Author: Alex

Categories
cats

Loki’s Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day

This is not a happy kitty.

The kitties went to the vet today for their annual checkup. Or rather, I took them to the vet, because it’s not like they were just going to hop in the car and drive themselves over there.

Tengu has gotten wise to my normal trick of leaving the carriers out and open, then luring the cats inside at the appropriate time. I ended up having to corner him in my bedroom and stuff him into the carrier. However, Tengu also got a Gold Star from the vet for being in a fine example of a cat his age and in perfect health. It was apparently the only gold star the vet had given out all day.

Loki, on the other hand. Loki. There was screaming and growling and hissing and spitting. There were one or two swipes at the vet, though he didn’t seem to have his claws out for it. They had to try to wrap him in a blanket, he was being so bad. And there was no way in hell he was going to quietly let the vet look at his ears, which he’s still having problems with. So he got a jab in the butt (plus hissing, spitting, and snarling) with some sedatives.

And he fought the sedation the whole time. He’s still fighting it now. This cat will not just go to sleep. I always knew Loki was stubborn, but this is a whole new level of Fuck You I Ain’t Gonna And You Can’t Make Me. At home, Loki is slowly wobbling around like a drunk, and every time he looks like he’s going to fall asleep he gets up and wobbles around some more. I was trying to just keep him in my bedroom to start with, but then he just would not stop trying to get up on the windowsill, even after I had to rescue him because he almost fell off. I think I’ve got him contented with a sunbeam coming through the patio door now. Maybe.

And he keeps glaring at me with this eyes barely open and his nictating membrane at half mast, which is both hilarious and creepy at the same time. It’s a look that promises there will be hell to pay, just as soon as there’s just one of me instead of seven or eight wobbling around his field of view.

However, all of this did have a good purpose. It turns out the ear problems he’s been having for years are because he has ear mites. A weird, asymptomatic case of ear mites. Because the gunk coming out of his ears doesn’t look like ear mite gunk, and he’s never given them to Tengu despite the fact that they’re very contagious and Tengu will not leave his ears alone, yet Loki’s ears are just crawling with mites. Bizarre. And the vet also said ear mites tends to be a young cat thing, and a farm cat thing, so maybe Loki got them before I picked him up (since he was born on a farm if memory serves) and has just had them ever since. Either way, I’ve got a treatment for him, so hopefully that means his ears will clear up and we won’t have to go through this drama with him again.

Hopefully. Next time they go to the vet, it’s for vaccinations, so there may be more of the good drugs in his future.

Categories
bbcp

Gilmore Hill pictures and videos

Here’s my Picasa album of all the pictures I took at Gilmore Hill: Gilmore Hill Drilling

And a few videos:
Core water cannon
Breaking pipes at sunset
Lowering the mast
Moving the rig to the new location

Categories
bbcp

My BBCP: Nights 6 and 7, That’s All Folks

The night shift, from left to right: Gabe, AJ, Brandon, Brady, Bianca, and me

As of right now, drilling is finished! We turned the B-hole (not to be confused with the Gilmore Hill A-hole) over to the day shift with less than fifty feet left to drill, and they got that done in a bit over an hour. So Gilmore Hill is finished, and that was our third and final site! So now it’s just about analyzing what little initial data we have, and biding our time until January, when we all get to meet up in Bremen and do another marathon of SCIENCE!

Will ended up deciding to go deep on the first whole, so on night six that’s what we did. The returns took a lot longer, and we had a lot of down time during the night shift because the drill bit had been worn almost entirely smooth. That required tripping out of the hole and back in, so that was like two hours gone. After that, we drilled at a reasonable pace, but by the end it was taking 20 minutes per core and there were some really clay-rich intervals that took forever (relatively speaking) to drill through. There was still a hundred and some feet left on the first hole when we handed it over to day shift in the morning, and they finished it up.

However, that night we did have some entertainment. Some of it was not so fun, like the part where I got bitten seven times by various mosquitoes. The most exciting part of the night was when a bat flew through the open door of the RV and couldn’t find its way back out. It eventually flew into the cabinets and hid. The poor thing looked so scared. Gabe ended up using a dish towel to grab it, then let the bat go outside. It flew away alright, so hopefully it was fine and caught a lot more bugs that night!

This last shift we started off just waiting for the first hole to get logged, then we moved the rig to the new location, a whole fifteen feet away from the first hole. When we finally did start drilling, it was just gogogo like the first night. Except since we weren’t doing sampling on this second core, it felt a lot less hectic because we effectively had at least one extra set of hands at all times. So even though we were getting core every ten minutes, I think poor Gabe was getting a little bored at times. AJ seemed determined to get through all 200 feet on his own – we’re not sure if this was because Doug spent like half an hour at the start of the shift telling him it just couldn’t be done, or because he and Brandon were just convinced that if they didn’t see the thing through to the end themselves, they’d somehow get suckered in to one more night shift. But in the end, we had to call it good at about 150 feet since the rig needed to be refueled.

But it’s done for sure now! And day shift has to clean up the drilling site HAHAHA. We went and got breakfast, and now I’m going to try to have a short little sleep and be up by around 1 or so. Our plan is to go hang out in Cody for a couple of hours, and then have a big dinner for all the Gilmore Hill crew. This will hopefully help me get back onto normal hours. And then I’ll be heading home early tomorrow morning, so I will be back in Denver before the weekend!

Categories
bbcp

My BBCP: Night 5, I’ll Be Sleepin’ Like a Log

The previous shift was so ridiculously busy that you’ll notice I didn’t even post about it until tonight. Because it was GOGOGOGO and then I sort of fell into bed and passed out for seven hours.

We’re at Gilmore Hill now, which is our third and final site. In good news, it’s a lot less windy than Polecat Bench, which I’m a fan of. And while we no longer have the most scenic portapotty in Wyoming, it’s also not a wobbly hellbooth on the edge of a very steep drop, so I’m counting that as a win too. In more challenging news, we’re on BLM land that’s a preserve for wild mustangs. Which means that we have to keep everything in a 50 by 50 foot pad of land that’s marked by little pink flags. So everything is very cramped together. And BLM has been by to check multiple times to make sure we’re not leaving our box, so trust me, we’re being very good about staying in the allowed area. This means the portapotty is right next to the RV, which could get unpleasant a few days into the project. It also means that the noise from the drill is pretty crazy at times since we’re really close to it.

And the area is also absolutely beautiful. check my Twitter feed for many pictures. The great thing about being on nights (aside from the impossibility of getting a sunburn and the lack of heat) is that we get both the sunrise and the sunset every day, while day shift gets only OMGSOHOT AHAHAHAHA.

Last night, we didn’t really get to enjoy the picturesque location. As soon as AJ and Brandon (our driller and his assistant) were on site, it was gogogo all nigh. Day shift had only drilled for a couple of hours, so we were rocketing through the shallowest part of the hole, with only a short break so AJ could eat a salad for his lunch. We processed well over 200 feet of core last night, which is a new record for the project. Pretty much as soon as we had one core packaged and logged, we’d have another one waiting. As you can see, we literally filled the rack and had to start double stacking.

So yeah, by the time day shift came to relieve us, we were all ready to drop. And unfortunately, Gilmore Hill is further from Greybull than Polecat Bench was from Powell, so we get a bit less sleep due to the longer drive. Plus night shift is borrowing Dr. Gingerich’s old blazer. I get so motion sick in that car when it’s on regular roads, it’s not even funny. So it’s a 40 minute hell drive for me, and on the other end I have about an hour where I just can’t even look at food.

Thankfully, at the rate this project is going, I don’t think I’m going to have too many roundtrips in the Vomit Comet. We already hit the original target for the first hole during the day shift. Will Clyde (the man in charge on this shift) decided to just go as deep as we could, so we’ll keep going like we did on Polecat Bench and drill until we’re out of pipe. That’ll probably finish tonight or tomorrow, and then the second hole is going to be a nice shallow one just so we can try to catch ELMO twice.

ELMO is the thing I’m interested in – it was a smaller carbon excursion during the Eocene, and if we get good data I want to see if I can do some comparative work between it and the PETM in this area. (Of course, this is all pie in the sky and we won’t really know what I’m going to do probably until January when we’re finished in Bremen.) We’ve all been nervous about getting ELMO in the cores here, since this is our chance – but there are some big channel sands in the area. And sands, while cool in their own right, won’t have climate data for us like muds do. So I was very tense last night as we were going down to 150 feet, since Will projected ELMO here is 150-200 feet in depth. And when we started the evening, we were in a big sand. Then around 80 feet deep we started getting muds, and that lasted until below 200 feet. So I think we’re good! It’s pretty exciting.

(Also as a note, ELMO is what we’re at Gilmore Hill for. We’re not going to get the PETM at all here, since drilling to that depth would require a bigger rig and a lot more time in funds, since it’s so deep.)

So that was our day yesterday. This shift is turning out to be much more relaxed already…

Categories
write-a-thon

Clarion Write-a-thon Day 34: KO BABY!!!!!

HEY GUESS WHO JUST FINISHED THE ROUGH DRAFT OF HER NOVEL??????

Today’s word count: 7857 (NEW RECORD!)
Cumulative Write-a-thon word count: 99231
Average daily word count: 2918.56

OH YEAH BITCHES

I DID IT WOOOOOOOOOO! I haven’t written anything novel-length since Throne of Nightmares in 2007. And I admit, I was scared – maybe I couldn’t do it any more. But I just did it! And I finished my write-a-thon goal with a week to spare! Now to let it stew and percolate a bit, give my head time to clear, and the dreaded editing process will begin. I feel like this one will edit a lot faster than ToN (which took three years), because if nothing else I think I’ve grown a lot as a writer since then and have a much clearer sense of how I want to put this bad boy together.

Soundtrack for writing this was primarily from Serenity, Firefly, and the three Transformers movies. Yet in spite of the latter, my novel contains only one explosion, and it doesn’t happen in slow motion. And no one runs away from it. So yeah. (What can I say… didn’t much like those movies, but I think they have excellent scores.)

And yeah. That’s all I have to say. Because my brain has now lost its ability to produce words.

EXCEPT OH YEAH YOU SHOULD TOTALLY PLEDGE MONEY NOW THAT I’VE DELIVERED THE GOODS! :D


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Favorite sentence I’ve written today: The rocks snarled like living things and then the world cracked, lightning and gunshot and bone, a sound that touched her at the base of the brain and told her to fucking run.

Categories
bbcp

Polecat Bench Pictures and Videos

I have been remiss – I posted all of these on twitter, but never collected them in to a blog post. Also, some additional pictures, and even some from Basin Substation, the site I wasn’t involved with. So:

Pictures
My Polecat Bench photo album
Elizabeth’s night 1 pictures
Elizabeth’s Basin Substation day 1 pictures – She worked a 24 hour day on the first day. Crazy!
Elizabeth’s Basin Substation pictures July 15-18
From the BBCP Facebook page

Video
Coffee sloshing in the pot in the RV, just to show how freaking windy it got
Bringing up core at Polecat Bench – what happens every core barrel. Video super noisy due to drilling rig and wind.
The last core at Polecat Bench – you can really hear how darn noisy the rig is on this video…

Categories
write-a-thon

Clarion Write-a-thon Day 33

Today’s word count: 3427
Cumulative Write-a-thon word count: 91374

It’s much harder to write thinky, feeling-ish scenes instead of action-y ones. Particularly when one of the characters is all, I DON’T HAVE FEELINGS, DAMNIT. I think she’s still bitter because I made her murder her first ever boyfriend when she was a teenager. (I totally had a good reason. I promise.) The exciting part is that I wrote up to the start of the FINAL EPIC BATTLETM and after that, it’s just basically a bit of tying up loose ends and general plot post-mortem. The ending is so close I can just taste it! GO TEAM GO!

Favorite sentence bit I’ve written today:
“You called me with blood.”

She snorted, then gently probed at the back of her head with one hand. Her fingers found stitches, which was story enough for her. “Didn’t work the last two times I tried to do that.”

“You used a lot more blood this time.” He looked down pointedly toward the gun still pressed against his side.

“You should be more careful about how you wake a body up. Some folk get mighty sensitive about it.”


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Categories
write-a-thon

Clarion Write-a-thon Day 32

Today’s word count: 4142
Cumulative Write-a-thon word count: 87947

Tonight was a bit tougher to write, and I got kind of bogged down between point A and B for this section. It’s definitely something that’ll require some smoothing over when I edit. If I end up keeping it at all, since once again I feel like it’s stuff I wrote just so I made sure I knew what was going on. But it’s moving on. Ticked off another plot point. It’s going to be hard, but I still feel like I can get this thing finished before we start drilling at Gilmore Hill. I mean, it’s okay if I don’t, but it’d be nice to not have to do this crazy level of writing while drilling, when you only get like 5 or 10 minutes at a stretch.

Favorite sentence I’ve written today: Raff pulled a dusty deck from his pocket; the cards scraped and scratched as he shuffled and dealt them each a five-card hand.


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Uncategorized

"Make Sure That Your Question’s a Question"

Whether you’re a skeptical person or not, atheist or not, carbon-based life-form or not, if you have ever in your entire life gone to a convention/conference/seminar/large meeting, you want to go listen to this week’s Geologic Podcast. Particularly the bit that starts at 26:25.

George Hrab was the MC for TAM this year. He kicked off the conference with a little musical medley, and the bit at 26:25 was my favorite part – “Make sure that your question’s a question.” The essence of this little musical ditty should be squeezed into spray bottles and handed out to moderators and MCs at every convention. Or perhaps it could be crafted into a branding iron with which to mark the worst offenders. Or maybe George should just be personally sent to every convention ever, and he’ll be able to soon retire on the proceeds of just being paid to sing this song by grateful attendees the world over.

I understand that there’s a real desire to engage in dialog with the (at least locally) famous people on a panel, and impress them with the wit and thought behind your own opinions. Goodness knows, I’ve had my more psychotic moments where I’ve imagined that, if I could just make it into a Presidential Townhall, I could totally straighten every policy in the goddamn country out with the 1000-watt beam of my scintillating political thought.

But then I punch myself in the face until I stop hallucinating, and it’s all better.

Seriously. No one else in the audience wants to hear your long-winded and grandiose story of personal experience that normally culminates in a question that sounds like, “Having said that, what’s your favorite color?” Most of the time, it just sounds sad and tacked on, like you desperately wanted to tell a story to a large (and ever more hostile) captive audience and just had to come up with a question at the end so you didn’t feel completely dishonest.

That’s what blogs are for. With a bonus of not even needing to come up with a faux-question for the end.

Also, since audience members aren’t the only ones that can bogart a microphone and make innocent bystanders contemplate the possibility of crafting some sort of hangman’s noose from the pages of the program book, there’s this too: About conventions, panels, and bad panelist behaviour: a rant

Looking back, I wonder how much I was guilty of this sort of awful behavior at anime conventions. My ego is particularly ravenous, and that can lead to all sorts of unfortunate conversation topics that absolutely no one but me gives a shit about.

And this blog. Hey. All I can hope is that my boundless reserves of sarcasm provide some kind of cushion for times like that.

So if you were ever at an NDK or Yaoicon or AnimeFest where I bored you to absolute tears, I would like to take this opportunity to apologize. And I hope that some day I will have an opportunity to show off just how much I’ve grown as a person and a writer since those days. My ravenous ego demands it.

Categories
write-a-thon

Clarion Write-a-thon Day 31

Today’s word count: 6226
Cumulative Write-a-thon word count: 83805

A new, new daily word count record! I’m pooped. And sadly, I didn’t tick a point off of my outline, because most of this was stuff that happened between my major plot points. Unexpected stuff, which is nice. Editing this bad boy is going to be mighty interesting…

Favorite sentence I’ve written today: Its head was bigger than his, its breath a meaty furnace.


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