August 11, 2017
Dear Everyone:
Many, many years ago, when I was working in the Company’s “Livermore”
facility, I had a lovely little fountain that stood on the far corner of
my desk. I had picked it up
at one of the many art festivals that covered the landscape back then.
It was made with a process called “cold glass sculpting” and consisted
of various pieces of glass fused together, with some loose pieces that
you could position however you liked.
There was a small water pump that brought water from the base up
to the top where is would cascade down over and through the glass
pieces. There was also a
small light, which the artisan provided for an added $10.00, that lit
the whole thing up from the inside.
Everyone who saw it was entranced, to the point that I had a template
email message, complete with a link to the artist’s website, sitting
ready in my account. All I
had to do was make a copy of it, plug in the person’s address, and shoot
it off to them.
Eventually, I had to dispense with the fountain, not because it stopped
working, but because I no longer had a desk on which to put it.
There was the usual reorganization at work; and the new manager assigned
me to a new supervisor. The
new supervisor decided to move her entire workgroup to "Pleasant Hill"
in order to “save money” by placing all of us into a small L-shaped room
that no one else would agree to rent.
She accomplished this by assigning each of us one wall of what would
have been a cubicle,
if it had two or three more walls.
She decided we didn’t need desks anymore since nearly all of our
work was done with computers.
The fact that the "Pleasant Hill" office was a good twenty miles
closer to her home than our previous location was, I’m sure, purely a
coincidence.
In any case, no more space for the fountain.
It stayed at home for a while, then I donated it to some worthy
organization.
I’ve had a fondness for fountains for as long as I can recall.
There’s something about the gentle cascade of water that is
soothing to the nerves. I’ve
made several attempts to have a fountain on my patio.
In one case, I found a “cheap” package that consisted of a pump and
several nozzles to control the flow of water.
You, the purchaser, added some kind of container for the pump and
water. I used the
bird bath that I
already had.
At its lowest setting, the pump sent the water gurgling up and into the
birdbath. Not much of a
cascade, but it seemed nice.
Some months later, I came across what was supposed to be a table-top
fountain that consisted of a base and ceramic sphere.
The water came out the top and slid down the sides of the sphere.
All I needed to add was a spare ceramic bowl to hold it in the
same bird bath and presto!
It even had tiny
LED
lights imbedded in the top so that it gave off a pretty light display at
night. The only problem was
you had to turn out all the lights to actually see it.
Over time I discovered that all of the outdoor fountains had one primary
disadvantage. They tended to
get clogged up with dust, dirt, leaves and, in the case of my patio,
tiny seeds from the many birdfeeders.
In fact, when the sphere fountain slowed down to a mere trickle,
I took it apart to find a seed that had not only been caught in the
pump’s filter; it had sprouted and was busily trying to grow into the
pump itself.
One by one, the fountains have stopped working, or become too much of a
nuisance to keep bothering with and found their way into the dumpster.
At which time I would suddenly discover the freedom of not
maintaining fountains.
Nevertheless, I continue to acquire small fountains from time to time,
always in the hope of finding one that will provide that quality of
tranquility that cascading water always seems to bring.
Or maybe I could just look in the
App Store.
Love, as always,
Pete
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