Two Kids One Sandbox Original Vi
RT: My mother's family was originally from Colorado. She was born in 1917, her mother died when she was ten years old. They lived in Leadville, Colorado, an area of high elevation, harsh winters, and grandpa moved his two daughters and son to California to be with relatives in a warmer climate in 1927. My mother attended schools in the Porterville area. My dad's side of the family had come from Minnesota. They had farmed in Minnesota, had various other business enterprises including a sawmill. Had farmed on what was a large scale for the horse days, I guess, in North Dakota. And the climate in those days was pretty harsh. My grandmother's physician recommended that she move to a milder climate so they moved out to southern California in about 1910, I believe; before my father was born. And they had some land in the area that is now Pasadena, California [laughs], sold that and moved over into the growing orange production area of eastern Tulare County. That's where my dad was born and grew up.
Two Kids One Sandbox Original Vi
RT: Yeah, I was the engineer/assistant manager, if you will, at the Tulelake Irrigation District, just across the state line down here. I was there for a little over three years. It gave me boots on the ground with the local farming community; I got to actually see what they were doing. I was in charge of making sure that the water got delivered. A little bit of hydraulics, but there again, I wasn't developing anything new. I was following the footsteps of who I feel are kind of giants of a previous generation of the Bureau of Reclamation that had some fabulous engineers that built this project, starting in the days when they did it with teams of horses. As part of my duties, I would go around and design and rebuild replacement structures that were then getting to be half a century old. So I'm out there with, in those days, optic surveying equipment, saying, "man, these guys were good." You follow a line down a canal for a couple of miles and you hit it within a hundredth of a foot. "These guys were good." Using the tools and techniques that they had at hand, they built a fabulous project here. In retrospect, the only thing they didn't have was today's perspective on societal needs. It was designed to do a limited number of things very well. As soon as we said, "and it should also provide," let's say, "these environmental benefits," the project became strained at that point. People are fond of saying, "oh, the water's over-allocated or over-promised" or whatever, that wasn't a fault of the original designers.
RT: I've led a sheltered life in a way. I've never had any kids; I've always been about my work. I've never been fired from a job, I've only applied for a very few of them, and I've held them for as long as I cared to.
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Looks great to me, kids. I made some edits and suggestions (the suggestions mess up the copy, sorry, I forgot how to imbed comments), and the only other thing I will add is in the section Perspective, 3rd para: these look like direct quotes, so cite the two quotes used. A fine job, IMO Aleta Curry 23:32, 5 June 2010 (UTC)