Thursday was pretty low key, on the way to lunch at pizza hut we saw them replacing the railroad ties with parking lot blocks. It was kind of amazing how quickly they tore through this. They covered between two subway stops a day which is not a bad pace. This involved tearing out the old ties and pushing the cement ones back under the rails.

Throwing people at a problem might not help in software engineering but it manages to wreck a construction problem (at least for the short term). They were not even using really advanced tools. Basically they would push a lever under the spike and lean on the lever to pull it up. If it was proving problematic they would bash at it with a rock.

For fun at night we burned ear candles. I had been excited about this since Yachi told me she was bringing these. The headphones I have are the ones that sit way down in your ear canal and I feel like they are causing wax to build up in my ears so I thought the candle would clear this all up. Turns out it just kind of burns your head and does not make any noticeable difference in the wax.