monday...

I'm bored at work...really bored. Bored enough to start the blog that I'd been meaning to start for, oh, since I started to get bored at my last job. Actually 2 jobs ago I started once which immediately failed, since i quit the job and then had things to do.

See, geology has that ring to it where you'd think "ooh, he's a geologist. He must live a life of high adventure and rollicking good times, out there in the mountains for weeks at a time. How rustic...", and then swoon. Which does happen, and is the reason that most geologists won't tell you that it's a whole lot more time sitting behind a computer than you'd ever think. I never thought it when I was in school either. The mountain part still does happen, it's just when I'm not at work!



1000 words a day is probably pretty cheesy - i challenge anyone reading this to find a group larger than 10 that doesn't have any clue that Jack London came up with that idea. Surveying out in front of the wal-mart in Moreno Valley doesn't count - it has to be in a county with a literacy rate above 50%. I think Riverside County is somewhere around 42%, so it's out of the running. If they can name the piece it was from, even better. If they know that John Barleycorn is another piece and not "the guy who runs that ethanol company, right?", well, I'll be duly impressed and start using Cormac McCarthy quotes instead. And if the general populace ever get to the point of recognizing those, I'll move on to Thomas Pynchon. And I know I won't have to get past that, because once the general populace starts recognizing Thomas Pynchon, the apocalypse is nigh. Though with Stephen King being awarded the Nobel Prize for literature, maybe it is already nigh. Or was, rather, in 2005. I guess we're in a post-apocalyptic world already, and never even knew it. Kinda figured it would be more bleak and ashy, and have less winking. You'd never figure that Sarah Palin, end-of-times-monger that she may be, would brighten up the post-apocalyptic visage by winking all the time. I'm beginning to think her winking might be a tick. I've lived in Alaska. Alaskans don't wink. Sometimes they blink, but when they do it's to un-stick their eyelashes that have frozen together because it's 60 below. They conserve energy for things like cutting wood, or building pipelines, or shooing off Russians.

I really could use more coffee at this point...and I'm going to change the music too. Sonny Rollins is a great sax player, and Saxophone Colossus an incredible album, but right now it's just wearing me out. I could blame it on an after-lunch food coma, had I eaten more than half a peanut-butter sandwich and a pumpkin muffin. But i digress. On to...Ridgetop Session, by the Woodsmen. The best band no one I know has ever heard of, out of Santa Cruz. I'll plug 'em, and I don't even know them, just dig the music. I don't think they're making music anymore, but you can download all their albums at thewoodsmen.net. Not thewoodsmen.com - that's some gospel music, which is decidedly different from the woodsmen that I'm listening to right now. Actually just opened another window to make sure i got the right website (the .net one), and they have another album (called Frisco Frisco) that I'm downloading right now...I'll write about it tomorrow I guess. Unless I keep writing long enough to get through it before i leave the office...but i hope I leave before then.

Today's another single-speed day out on the mountain bike after work. If you don't know what that is, think of how most every bike you see has gears that you can shift through. All those gears are there basically for one reason: to make it easier to go up hill. Now think of the same bike with one cog in the front instead of 3, and one cog in the back instead of 9, and you have a single-speed. Going single-speed basically means that one has to expend more energy going up hills. A whole lot more, sometimes. It's not the torture machine it sounds like, though before i had one i thought it was kinda masochistic too. Sometimes you inadvertently end up being masochistic. I'll see a hill and think "I wonder if I can make it up that...", and then go abuse my knees torquing up some hill that I wouldn't want to climb on my geared bike. I did that riding down at the San Clemente singletracks the other day...started out thinking I'd brought the wrong bike since a lot of the climbs out are really steep, and ended up glad i had brought it since it actually made the climbing more fun. I'm a closet masochist I think.

Anyway, tonight riding out at Chino Hills state park until it's dark, and tomorrow a quick loop at the Fullerton loop and then beer tasting! An entire night of beers from Unibroue, the incredible Canadian brewery out of Chambly that puts out phenomenol Belgian-style beers. But i'll save that for tomorrow.

cheers.