Reading

It's June 13 at about ten in the morning, and the temperature is 48 degrees and raining. Been this way all weekend.

I finished reading A Walk Across America. I enjoyed it, but the last two chapters were just awful. The author is a terrible writer, but I overlooked that because I was really fascinated by his adventure. Then, surprisingly, this church-avoiding, long-haired, earth-loving hippie type "finds God" when he drops into a mega-revival in Alabama. It was all a little too suspicious and weird, as were the events the followed. For the tale of his adventures, I'd give it 4/5 stars. For everything else - his lack of writing skills, his inability to tell a decent story, and his weirdness to name a a few things - a mere 1/5 stars. He's got a second book which he wrote after walking through Louisiana, Texas, New Mexico and ultimately settling for a time in Ouray, Colorado, but it got worse reviews than his first. He's also got a book about Alaska, which more readers seemed to enjoy, and a fourth about some other country which I didn't pay much attention to. I'm not sure I'll be reading anything else by Peter Jenkins.

Seeing as it's cold and rainy - perfect for curling up in my pj's by the fire with a book - I started the next one, The Blind Watchmaker by Richard Dawkins. Dawkins is a very accomplished writer whose books focus on evolution and genetic inheritance. The Blind Watchmaker is one of, if not the, most popular of his books. It's been waiting on my bookshelf for a long time, but I tend to buy books faster than I can consume them. I'm trying to resist the urge to go buy a few new ones today since I've got four or five on backlog at the moment. Sometimes I wish I could lock myself away in a remote and cozy log cabin in the snowy depths of winter and do little more than get lost in my books for a solid week.

FB

Facebook is dead to me. It was really cool reacquainting with old classmates and others from my distant past, but now that the new has worn off and we've all had our OMG-I-CAN'T-BELIEVE-IT'S-YOU moments with each other, my news feed has mostly been reduced news flashes about baby poop, 3rd grade baseball games, shameless solicitations, and way, WAY too much crap about Jesus. I've learned a valuable lesson in all this: if you aren't still in my life today, there's probably a very good reason.

The past week has been warm - about fifteen degrees above average. We've had temps in the 90's. Boulder Creek normally runs at 100-300 CFS (cubic feet per second), but this week it was overflowing its banks at almost 1,000 CFS! The heat caused rapid snowmelt in the mountains. A bridge collapsed just up the canyon from Boulder, creating an unstable dam which collected water and threatened to send a wall of water rushing toward town. Fortunately it was cleared and all is well. A cool front has since come through and water levels are dropping a little as the melt slows. Saturday the high is only going to be in the low 50's. Nice!

That's all for now. I'm hoping to finish reading A Walk Across America before the weekend comes to a close. I'm halfway through it. It's a story of a guy who, in 1974, decided to walk down the East Coast, through the South, and on to the Gulf of Mexico instead of getting a job after he finished college. Just him and his dog. Pretty amazing, the things he experienced. Makes one think. I'll probably comment more when I finish.

G'night!

Insanity

Do you ever feel like life, or at least self-awareness, is really just some cruel game dreamed up by a bored god looking for some cheap entertainment?

Today I learned that there is talk - serious talk, mind you - of detonating a nuclear weapon in the Gulf of Mexico to plug the oil leak. For the record the American government is saying no way, but there are plenty of people who seem to think this is a good idea.

Summer is here. We're actually having record heat this spring, and the rivers are overflowing their banks because the snowpack in the mountains is melting so quickly. I've been passing the time with travel. A couple of weeks ago Gerard and I spent five days in southwestern South Dakota, exploring the Black Hills, Mt. Rushmore, the Badlands, Deadwood and other cool places. It's beautiful, South Dakota. The wildlife there is extraordinary - our first morning we weren't a hour out of camp when we saw herds of free roaming bison, pronghorn, mule deer, wild turkey. Later in the day we saw bighorn sheep and a mountain goat. Unfortunately, however, South Dakota doesn't think native predators are as good for tourism as herds of bison, so they've quietly allowed the grizzly bear and the wolf to remain exiled. That means humans have to round up some of the bison every year and ship them off to meat packing plants.

Last weekend we hiked about ten miles through a mountain ghost town called Homestead Meadows. The decaying remains of cabins dot tens of hundreds of acres of open meadow and woodland near Mountain Lion Gulch. It's easy up there to forget about florescent lighting, office cubicles, artificial deadlines, Sara Palin and nuking the seas to plug oil spills.

Tonight when I close my eyes, I will go home.

Happy Birthday

He turned thirty-six last Sunday
In his hair he found some gray
But he still ain't changed his lifestyle
He likes it better the old way
So he grows a little garden in the back yard by the fence
He's consuming what he's growing nowadays in self defense
He get's out there in the twilight zone
Sometimes when it just don't make no sense

He gets off on country music
Cause disco left him cold
He's got young friends into new wave
But he's just too friggin' old
And he dreams at night of Woodstock and the day John Lennon died
How the music made him happy and the silence made him cry
Yeah he thinks of John sometimes
And he has to wonder why

He's an old hippie and he don't know what to do
Should he hang on to the old
Should he grab on to the new
He's an old hippie...his new life is just a bust
He ain't trying to change nobody
He's just trying real hard to adjust

You're Kidding

Mom's supposed to be flying up to see me today for my birthday. She gets to the airport this morning in plenty of time, to find no one that can help her do curbside checkin like she always does. She manages to find one rude person to tell her that Continental has moved to a different terminal. There, she finds no one curbside. She tries to check in at a kiosk, but it won't accept her information. Again she flags down someone who clearly can't be bothered, but who puts forth minimal effort to help mom. "You're doing it wrong!" the attendant snaps. The attendant tries, and the kiosk will not accept her information. After some runaround, they figure it out and the attendant tells mom there will be a $25 charge for her single bag. It's a new fee. So she tries to pay in cash and the attendant snaps that she can't give change. After another 15 minute ordeal mom proceeds to security. At security it was another long string of fairly mundane but typical hassles. By the time she gets to the gate the plane is gone.

She explains what happened and the attendant says they'll put her on standby on the next flight, but gave mom the wrong gate number. Eventually she gets to the right gate and verifies she's "on the list." She waits. After everyone is boarded, even the other people who were waiting on standby, she is ignored. She goes to the counter and inquires only to find that the new attendant can't find her name on the list. An argument ensues and mom produces her receipt from the last gate which finally gets her on the plane. The plane is locked and ready to go, when they shut things down, open it up, and call her name. They need to see her ID! After that 15 minute delay, the'yre finally ready to take off. The plane has started to taxi when it dies on the runway. They sit for 20 minutes, announce the plane is dead, haul it back to the terminal, unload everyone, and say it'll be another hour before they have more information.

This morning my water heater died, and it's supposed to be cold and rainy the entire weekend.

Happy birthday to me.

Life Lessons

I think I'm finally running out of steam when it comes to Facebook. I've reconnected with just about everyone from my past. In general, I find most people aren't as excited about reconnecting as I was. It's disappointing. I'm also starting to remember why I was so eager to get the hell out of Huffman.

Maybe there's a darn good reason why people from my past who are no longer in my life are, well, no longer in my life.

I'm trying to understand why an old friend would claim to be so excited to reconnect, send me all kinds of wonderful emails about how much I am loved, say "call me!" and then not return any of my phone calls going on two weeks now. I know these people are still alive because they've posted on Facebook a few times since. Yeah, it's happened with more than one.

Then there' s slew of people who friend me, but won't respond to any of my messages.

Of my old high school friends, there are several who grew up to be really jaded. I can't imagine going through life with such a bad attitude.

But maybe I'm just the weird one. Or maybe I'm just weird in my own special way. I love the idea of having a community of close friends, but the older I get the more I feel like most friends are really just paying lip service. And maybe they really aren't even doing it on purpose. Maybe they're just too wrapped up in their own issues to pay too much attention to a friendship. I know that's been true of me before.

Tonight Gerard and I went out in Denver for a couple of hours, just to try and meet some people. I get so frustrated and tense in crowds, especially crowds of strangers, that I need to be drinking to enjoy it. Being Sunday night, I only had one beer. I can safely say that the bar scene hasn't changed since I first started going 20 years ago. I, however, have. We left.

On the drive back to our quiet place in Boulder I reflected silently to myself on the past week. Side note: I don't think I've mentioned it at all on my blog, but my old classmate Kelly Danaher was killed one week ago today. I've spent the better part of the week mourning with my classmates via Facebook. I was terribly, terribly bummed out by it and only now am I starting to somewhat get out of the funk I was in. I wrote an open letter which was probably entirely too mushy and posted it on Facebook, but it helped me get my head clear. I actually got a lot of positive responses, which made me feel good. I'll probably post it here. I've been neglecting my blog lately because I've been so wrapped up rediscovering people on Facebook.

Anyway, the drive home. I thought about the ups and downs on Facebook: happily rediscovering people only to have them not be interested in actually making a human connection. I thought about the overcrowded bar full of people who by all appearances were frankly a little pathetic. Like I said, the scene never changes. I sometimes get these nostalgic fantasies in my head: If only I could go back to high school knowing what I know now, it would be so much more fun! If only I were free to party again like I did in college, it would be so much fun! If only....

But it isn't true. I still clam up in bars (unless I'm drunk) just like I did in college. My old classmates are proving they are still very much the same people they were back in high school. Sure some have mellowed. Others have gotten more intense. But my subconscious fantasy that we're all going sit around reminiscing about the old days and forging some kind of new improved friendship is bullshit, I'm sorry to say.

It's also very clear to me that the life I have today is the life I built for myself. I built it because it's what I want. I guess sometimes I start wondering about what else might be, or what might have been. But those are silly things to seriously consider. As I drove back to my quiet home in Boulder, I thought, yeah, this is what I want. This makes me happy.

Ramblin' Fever

My hat don't hang on the same nail too long
My ears can't stand to hear the same old song
An' I don't leave the highway long enough,
To bog down in the mud
'Cos I've got ramblin' fever in my blood

And I don't let nobody tie me down,
And I'll never get too old to get around
I wanna die along the highway and rot away,
Like some old high-line pole,
And rest this ramblin' fever in my soul

-Merle Haggard

I drove my truck to work today. Sometimes I do that just to get a little thrill at both ends of the day. There's a nice 20 mile stretch of open road I take to work, and for a few minutes I can pretend like I'm out roaming some remote corner of the west. I'm planning a road trip to Texas this summer. I'm planning to take a week and see some old friends. Some I haven't seen since high school. I'm planning to hit my favorite swimming holes, watering holes and hole-in-the-walls along the way.

Sometimes there just aren't enough miles of pavement.

Baby Daddy

Of the people I went to high school with, all but about three of us, insofar as I can tell, have babies. Families. Husbands and wives. It's just weird. It's weird because I can't accept the fact that they've all grown up in the 18 years since I've seen them.

I must admit though a part of me wants to that too. I don't know if its that I want kids or if I just want to fit in. I suppose it's a little of both.

I suppose I'll get over it. I really like my freedom and my money. I should have a t-shirt made.

School Rant

I have ONE class to finish in order to get my master's certificate in GIS, and it's pissing me the hell off. It's a geographic statistics class, online, in which we're getting virtually no instruction, guidance or feedback from our non-responsive, uninterested instructor.

Our first problem set is a TWENTY PAGE DOCUMENT full of typos and vague instructions. Problem number 11: Write an essay on Exponential Distribution and make some graphs. Use a software called JMP that makes no sense unless you're already fairly versed in stats.

Okay.

Since there's no lecture or anything to guide us, I start with Wikipedia:

In probability theory and statistics, the exponential distributions (a.k.a. negative exponential distributions) are a class of continuous probability distributions. They describe the times between events in a Poisson process...

Okay, what's a Poisson process?

A Poisson process, named after the French mathematician Siméon-Denis Poisson (1781–1840), is a stochastic process...

Okay, what's a stochastic process?

In probability theory, a stochastic process, or sometimes random process, is the counterpart to a deterministic process or deterministic system...

Okay, what's a deterministic system?

In mathematics, a deterministic system is a system in which no randomness is involved in the development of future states of the system.

By this point I've forgotten what I was even looking for in the first place, and all the crap I read in between.

Good Day at Work

I had an unusually good Monday, considering I was working at a computer instead of fly fishing, hiking, camping, gardening or hunting.

More amazing still, it was a good day despite conducting interviews for a new hire.

Why was it such a good day? I solved a problem that on Friday I had no idea how I was going to solve. I've got temperature at depth data for the US - that is the temperature below the ground in 1 kilometer intervals all the way down to 10 km. I had a list of several thousand oil wells and the depth to the bottom of the wells. I needed to figure out the temperature at the bottom of the wells. With a little linear interpolation and some Python scripting, I made it happen. I was quite proud of myself and my client was ecstatic. Not that I'd put this on my top ten list of favorite things to do on a gorgeous spring day, but it pays the bills and it always feels good to accomplish a complex task.