First Day Off After Nine

Early morning: This was my rousing view of clouds and the foothills of Winnemucca Mountain when I awoke this morning. This photo now seems to represent what was a somewhat inspirational beginning to what turned into a busy, erratic day. Perhaps the day was also a bit like the clouds: scattered.
Early evening: It was a hectic day, seemingly, and I'm finally relaxing with a cold beer — a Rotator IPA in a Ruby Mountain Amber pint glass. I think the only reason the day seemed hectic was that I did things other than what I planned, things that weren't on my TTD list, so I felt as though I didn't accomplish anything. Instead of relaxing and blogging (both were on the list), I did a modicum of unpacking, a bit of arranging, and quite a bit of rearranging. I did get two things on my list done, including having a relaxing hot bath. And, for things not on the list, I accomplished the hanging of a peg strip near the front door of the apt, which now looks like this (sign compliment of furnished apt):
By the end of the day, prior to beer, I didn't find a Father's Day card to my liking. Whereas it seemed that the cards in our moved-away-from town were dorky and quite repetitive year to year, it seems as though the cards in this new town, while ostensibly or superficially quite varied, trend overall either toward the overly sentimental (for either myself or the way I view my dad), or they are raucous musical and noisy things that I'm pretty sure he wouldn't like. Consequently, because I'm already late in mailing anyway, I'll probably dig through the many cards I have on hand, which I've bought for myself not to use but to look through and enjoy (art cards), then I'll pick one out and hopefully get it sent by tomorrow afternoon when the mail gets picked up at our nearby apt-based boxes. With any luck, the card will arrive in AK by Monday, only one day late.

In the meantime, I'm expecting a phone call from MOH. He's on his northern adventure, checking out oil fields and small towns in northerly areas that I've never visited. (I'm jealous, in a way, but am getting daily pictures of campsites, rivers, and the way my old truck currently looks as a mini-RV. One thing I've learned is that the Yellowstone River is quite beautiful, though a long way from here.)

And now, my beer is still cold but needs to be refreshed with a new one, the sun coming through the open-to-the-freeway window — open to let swamp-cooler air on high out — is warm. After beer I'll have a dinner either of mint chocolate cookie ice cream or mini-ravs and milk. That will be the end to what I now see as a good day.

P.S. The "our town" tag refers to the old place in the hinterland of eastern Nevada, and the "wnmca" tag refers to a uniquely named town in north-central or north-western Nevada (depending on how you view Nevada geography).

P.P.S. I am finding myself, as I've mentioned before, considerably shorter on time for blogging while working the industry-wide normal 10-hour days and having a door to door driving/riding time of 45 to 60 minutes, depending on particular logistics. These logistics create what are actually 12 hour days, longer than my previous 10-hour work days plus 30 to 45 minute max round trip times (10.5 to 10.75 hour days compared to ± 12 hour days). I'm still adjusting, rather slowly, to my lack of blogging time. I'm not awake enough in the morning to do much serious (or very good) writing or link finding, and the short evening is often crammed with brief winding down, dinner, getting ready for the next day, enjoying a netflix-streamed old TV series episode or two with MOH when he's here, OR just crashing, OR reading the internet but not blogging. Haven't figured all that out quite yet — and I haven't quite scheduled time in for any excercise besides what I get at work, walking up and down metal-grated stairs and walking back and forth down my rubber-padded cement-based core-logging lane.

P.P.P.S. Wrist and elbow overuse pain (started in one arm, is now also in the other becuase of using the other almost exclusively at times) has also limited what I have been able to do on the computer. The pain, soreness, inflammation, whatever it is, is better. It all probably began from packing and lifting/carrying boxes; consequently, any unpacking I do puts me at least slightly at risk of a longer healing time. (RICE: REST, ice, compression, elevation — need the former, acheiving very little of the latter - how does one raise the elbow without using it or other possibly compromised muscles? Meh.)

Our 2011 Garden

We got a later start on our garden this year, and although I'm really not sure about the relative timing of plants getting into the ground with respect to last year, this year's plants were started later indoors and may have been smaller when we put them in the ground. We had to get them on a drip line before we went on a road trip at the end of last month.
The chocolate mints, in two pots, are growing like crazy, and we're thinking of starting more pots so we can give some away.
We've planted fewer vegetables this year, partly so this squash can have more room than last year's had, partly so the chard can have more room, and also so we can plant more flowers.

Friday morning, a little more than a week after the squash photo was taken, the temperature dropped below freezing, and currently the little guy doesn't look so hot: leaves have wilted and dried some. The squash, basil, a newly planted melon, and oregano were covered last night, and we'll keep covering until we get some summer-like temperatures (even spring-like temps would be helpful).
And so, this is how the back garden looked on May 27th, just after the drip line went in. There are little chard plants, the squash, two or three tiny tomatoes, green bean seeds against the far wall, and lots of flower seeds scattered everywhere.
A little more than a week later, yesterday afternoon, the back garden has larger chard plants (still hard to see but on the left), and the tomato plants look like they have survived all the chilly mornings. The larger plant towards the back, behind the pot of chocolate mints, is the honeydew melon MOH planted after we came back from our late May road trip. No seedlings have sprouted.
Here's the front garden as it looked on May 27th: a chocolate mint pot, two tiny basil plants almost drowning in the water of the newly re-established drip line, and lots of flower seeds in the ground.
And here's the front garden yesterday afternoon. I've taken matters into my own hands and planted a few nursery flowers from the big city — marigolds, a lavender, some little daisy-like flowers, and the some oregano. Possibly some little seedlings have sprouted; probably they are common weeds. Across the street in a barren spot, I threw out some wildflower seeds: Cosmos and bachelor buttons. These aren't on a drip line, and will require watering by hand.

As it turns out, we needn't have bought plants from the out-of-town nursery — a local hardware store has put in a couple greenhouses and has quite a nice supply of flowers, herbs, and vegetables (and other things including trees). We had lost our only nursery last year to the go-out-of-business demons, but now we have a replacement. I hope it does well.

In the meantime, MOH has started new squash seeds indoors in our heated seedling mat, along with seeds from our ballon flower.

Snow and Light in the Morning

The inside of my truck on the morning of March 25th: I'm all packed and ready to go, but I haven't yet shoveled the snow off the truck and scraped the windshield. The clock reads 6:45 am: Ack, I'm late!
Light from my headlights illuminate the untracked snow of the driveway and street in front of me. (Yay for 4WD!)
I attempt to get a photo showing the snow falling in one of those starburst patterns, like this one that someone linked to recently (was that you, Dana?).
Illuminated snow ruts on the main road, which hasn't yet, at 6:53 am, been plowed.
A street light glows through the falling snow and my spotted windshield.
The old schoolhouse at Lane City almost blends into the snow-covered sagebrush.
I never saw a single snow plow once that morning!

One Year Ago Today: Bye Bye Trees

I'm a little late posting this one - three days to be precise - but am going ahead with it, and using the original publish date. My excuse? I was out of town without access to wifi.
It was exactly one year ago when these nefarious people came along and cut down the elm trees growing near our little house in the hinterland of eastern Nevada.
I was annoyed and saddened by this at the time, and blogged briefly about it last spring, when I showed what the now barren wall looked like in the before state.
It still looks barren out there to me.

A Walk: Across Town and Back

It was sunny, yesterday, for the first time in several days, and cooler than is normal for early June. Rather than hiking up the hill, I walked around town, thinking that I'd do a few minor shopping errands. Instead, I meandered around and looked at things.
The backyard of a nearby old house - the one we sometimes call "our house" though we don't live there and probably never will - is a bit overgrown with lots of cheat grass. Two yellow roses bloom on the bush overhanging the shed roof. (Look closely, or enlarge!)

Pink.

Paint.

The wind was strong enough to almost knock me over at times, and blustery clouds came up before I had gone more than two blocks.
Semi-wild yellow climbing roses adorn the stairs of an old house.
Red climbing roses - an old variety brought west by settlers or miners - are often found growing wild or semi-wild in western towns.

Sign: If You Can Read This, You're In Range. (Watch out, it's Nevada!)

As I meandered around, I more or less followed the old railroad tracks, which lead to the Nevada Northern Railway depot. I don't really know what the tall, cylindrical, concrete thing above is, but it's close to the railroad and looks a lot like a smokestack. I found nothing about it or it's history online, other than one unlabeled photo. (The wide angle setting on the camera distorted the 90° angle where the lower, bridge-like structure meets the tall cylinder.)

A railroad car in front of the "Safety First" building.

Having made it that far, I moseyed over to the only stand-alone espresso shop in town. I had a mocha frappuccino, then a brisk walk back across town into the wind.

One Year Ago Today: Elm Trees

One year ago today, the Chinese elm trees on our side street were green and growing. They were cut down last fall, an act of our small town that made me sad for weeks every time I looked out the door. They will grow back as bushes, from the stumps, but may never be the same.

Signs of Spring: Ravens

When out on our most recent long hike, last weekend, we decided to climb breccia hill once again, to ascend this rocky knob of Eureka Quartzite, in order to go to the arch in the upper part of the knob. If you look closely, you can see the arch: it's above a large brownish talus patch in the left center of the photo, and in the lower part of the upper ledge. For interested geologists, the Eureka Quartzite is Ordovician in age. See new geologic time chart here.
We hiked and scrambled up the slope, finally getting high enough to have this great view of our eastern Nevada town, looking south toward the southern Egan Range.
We'd been hearing a lot of raven-like croaking, and finally we spotted these two flying together, with the second bird looking like it was carrying something in it's beak. A twig for a nest?
At about that same time, and now on the upper part of the scrabbly brownish talus slope and still one ledge below the arch, we saw this large nest made of twigs and carefully placed in a protected area below an overhang of quartzite.
One of the two ravens was watching the nest from a vantage point above it, while the second raven tried to get us to move away from the nest by flying elsewhere. If you look closely, you can see that this raven is sitting on brecciated quartzite. In fact, most of the quartzite is fractured, cut by multiple sets of joints and faults, and brecciated.
The raven takes to the air, flying around in futher attempts to get us away from the nest. Unfortunately, our path to the arch - uphill and down - led right past the nest.
One raven stands on quartzite, looking at the nest partially hidden by the piñon pine.
A raven settles into the nest. We saw one of the ravens sitting on the nest as though there were already eggs present. It seems early, but is not outside the timeframe for the beginning of raven nesting.
Here's the slope above us, with large to huge blocks of quartzite, and the arch barely in view near the center of the photo. Some quartzite blocks larger than houses have rolled all the way down the hill.
From the top above the arch, we had another great view to the south.
As we descend past the lower quartzite ledge, a raven flies from the nest. The sun has gotten lower in the west, and the entire outcrop is now in shadow.

Is a Consultant ever Unemployed?

Is a consultant ever unemployed? This is a question I've been asking myself recently, maybe since about early or mid-October when metal prices began a bit of a slide. As a result of that slide, and along with the combination of the stock market, and the financial and housing markets going down or becoming unstable at about the same time, many mining companies - especially those in base metals like copper, nickel, zinc, and others - have had numerous small to large layoffs and have had to cut back on exploration, project development, and mining.


Some (a few? several?) copper mines have been shut down, and - as I mentioned above - many companies have had worldwide layoffs, have cut back on things like exploration at mines, or have shifted gears in some way or another by revising mining plans or time schedules. At least one company is planning expansion, which is actually one of the best things that can be done during a fallow season; it can put you way ahead of the game.

The slides have also affected gold mining and exploration companies, but to a lesser degree, and mostly as a result of the decreased ability of companies, especially small ones, to raise money - through borrowing or stock - for operating costs and personnel, for project expenditures like field work, sampling, and drilling, for capital expenditures like mine or mill equipment or plants, for environmental remediation and reclamation which are always ongoing, and for just about anything you can think of that goes into normal and everyday work. Companies with cash are doing better than companies without cash.



One gold company I know, for example, has enough money to stay in business and hold their exploration properties but do not have enough money to pay anyone to do any work, so no mapping, sampling, or drilling is planned for this year. Of course, the CEO - a former colleague of mine - will be out looking for investors, so the status of his company might change.

Geologists at mines, especially those working in exploration, are usually the first to go. Mine geologists - sometimes that would be one person, sometimes that would be one person with a small staff - are usually kept on.
I was given notice back in October that the funding for the part of the project I was working one would probably be cut entirely by the end of 2008, or would be cut back considerably. As such, I've worked one week since the middle of December, which is one week more than I was expecting to work when I first heard the news. I haven't done a lot of job hunting, yet; the looking I have done suggests that things will most likely remain slow into the spring or early summer, barring a major turn-around, a turnaround which many at this point might not trust even if it were to happen. I do have a leads to check on, one of which is a company with entirely private (non-stock) funding.

MOH is continuing his work at the place where we have both been employed for the last 1.5 years or so. He still works his days and nights on his 28-day rotation. So we are continuing to rent our small tiny house in our small eastern Nevada town. My expenses - which included rent, some utilities, a perdiem for food, and my gas mileage back and forth to our home at the lake - are no longer being covered. We recently looked into moving into a somewhat larger house here, but the rent was about than 2x what we are paying, so we decided against it.

Rents have been high here for two or more years; house prices are, even now, comparable to those in Reno - even though prices in Reno have started to drop, and even though the cost of living in Reno has seemed high to me ever since I moved there in the late 1970's from the Washington, D.C. area - lower than San Francisco, comparable to northern Virginia, comparable in many things to Anchorage, AK. So we've decided that $400/mo for 500 450 sq ft is what we'll stick with right now.

Like I've said many times, this place is small: larger than a breadbox, larger than a motel room. The square footage includes an arctic-type entryway that is unheated, has no electricity, and serves mostly as a small storage room. The longer we stay here, the more things accumulate, and the more crowded things seem. We add shelves to the walls, hooks for hanging clothes, and the more storage space we create, the more things we seem to find space for!

I've got lots of geologic literature and old photos here, moved out from our home at the lake; I've got winter and summer clothes, many stored in bins under the bed; we've got lots of miscellaneous books, DVD's, and electrical miscellany (small TV, phone wires, chargers, cords, old computer, head phones... ); and we've got lots of outdoor gear and some miscellaneous tools. Obviously (at least to me!), some of these things can be sorted through and moved to the small storage area we rent here, and some things can be moved back to the lake. At first I was taking winter/summer clothes back and forth when the appropriate time came; more recently I've just stuffed things under the bed.

Anyway, one point of all this is the answer to my first question: are consultants really ever unemployed. Harold Asmis at Ontario Geofish said no, we're just underemployed! I think that's a pretty good answer. As a consultant, I am not technically unemployed, because it is my business to have clients and find work as I see fit. As a consultant and independent contractor, I can't really apply for unemployment, and consequently I, and many other geologists, do not get counted on unemployment rolls: we are not part of the unemployment statistics.

At the moment, I'm confining my exploration adventures to our town here in the hinterland of eastern Nevada. I have plans to take some sightseeing and geologically oriented pleasure trips on my own this month and next. Well, maybe scratch this month - have to get ready for our next trip north, to the Iditarod, see sidebar for countdown!

Mid-week Exploration: An Old House

After hanging out a bit too long today doing computer things, I decided it was time to get outside. So I grabbed a hat and maybe a jacket...
Outside, the sun was bright and the temperature was warm (hot for winter): 54 F and 37% relative humidity.

Having not been out in the field for a bit of time, other than a couple vacation-style road trips, I thought I'd do a little around-town exploring. Noticing that the back door to "our house" was open, I went inside. [This is an old, abandoned house, not the little house MOH and I live in while out here in eastern Nevada.] The place is still abandoned, just like last year, and junk is scattered everywhere inside and out, but someone is feeding local cats. They go inside through a tiny cat door.
I went upstairs. The place is really pretty rickety in places with very few level surfaces because of foundation problems.
Nice, bright colors! I love old houses, and exploration of the insides of abandoned places takes me way back, back to my childhood when finding an old place was like finding my own personal haunted house. Haunted houses, though, don't have such bright colors.
I went back down the stairs.
Out the broken kitchen window, one can see the view of the rustic back yard.
And here's the broken window on the back door. This is the first time that the door to the inside has been open. The back door itself has been open ever since I first checked it out, but an interior door just inside is also now open. A few things from the kitchen appear to be missing, judging from what I could see last year through the window. The most recent newspapers are from 2006.
More of the back yard: winter tree branches and shadows of branches on an old shed.

This house sits on a nice-sized city lot, but after seeing the inside, I would only want to buy it for the lot, if at all. I don't think the house is salvagable, although the stairs are neat - maybe they, and a few other bits and pieces, could be saved. The orientation and placement of the lot would create problems with winter parking, I think; most places nearby have winter parking problems because of hilly streets covered with ice and snow.

And now, I must get on with the rest of the day, go buy a few topo maps, get a Valentine's Day card, get some gas. Or maybe I'll just walk...