Random Notes

There was frost on the ground this morning. First morning my hands were chilly on the morning dog walk (and if I had put them in the pockets of my leather jacket, which I got out for the first time this morning, I would have found some gloves). Yet somehow this morning, unlike Monday and Tuesday, I decided to man up and *not* wear a turtleneck. I've just changed into my jammies and warm fuzzy robe and slippers, and I feel much better now. (A little warm actually, but that's 50 for you.)

I got to work this morning to discover that I will be mapping requirements and doing rework on the document for at least the next week. I can't say it came as much of a surprise.

I may or may not have already mentioned that I am turning 50 next week. Major birthdays are a lot more annoying than minor birthdays. As a general rule one must decide what one wants for one's birthday, where one wants to go out to eat, etc., but on a major birthday you can't just get an ordinary gift or go to an ordinary dinner. I keep trying to reframe this: gee, what would I love to get but would normally never think of buying; where would I love to go but normally wouldn't. I should be viewing this as an opportunity. But mostly I have other stuff I want to be spending my October weekends on. It know it would be better for everyone, including me, if I would quit grumbling and appreciate the moment.

I have moved the "crafting" chair over to the table the laptop is on. I haven't done any crafting in quite some time now, although theoretically Christmas is coming and I have big plans. I'm not sure the furniture rearrangement is a good omen.

Back

Sheesh--I've been gone so long Blogger made me sign in. I was so excited this morning when I went to work: today was the deadline for peer review comments on a document I have been helping to write for the last couple months. I have been writing, getting comments, rewriting, formatting, fighting with a new document tool (Open Office), and generally hating life since the beginning of May.

Twitterer @badbanana had a tweet one day that made me laugh out loud: "I had to hunker down and do some serious writing today. Which is why I made a working flute out of a carrot." That has described my days pretty accurately. I considered buying some handcuffs to chain myself to my desk with. (Sorry, with which to chain myself to my desk.)

A week ago I worked over the weekend (and into Monday, because that's how these things wind up) to finish the last section and try to fix as many cross-references as possible. Then it got packaged up and sent out for the formal review, which was scheduled to end today. (Fortunately, or unfortunately, most of the reviewers are also authors, which means that commenting is going to be somewhat superficial. Although a lot of my comments weren't altogether superficial.)

My boss says he's going to do all the rework, which I really don't believe, and my other boss says he's got someone else creating the huge table at the end mapping all the requirements to sections of the document, which I don't think is attainable for one person in our time frame, but at least for this moment I am technically done with this document. (Until May when we have to update it again for our next release.)

I am now free to resume my life as an engineer. I feel sort of like someone getting out of the hospital after a long illness. Except of course we have a ridiculous deadline coming up just before Christmas, so there is no time to waste "getting back into it." Instead of feeling like celebrating at the end of the day, I was sort of numb. (OK, I had just finished spending over a week reviewing 300 pages of tech-speak, so that is probably understandable.)

Anyway--coming home at night after wrangling words all day did not leave me in much of a mood to get on the computer and write blog entries. This morning I had that feeling you get in the spring when the birds come back and start singing again (even if fall and 50-degree high temperatures did descend on Minnesota this week, and the s-word appeared in the forecast for northern Minnesota for the first time). So here's hoping I'll be making more frequent appearances.

A Spouse in the House

I'm assuming that every married person occasionally daydreams about what it would be like to be not married, and have all your time "to yourself" so to speak. Somehow you imagine you'd spend lots more time doing various things you feel you're not doing enough of normally.

I've had a chance to try that out this week (my husband is on a business trip), and, unsurprisingly I guess, it turns out that left to my own devices, I spend a lot of time surfing the internet and staying up way, way too late playing Spider Solitaire on the computer and doing crossword puzzles. (I say unsurprising because I already spend too much time doing these things. Now I'm just free to spend more time without any of that peer-pressure sort of guilt that occurs naturally because there's another person in the house who knows what you're doing.)

Last week my head was filled with ideas of all the things I could do during this time when I would be on my own. I could do whatever I want! I could spend hours on my own pet projects without worrying that I was neglecting our relationship! I have a list, of course, of things I wrote down that I would like to do (or that I ought to do). Too bad Spider Solitaire is not on the list, or I'd have something I could check off.

He had to get up ridiculously early on Tuesday to make it to a 7:30am flight, so I got up early, and got to work before 8:30. The plan was to get up early, now that my internal clock was all realigned (I did wake up at 5:45 the next morning, but didn't get up for another half hour), come home earlier, and try to "get some things done" in the evenings. I'm always searching for that singular event that will shake up the inexorable slouch toward later and later every day, and was pleased to have found one. I made it to work before 9:00 the second day, but I started logging in from home to do a little work each evening (so I could leave the office earlier!), and pretty soon I was up until 11:30 each night like usual and getting up late since I'd worked the night before.

Last night, a mere 60 hours from that early Tuesday wakeup, I turned the light out at 2am.

So, repentant now, I'm resolving to do better next week. So far today has been a washout--I finally decided maybe I'd go out and try to wash bugs off the front of the camper and it started raining. I'm sure there are other things on my list that don't require going outside, but hey, that was what I was all geared up for. Now I think, being Saturday and all, that the dogs and I will live large and go get some fast food drive thru for dinner, and I can rack my brain to try and remember what movies I've always wanted to see that he doesn't want to watch.

Tweet of the Day

Well, yesterday, actually. And it was from @badbanana (who else):

Obama is going to address the nation's schoolchildren? One good fart joke and the Democrats control Congress for 60 years.

Easily Amused

I had lunch today with some former co-workers I haven't seen in quite awhile, and as it turned out, two of them had plenty of hay-baling experience earlier in their lives. So I heard quite about about how hay is baled, moved, and stored. I wasn't taking notes, however, so I cannot write a very thorough review of what I learned--my apologies. I can say that some sort of spinning fork thing is how the circular hay bale gets started--the first bits get caught in that and then it builds up from there.

Meanwhile, my excitement for the weekend is that I ordered a home carpet cleaner. My sister-in-law has a Bissell that I have borrowed a couple times, and I've rented a Rug Doctor several times. We have new carpeting on the second floor of our house that is less than a year old, and the carpeting on the main floor is only about two years old. The new carpet is frieze, which apparently likes to be vacuumed more frequently than the dense pile we had before. I can promise myself I will begin vacuuming regularly, but that doesn't make it happen. So I also promised myself I would wash it several times a year, which gets a little expensive if you're renting a Rug Doctor each time.

Before we went on the Montana trip Tom noticed that one of his favorite web sites, NewEgg, had a Hoover for $149 (with free shipping) that had gotten pretty good reviews. After we got back from the trip, the NewEgg deal was still there, plus Amazon had the same unit at the same price. And thanks to my friend Sheila, who friended me on Amazon Prime, I was able to get it with 2-day free shipping from Amazon.

So it arrived this afternoon, and I commenced unpacking and assembling it. I was expecting an all afternoon experience, because several reviewers had commented that it required quite a bit of assembly and they wished it came a little more put together out of the box. Assembly turned out to be two bolts and one screw. (I decided that these folks should definitely avoid Ikea.)

My initial reaction is that it seems perhaps not quite as durably made as the Bissell, but I like the rotating brushes, and it comes apart quite nicely for cleaning. The Bissell has this ingenious scheme where there's a plastic membrane in the tank that allows the dirty water to refill the same tank the clean water is pulled from, but the Hoover has two separate tanks. (Reviewers who mentioned this difference seemed to prefer the two-tank arrangement. Obviously they are not engineers.)

I was a little worried that maybe the tanks were smaller, but I looked it up and they're both one gallon. I was surprised that I did our whole family room on one gallon of water--I didn't remember being able to do that. The machine handled very well and I was entirely satisfied at least on the first outing. The carpet looks much better, but I think I'm going to do it again on Sunday afternoon because the first "coat" took out tons of dirt. I'd also like to do the upstairs, but I might not get to that this weekend.

This is the beauty of owning your own. I don't have to do it this weekend. I can do it whenever I want! And I can do it more often this way. I kind of like cleaning the carpet, and it's not much fuss--these machines are really well designed so they're pretty easy to use. So I think it will really happen. Maybe I should hire out. I can clean carpets when I retire.

Hay!

Today we drove back across eastern Montana and western North Dakota to Jamestown. We're camped north of Jamestown at the reservoir campground. We drove for ten hours, got set up, and grilled a bison steak that we bought in Big Timber. It was great--so tender! A baked potato, some leftover carrots, a little salad and some cantaloupe--a great meal anywhere.

I'm convinced that one thing America does prodigously is grow hay. We must have passed thousands of bales of hay in the past week. If we were to do the trip again I would create a photo album of hay bale arrangements. Most of them are scattered out in the fields where they were baled. Often they are stacked in neat lines two or three tall. Today we even passed a couple balers at work, and a couple tractors moving bales. The landscape is absolutly covered with hay growing and hay bales. (We also passed grass along the sides of the road and in the off-ramp areas that had been baled.)

We did pass a lot of cows, and quite a few horses, and even some sheep who would be eating this hay, and I get that they eat it all year round. But we're talkin' really enormous quantities of hay.

Maybe if I drive around Minnesota I can find good hay bale sculptures to photograph. For a really thorough treatment I'd have to get someone to show me how the baler works to roll it up from the inside out.

Gallatin Forest Day Trips

We've taken side trips the last two days into the Gallatin National Forest. Yesterday's goal was to visit the Crazy Mountains, and today we went to the Natural Bridge and Falls on the Boulder River.

All up and down the Rocky Mountains, if you look on a map, there are named "ranges," and clumps of mountains named the X-and-Such Mountains. The Crazy Mountains are just north of Big Timber, they are a small cluster of mountains on their own, on the eastern edge of the Rockies. The tallest one, Crazy Peak, is over 11,000ft tall, which is pretty tall by Rockies standards. According to Wikipedia, the original Crow Indian name for the mountains was the Crazy Woman Mountains, and referred to a woman whose family was killed in the westward settlement movement, and she went insane and lived in the mountains.

The forest service has primitive campgrounds and hiking trails throughout the national forest areas. Montana seems to scoff at pavement, a lot of the rural roads are dirt or gravel roads. On the map it looked like one of these campgrounds was right up in the Crazies, and we wanted to get a closer look at them. So we hopped in the truck and started jolting across the countryside toward the mountains.


One of the things I find interesting about the countryside is that it is like a multi-level floor plan. One area is at one level, then there's a large step up and another large flat area is some twenty feet higher than the first.

This drive went through quite a bit of private land, with rustic old wooden cabins. There were a lot of beautiful horses. In one place we had to stop the truck to let a herd of them pass on the road. (At first I thought they wanted to come see if we had any treats for them, then we realized they just wanted to get by us.)


The road to the campground led us through a canyon into the Crazies, next to Crazy Peak's next door neighbor. We took pictures of wildflowers and pine trees and horses.



Today's trip took us south of Big Timber along the Boulder River to the Natural Bridge and Falls. This is an area where the water has worn an underground path through the rock. During the high water in the spring, the water goes over and down a high falls, but during lower water it goes under the rock and comes out below. There was a natural limestone bridge over the falls, but it collapsed in 1988. The falls area and the canyon around it was lovely.

I apologize for the drunken quality of these photos--I seem to have difficulty seeing whether things are level when I'm looking at the camera. The first photo is the rapids above the falls, before the water goes "underground." The second one is looking over the top of the high falls. The third one is opposite the falls. The high falls at the top are dry, and the water is coming out of the underground channel.