Denver Colorado Photostream. There are quite a few photos illustrating streetscape elements, construction, and other design elements.

Day 37

Of course, my first day back at work after the conference was spent mostly catching up. I went though emails and met with my staff to discuss the status of certain projects. I also worked on preparing a status update for an STP project we have scheduled for FY2013.

Day 38

Finally on Friday, another engineer and I attended a “lunch and learn” about natural area management. It was presented by Karen Kase who works for Hampton, Lenzini, and Renwick. I’ve mentioned her before on this blog – Karen is part of a team at HLR managed by Erica Spolar that focuses on design and management of natural areas including wetlands, stormwater basins, etc. The information they shared with the group is important because our area has constructed these natural areas everywhere, but it appears that when they were put in, a management plan was not always created. So many of us are now working to address this component. And until now, there was little formal guidance on how to handle this aspect of these natural areas.

Our office also had scheduled the carpets to be cleaned over the weekend so all of us had to clear out our offices. You don’t realize how much stuff you have on the floor until you have to move it. Today I told another co-worker, I was starting to think maybe they did this to encourage us to minimize what we put on the floors!

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