New theme, new family blog

Once again, I’m switching up the blog themes. Not that it’s that difficult with WordPress, but strangely, with hundreds of themes to choose from, I have a tough time settling on one that I like. After some tweaking, I’m almost satisfied with this one. The bigger news is that I’ve created a new blog specifically for family news, Forty Fingers, Forty Toes. Marie and I will both be posting to it (she’s put her first post up already!) and it will be the primary place that we’ll keep people updated on news of the twins, house, jobs, life, etc.

Trumpeting the death of terrestrial radio, in HD

First, my weird experience of the day… so far. I got to work, opened up my cube fridge (that being a small, cube-shaped fridge and also a fridge which resides in my cube) and the power went out in the building. I looked around, shrugged, muttered “huh”, and closed the fridge. The power instantly came back on. Sweeeeet. My superpower of the day is the ability to control electricity. Maybe tomorrow it will be the ability to control the cost of gas.

Now on to the meat. A week ago I installed a new HD radio receiver (JVC KD-HDR1) in the Jeep. I am now ready to report that terrestrial broadcast radio will die on the government-mandated analong shutoff date. (2009 for TV, none set yet for radio). With an analog radio, I can receive around 35 FM stations in stereo in acceptable quality (meaning, I can still clearly recognize the song being played.) Of these 35 stations, around 10 are broadcasting in HD. Of these 10, 3 of them have HD signals that sound worse than the analog. (WEMU for example, sounds like a poorly-compressed mp3 with hissing, ringing, and flanging in the upper frequencies.) Of the remaining 7, only one will actually lock in on the radio while I am driving around the area.

Of the above concerns, it is the last one that will ultimately cause me to switch to satellite radio, and it bears clarifying. HD radio is digital, like modern cellphones, which means that when the signal drops below a certain threshold, it cuts out entirely. So unless I live in the same city as the broadcasting station (the one in Ann Arbor), I have to deal with radio stations that sound like a scratched CD, dropping out every couple of seconds. Most people I know will deal with a radio station that fades in and out and becomes slightly staticy, but no one I know will buy into a system for very long that’s broken this badly from the start.

So a couple of things may need to happen. We all get better antennas on our cars, the radio stations increase their transmit power, or the FCC allows terrestrial stations to maintain their analog broadcasts. It’ll be interesting to see how this plays out, but just in case radio loses, my receiver is satellite-compatible.

Back home

Here’s one more picture from the trip. I’ve added a few more to Flickr, which I will soon be using only for casual sharing of photos, not archiving as I had once planned. (It turns out that Flickr stores your uploaded image in its original resolution, but NOT its original compression, so you can never re-download your actual original image.)

So I’ve been home just about a week now and am still recovering from some flu or something that hit me the day after returning. I’ve just right back into things with a JCats gig last thursday, several days of bike team stuff at the Art Fair, a bunch of FD calls including a structure fire, and of course, cutting the grass, tilling the garden, trimming the hedges, etc.

But I did get an afternoon last wednesday to catch up on SG-1 and Atlantis episodes, as well as check out a new series called “Eureka”

Caravaning East

Is “caravaning” a word? It looks a bit strange to write… Anyhow, our wagon train of four 15-passenger vans and a pickup trucks is winding its way through South Dakota and into Iowa where we will spend the night before rolling into Albion tomorrow afternoon. Actually, there’s not a lot of winding going on in the plains. You could pretty much set the cruise control, lash the steering wheel in place, take a nap, and wake up several hours later in the same lane and many miles further east.

In many ways it feels like the past five weeks have gone by very quickly… I can easily picture the campsite from the very first night on the road. And on the other hand, I feel like I know my fellow students from this trip better than I know many of the students that I’ve been in class with for the last couple years. It’s a sad fact of life that most of us will never talk to each other again… especially since it seems like one weekend of camping (not to mention three weeks of it) creates a closer association with people than spending months in a classroom.

Now that the course is completed, I can say that it was really nothing like what I expected. I never expected that I would get to know the other students and create the friendships that we have in such a short time. I certainly didn’t expect that the camp would be as much work as it has been… both physical and mental. And I really had no idea what truly awesome things the West has to offer. During the time that we were in Wyoming, Montana, and South Dakota, it was easy to imagine that we were in a place where stories and legends were still being created, not just retold, and that there were still plenty of mysteries and wonders to explore and uncover. Maybe it’s a strange association, but I can’t help but think of the song that Gonzo sings in The Muppet Movie, “I Want to Go Back There Someday.”

Last Stand

We have been in Custer, SD for the last couple days and are now T-minus three days away from completing our final mapping project and heading for home! I have been surprised at how nice it is in South Dakota. I’m not sure what I expected, but it is a land of small towns, plentiful lakes, infinite forests, and stunning mountainscapes. It seems like every piece of property here is a ranch with acres and acres of rolling hills with national forests for a backyard.
From a geological perspective, the Black Hills are an astounding treasure-trove of just about every type of rock and ore formation that exists. I say that only a little figuratively… these hills are famous for the last great American gold rush and for the personalities associated with them… Calamity Jane, Wild Bill Hickock, General Custer, etc. And it’s impossible to walk through the woods without stumbling across a prospecting hole every hundred yards that has been dug into tons of pure white quartz. Pegmatites (mined for rare minerals for industrial uses) are equally numerous and I’ve books of micas larger than an encyclopedia and tourmaline crystal fragments larger than my head. Actually, many of the rare minerals that I would have been excited to find anywhere else are so commonplace here that we don’t even slow down to notice them anymore. I should mention as well that the dirt paths and streambeds here literally shimmer due to the abundant micas (which is what glitter is made of) that weather out of the rock and wash into the low areas.

This last part of the trip has been the high point for me… temperate weather, forested map area, mild slopes, great rockhounding, and much better food (steak and potatoes last night!). But I’m still counting down the days until we pull into Albion and I can go home to enjoy a home, a bed, a shower, high-speed internet, and of course, a steadily growing family!

Just like home

We’ve spent the last two days driving across Wyoming and into South Dakota and are now camped in Sturgis, home of The motorcycle rally (and also of Bear Butte, which we’ll be mapping over the next few days.) We’re out of bear country now, so it makes food handling easier, but the tradeoff is that we’re back in the lowlands, with temperatures around 98 degrees in the shade and 90 percent humidity.

We did make a stop at Devil’s Tower on the way through, and most of us were surprised that the tower doesn’t sit in a bare field, but sits on top of a hillside among several other series of hills. I guess we were thinking of the Devil’s Tower that we saw in Close Encounters.

Drive-by adventuring

I’m sure that at some point someone must have told me this, but I just didn’t realize how big Yellowstone Park is. We spent 5 hours driving today to hike and sightsee for only about two hours. Mammoth Springs is at the north end of the park and our campsite is near the southern boundary, and while the speed limit is 35 or 45 through most of the park, human factors reduce that to about 25mph with frequent, sudden stops in the middle of the road. The stops were apparently for the passenger (or driver) to stick a hand out the window, snap a couple quick pictures with the camera phone, and then continue on to the next site of interest. “Cheating” is about the only thing I can think of to describe it… sort of like “camping” in a 30-foot RV. I know that everyone has different schedules and different demands, but it seems almost pointless to come to these parks and not actually get out of the vehicle and experience them.

On the other hand, we found ourselves getting frustrated with people who wanted to get out and take pictures of the wildlife because we were in a hurry to get to the geological interests. I guess that’s one phrase you just don’t hear very often… “Step aside folks! Geologists coming through!” Though I do think that we have a much deeper appreciation of The Park than 99.999% of the rest of the people who visit here. For instance, each of the three last times that Yellowstone has erupted (2.1, 1.2, and 0.6 million years ago) it released approximately four thousand times that amount of lava and ash than what was produced in the 1980 Mount St. Helens eruption. And 6 foot ash deposits from the last eruption were found as far away as Texas.

Yellowstone!

As one of my instructors said to us a couple days ago, “Why do we come to Yellowstone? Well… how can we be this close and NOT come to Yellowstone?” So yesterday, we returned to Cody to send off one of the other instructors and then headed west through Buffalo Bill Dam and into Yellowstone. Our first night was spent under a thunderstorm, which would have been fun to watch from under a porch roof. It was still impressive, but not nearly as amusing to observe from a car and tent. My REI tent stood up pretty well to the storm, with only a damp floor and a small puddle in the corner. Others were not so lucky and woke up with a pool in the floor of their tent.

Before setting up camp, we spent the day yesterday afternoon driving around The Park and seeing some geo-sites, which are not exactly sparse or hard to find. The first half of today was the same thing, with the remainder of the afternoon spent at Old Faithful and the geyser section of the park. Cool, but not quite as awesome as I would have expected. The more inspiring sites have been the wildlife… driving only a few feet away from 2000 lb bison, seeing the enormous horns of the moose and elk sticking up from the grasslands, being warned that there is a grizzly bear wandering our campground, and only just a few minutes ago having a female moose and her calf wander right up to the campsite.

This trip has unquestionably been nothing like what I expected. It has been both more work and more fun, and the sites have been like nothing I’ve imagined.