Two days in the Valles

This week I spent Wednesday and Thursday up in the Valles Caldera with my advisor. We deployed a few more temperature probes and did some sampling. Mostly we got to hike up a streambed in 1-2 feet of snow with snowshoes strapped to our feet!


I have discovered that my old gaiters do not work all that well. The backs did not stay on my boots, instead resting on my socks, which allowed snow to get into my boots. My feet were therefore damn cold by the end of the first day. Eventually I thawed out. Check out the windblown snow we saw about halfway up:


The second day we hurried up the catchment and did some more sampling up at the top. It was a productive couple of days, and we brainstormed some good ideas for furthering my research. Hopefully things really get moving this winter! I'll hopefully be spending much of the spring (post-snowmelt) up in the Valles.

Welcome, winter weather.

I got up at 6:12 this morning to get myself down to my vanpool. I usually try to get up at 5:40 (my alarm goes off at 5:30) so I can shower and maybe even eat breakfast. This morning I had to sacrifice both to laziness. I left the house at 6:30, and arrived at the parking lot just a little before 6:40. The van is supposed to pick us up at 6:45, but that time came and went with no sign of a van. This happened once recently, and that time there was only one person at the north stop (I board the van at the second, south stop), and he apparently didn't want to drive because he sat there and waited for a long time before deciding to drive down. He also almost ran us off the road, leading to my first experience driving the vanpool van. But that's another story.
The van never showed up, but a car of usual van-riders did arrive around 6:50 to 6:55. Four of them piled out of a fairly small car. There were two of us waiting at the south stop for the van. Hmm. I decided not to go down to Socorro today because of that, and am instead working from Albuquerque. This fact has allowed me to observe the winter weather happening down here near the Rio Grande this fine day.

7:00 a.m.: When I started biking home, it was overcast and nothing was going on. Right around 7, we started getting an extremely light snow. Very exciting; I haven't been snowed on since last year. That snow steadily increased as I got home and walked Alison back to her bus stop for her trip to work. By the time I got home, a little bit had actually accumulated.

8:30 a.m.: By this time, the snow had stopped completely. We had probably about a tenth of an inch or so of accumulation. I took this picture:


10:00 a.m.: Most of the snow has sublimated or melted away. I figure this is the last of our winter weather today.

11:30 a.m.: The sun is out and shining in through the skylight above me.

12:02 p.m.: Graupel starts, up to pea-sized. At first I thought it was hail because it was hitting the skylight pretty hard. But no, it was just graupel. Large graupel lasts only a few minutes, and turns into very small grains of the stuff.

12:15 p.m.: Graupel stops. Within five minutes, much of the clouds have gone away and the sun is shining again. It looks pretty clear to the west, which is where our weather tends to come from this time of year. Out east looks damn ugly. That's where Alison works. I can't see the mountains at all, so they are probably getting hammered. I hope she can make it home today.

13:37 p.m.: The sky has clouded up again, and there is the lightest little bit of snow falling. Pretty much everything that had collected previously has melted. There was a cat in the yard, but he didn't want to be my friend.

13:53 p.m.: The light snow has stopped again, and the sky is once again clearing up fairly quickly.

14:31 p.m.: Extremely light snow, but the sky is clearing up already.

After that, it cleared, darkened, and cleared one more time. What strange weather. This morning it was 8 degrees in the Valles Caldera, and snowing heavily. We will not be making a trip up there this weekend.

Is there an Arachnologist in the house?

So about four days ago I was sitting at my desk (yes, this very desk) when my lower right leg started itching a lot. I am terrible at leaving itchy spots well enough alone, so I scratched at it, then discovering that I had four nickel-sized lumps on my leg. They looked and felt like big spider bites. Now, four days later, the lumps have been replaced by angry red circles, and a blister has formed in the middle of each bite. To see a picture, go visit the wife's blog about this subject. If you know anything about spider bites, or know somebody who knows something about spider bites, I would like some free consultation on what might have bitten me. That is all.

Life Calderic

This is what happens when you watch The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, and then spend the next day hiking in the Valles Caldera:

I am substantially uncool.

Good news and bad news

Let's start with the bad. Pervez Musharraf has declared a state of emergency in Pakistan, and suspended the constitution, as well as taken all non-government stations off of television. Sound like some sort of Military Dictatorship? Wikipedia agrees. Now, our government has an expressed interest in turning dictatorships into democracies, yet we are staunch allies of Pakistan. Sounds awfully two-faced. Some of our other allies: India, Thailand, Egypt, Israel, Turkey, Russia, and Morocco. Some other spots that are not free: Sudan, Chad, China, Vietnam, Russia, and others. We don't do much about situations about these other countries. I assume this is because they are either too large, or they don't have any oil.

The good news is that I got all around Albuquerque yesterday without using a vehicle. Alison went to work, and I decided to take the bus to lunch. I took my $1 and my LG Chocolate and hopped on the #5 that runs from Downtown to the east side of town. It takes just about an hour to get out there, so I did some reading on evaporation and stable isotopes. Once I got off the bus (finally) I stopped at the Subway to get myself lunch, and the Pizza Hut to get some for Alison. We ate lunch outside of her office, then I headed back down to Montgomery to get back on the bus. This time the ride was pretty short. Also, the bus was very quiet because it's one of the new CNG (Compressed Natural Gas) buses. Go Abq! Importantly, the Target and the Wild Oats are both along the route, so I can do pretty much all of my shopping and wife-visiting on this single bus route. The drop off is probably about half a mile from our house, so it will be kind of an annoying slog carrying groceries home, but oh well. These are the sacrifices we have to make to live with minimal impact. Later last night, Alison and I walked downtown to the theater (a 3-mile roundtrip walk) to see The Darjeeling Limited, a Wes Anderson movie. It was a pretty good movie, and I liked the fact that there were no truly likable characters. Go see it and decide for yourself. Another nice thing is that all of the previews before the movie consisted of seemingly intelligent movies; no Fred Claus, or Saw IV, or Spongebob movies, etc. People didn't talk much during the movie either (except for me - I have this annoying habit of having to whisper something to Alison every like 10 minutes).

Why are people so terrible?

Let's start out with this: I am against the war in Iraq, and I always have been. It is a politically motivated exercise that seeks to secure our access to Middle Eastern oil in the future. Now I believe that the $465 BILLION that we've spent on the war could have been better applied to improve security and, gosh, I don't know, research some alternative energy sources. I thought there would be a big uproar back in September of 2006 when the death toll in Iraq passed that of the number that died on September 11, 2001 (not sure how CNN calculated the 9/11 casualties (Iraq is now up to 3,157 combat casualties), whether it includes people who have developed health problems due to rescue work, and their likely early deaths). That came and went fairly quietly, with few holding it up as an example of the uselessness of our time there (sorry, friends of mine who have been there).

I realize that my personal opinion has no weight on what will happen, but I surely hope that the opinion of over half of America should count for something, and that we should get out ASAP (it is depressing to note that, according to that poll, while almost half of Americans want our troops out in less than a year, only 10% believe that they actually will be out that quickly; the largest bin is 2 to 5 years).

Having ranted that, I am not against our troops. Except the bad eggs, which I hope are the exceptions. They're doing the job they are told to do, and I would certainly be afraid in their situation. Nearly everybody supports the troops, except for a few whackjobs. And those whackjobs are all super leftist liberals, right? Wrong.

In case you missed the news today, a federal jury awarded a Maryland man $10.9 million in damages in his suit against the Westboro Baptist Church in Kansas. This group protests outside of soldiers' funerals. Their reasoning? Not disgust at the concept of war, or the futility of the exercise, or anything that actually has anything to do with Iraq, our military, the War on Terrah®, or our general security policies. No, they're protesting a completely unrelated (to anybody sane) governmental stance. Not our slipping liberties; our worsening human rights record; this administration's terrible environmental record; the unsatisfactory response to Hurricane Katrina; etc.

No, the group is protesting at funerals because it believes that the war is punishment for this country's supposedly lax treatment of homosexuals. This being the same country where gay people are obviously held in disdain by most of the populace. The same country where gay people can't get married because it destroys the idea of a family (I think our 50% divorce rate does a fine job of that, thanks). The same country that voted with Iran on an anti-LGBT bill in the U.N. (at least we have a starting point for negotiations with Iran now - hatin' queers!). How much less lax can it get? Worse than treating these people as second-class citizens? Didn't we learn our lesson with black people (and don't give me the "you can't choose to be black, you can choose to be gay" claptrap, Michael Jackson proves you wrong)? I wonder if it is comforting to gay people everywhere that they can rest assured that, one day, they will be accepted by our society, or if it is terrifying that it took black people pretty much an entire century from the abolishment of slavery to an actual governmental approach to make them equals, and that the same may very well apply to the LGBT community.

In any event, the news today was refreshing. I hope that this suit bankrupts the church and their apparent ability to travel around the country at will to disrupt one of three events that should never, ever be interrupted (the other being births and weddings) by undue scrutiny. I just tried to get on their website (www.godhatesfags.com), but it seems to be down. I hope it got flamed. Hate is a terribly strong word to throw around, and my personal conception of God provides no room for it. Nor should a purportedly Christian heart.

To: wife.