Nate's White Trash White Sauce:

add:
1 part Ranch to 1 part Mayo
equals mmmmmmmmmmmm  ¶ 19:24 0 comments

  Some great maps i've found lately:



and

Where Americans are Moving
fascinating... and i'm frankly intrigued Whatcom WA/Eau Claire WI didn't show up, i think i could name 10 people who've done that one.  ¶ 09:24 0 comments

 

Google Earth Outreach & I Love Mountains.  ¶ 10:51 0 comments

  It has to be summer somewhere soon.  ¶ 19:36 0 comments

  ooooooooohio

Just a quick update: i'm back in PA, after about 3 weeks at home. My last site here was boring, and nothing terribly eventfull happened while at home, other than the standard endless job search. Bryan rode with me to the East, and the day i got here, the boss realized he told me the wrong date, so i don't have to work for a few more days. This has actually worked out pretty well, in that i've been able to show Bryan around PA a little, and today we are going to a movie showing that i'm pretty excited about.

"i don't go to coffee shops"  ¶ 11:41 0 comments

  kamikaze without the glory  ¶ 17:19 0 comments

  Traditional destruction.  ¶ 14:19 0 comments

  "Just because you collectively lose your sense of consequences doesn’t mean that you don’t have to live with consequences." --JHK--

From Transition Voice, which is awesome.  ¶ 20:33 0 comments

  This has been the sort of week i can't believe i've lived through.

For three nights, about every half hour or so, i have stood a story up, precariously balanced on pipes slathered with drilling fluid, only able to lean on a large vibrating metal box, to adjust a small splice-valve-thing while being buffeted by winds flowing up a mountain from one side while poisonous vapors steam up my glasses from the other side. (What are these poisonous vapors? Well, methane, ethane, and butane to be specific, but i couldn't be more specific than that because of ice in the line. That's why i had to go to such a place.)

For almost a month, i've 'slept' half a block from the equivalent of a fleet of jackhammers. Been covered with mud and yet without indoor running water.

For two days both of the toilets i can use were out of order due to frozen pipes.

And been basically told i'm a crazy person every time i seek solutions to these things.

While many, many other things are wrong at the moment, i don't even know how to start going into detail. The gas-trap-fumes-windchill-slippery-legs-and-hands-hurting scene, though, epitomizes it all; though the worst of it was three nights of frozen lines, it basically amounted to a straight week of continuous panic. Today there's nothing of that sort, i got the bottoms up sample 15 minutes after waking up, and all day since has been cleaning, breaking down equipment, typing up lists--the easy things i can handle. The things i could handle half asleep and hungry, even. But it's at this point where i can feel stress flowing through my back like it knows something else is about to happen, and it's going to be my fault.

i don't think i'm a crazy person for knowing working nights is unhealthy. i don't think i'm a crazy person for missing my friends. i don't think i'm a crazy person for not knowing the names of different sorts of valves. i don't think i'm a crazy person for thinking a trailer i'm going to be working in for months should have running water. i don't think i'm a crazy person for not knowing the relative registration laws of Texas vs. Pennsylvania. i don't think i'm a crazy person for being proud of both my hometown and my adopted home town. i don't think i'm a crazy person for believing history is a thing that has happened, not just shit we get to make up later. i don't think i'm a crazy person for thinking 84 hour weeks is a bit much. i don't think i'm a crazy person for using my own computer. i don't think i'm a crazy person for having interests worth pursuing in the expanses of free time. i don't think i'm a crazy person for insisting on shutting the door when talking to a mutterer when it's hailing. i don't think i'm a crazy person for not enjoying sexist "jokes." i don't think i'm a crazy person to insist on wearing gloves every time i handle poison.

i think most people in the oilfield are not just crazy, but unnecessarily cruel.

i do think i'm a crazy person for not seeing any way out of this.  ¶ 23:08 0 comments

  in the makings of a tradition

Well, good lord. i don't post much anymore do i? Now that i have my own laptop, i can save links on my own thing, and don't have to post them to find them again... opps.

In any case, things are going alright. i'm back in PA and wish i was in WI, but that's pretty much par for the course in 2010.

i've come across a few crazy - interesting things (and shall try to update with such such more often!).

Japan as Number 2. Absolutely wonderful. i'm still intrigued that adbusters regularly has such great reporting. As for this article in particular, i want someone who's been to Japan lately to tell me if it seems reasonable...?

Did Climate Change Drive Prehistoric Culture Change? Ah ah ahhhh!!! One of the authors mentioned is Sierra's boyfriend Sam, so i'm really excited about another one of my friends being published! And as for the science itself, it's just fascinating, my understanding is that this is pretty well established for the middle east & africa, but this seems to be the most complete work done for north america so far. Very, very exciting stuff!

GUERRILLA GEOTHERMAL WORK. YES CANADA I <3 YOU!

Young Me Now Me. Good for, like, hours of distraction. Unbearably cute & disturbing by turns.

Oil on the Brain. Watch her TED talk! Do it! i mean, like, oil is gross and shit, it's... not a fun topic. But Lisa makes it interesting! She calls us "children of the hydrocarbon age." (Understatement)

our own peace of mynd





  ¶ 17:44 0 comments

  Well Louisiana's still pretty awful.  ¶ 19:32 0 comments

  more than the moon

It's funny to always be so happy about one thing, and yet continuously on the verge of panic on almost all others. No resolve, no rest, and i cannot fathom another day of it yet i don't know a thing i could do to ever make it end. i feel like if i could ever concentrate, there might be a way out, but the prospect of even spending a day or two not calculating if i have enough money to eat or sleep again is... impossible.

depends which generation of star trek it relates to most / (the lady doth protest too much)  ¶ 08:58 0 comments

 

!!

oops, months later... whatevs. Via volcano blog.  ¶ 16:54 0 comments

  i wish i could go home.  ¶ 19:25 0 comments

 

and for Bryan & Thomas:



yeaaaaaaaaaah  ¶ 19:19 0 comments

  ambition & failure

so i guess it is a game, if there's winners and losers.

place  ¶ 19:21 0 comments

  "it ain't a love story unless there's a mummy in it."

Well oh my, my what a July.

June, actually, but whatever. It's July now, and still ungodly warm, and the rest of the summer will be working so most likely not too much will happen. Damian flew out to PA to roadtrip back with me, and we went to Centralia, Reptileland, a bunch of state parks, saw some waterfalls, and Titusville, as well as getting lost a little and so on. And i guess this is where i mention that i am dating Damian now. A few months ago i didn't think he'd actually take me up on the (rather snarky in retrospect) point that 'if you want to spend time with me you'll have to vagabond with me!', but he did, and that's enough of that story for the internet to know.

Back in the midwest it was Elyse's wedding time, we (RGE, Dan, Ratty, Damian, Bryan, Tom, Donna, mother & myself, among others) all drove up to Macinaw City for the wild carriage-gazebo-ferry-fest, and the DJ played Mariner's Revenge twice just to see if we would dance it twice (we did), the caterers were either impressed or appalled at how much we drank (the most ever see for a party of our size (half from WI and a Russian, go figure)), and there were--literally--fireworks (unplanned by anyone in the wedding party) Bryan & Tom fell asleep with empty vodka glasses on the beach (twice).

mmm. So yeah. The weeks since were almost like real life in Eau Claire, except once again everything was different and everything was the same. Endless bouts of drunkenness and youtube and Nik's bad youtube-ness and guitar and books and porch-sitting and fires and frisbees and Topper's and Racy's and the Court N House and bridges and boardgames and painting at Joe's and having Damian meet the family and already knowing-ish his and staircases in my hometown i'd never seen before and on and on and it was a great summer, in just over two weeks.

And then the leaving, always leaving; out with Mike & Clara in Madison, and gyroscopes with Alexis, and pyschic octapuses at Dave's (yes we watched the world cup, yay Spain!), and Navy Pier (blue tongue and stained glass!) and the Chicago Tribune (seriously, the Parthenon? What?!) building here with Megan & Arian. i'm heading back east tommorrow, the long haul drive from Chicago to central Pennsylvania, and even though now i have internet and books and spent all day with friends i can already feel my mynd clearing, unready for another reality.

"but how will you pay for it?" "...i'll hire someone!"  ¶ 23:06 0 comments

    ¶ 00:25 0 comments

  "I'm going to burn the next thing you say you love."--Damian--

The site of the first oil exchange is now a Family Video/italian restaurant, we walked past there last night.

dredges of america  ¶ 08:41 0 comments

    ¶ 17:07 0 comments

  Middle America... even more depressing than i thought.  ¶ 19:50 0 comments

  This is What the End of the Oil Age Looks Like

Over the past few weeks, i've been following the continuous epic fails of BP to staunch the Horizon Deepwater flow. It's taken on a surreal fascination for me, this worst-case-scenerio play-by-play of All That Could Go Wrong Offshore. The Oil Drum has had practically immediate updates, and the latest is that top kill didn't work.

So i got a text the other day, as most of my friends' geologist/environmentalist/future-pragmatist in-action (LOVE IT!!), asking, 'so I just heard someone refer to the oil spill as the largest environmental disaster in the history of the Earth. Thoughts?'

Thoughts?! Well, why yes, have them i do; my tweet-length response was simply, 'BP spill is def in the top 10 manmade 'disasters,' but earth's seen much worse-it's just that this shit happens so often lately is why it's a problem.' Make no mistake: this oil spill is a really big deal. Fisheries will collapse. Beaches will be unusable for months, maybe years. Species will go extinct. The water column is poisoned top to bottom.

So, let's go backwards through the chain of events here. The leak started because of an explosion on the rig, caused by a kick--inflow of liquids--into the well, possibly caused by methane hydrates, when 13 people died. The one thing that should have been noticed a bit earlier was a gain in pit volume even after they stopped pumping, a common sign of kick in a well. At that point, the crew probably had a few hours to figure out what was going on, but clearly no one did quickly enough. Well kicks rarely lead to explosions these days, after the fabulous gushers of the Texas oil boom era (and... massive associated death), a handy device called the blow-out-preventer was invented as a giant plug on the hole. At the Deepwater Horizon, that failsafe mechanism failed... to be safe.

At the time of the explosion, the drilling crew was already rigging down their equipment, in preparation for the production crew to come onsite; ie., some personnel including mudloggers and measurement-while-drilling people had already gone back to shore, and some of those crew would have hypothetically been the ones to be watching for non-normal events like what caused the kick in flow to the surface. In the next few weeks, there will certainly be better updates on how the "accident" happened, but for now these are the things we know.

Before that, suppossedly not enough cement was used in the final casing and that possibly the Schlumberger people were run off from the site, because they warned that something was wrong with the well. Things will certainly come to light later on in the federal trial, but frankly those kind of things aren't rare in the oil field. That's one of the many, many reasons oil is a risky business: not only is it complex, there is an incredibly wide variety of people working in the field, who simply don't always get along (what other line of work that has coined its own terminology for being asked to leave (ie, 'run off')?). The energy business is not really like other businesses. The crews don't go home at the end of the day to their wives and kids and dogs, they live onsite for months at a time, and then get months off. Crews rotate in and out frequently, and exhaustion is a very real problem in the oil field.

Apparently there had already been some concerns raised about BP's offshore operations, but none of it had come to consequence-time yet as of when this explosion/leak started. For now we have the blame game, Transocean vs. Halliburton vs. BP vs. ... who knows, everybody. There's postulation that since BP was behind schedule, the stage was set for disaster. The thing is, many, many people and pieces of equipment had to fail for this all to go down. So yes, complexity? Definitely a factor.

And, oh yeah, why was the rig out there in the first place? Simply because oil is the lifeblood of the world economy. Cheap energy is what makes growth as we know it possible. For four generations now, we have had had continuously more and more, and at this point in time we are near the peak of oil production. As oil productions plateaus, and then begins declining (when in the wonderful words of the Oil Drum we will have "continuously less and less"), more and more marginal places to acquire energy will be tapped. The Gulf, America's third coast, the vast already fragile ecosystem, will be drilled even though we know it's dangerous, if we expect a growing economy.

We know we should stop drilling. But we drill because we're greedy. We drill because of an unwillingness to face an unknown future. We drill because, even with the immense--maybe even incalculable--harm, it is still easier than all the unknown alternatives. We drill because of a lack of imagination.

Some people, of course, have already thought through the post carbon future (if this is a term unknown to you, prepare to spend a lot of time on your comp catching up!). Grist ran an article on cutting the oil habit, wonderfully parsed by the oil drum here.

As for whether this is the worst environmental disaster in the history of the earth... well, no. Here's a few pretty bad examples of other oil disasters. And as for other disasters going down lately: desertification, coral bleaching, species loss, deforestation, aquifer drawdown, water contamination, monoculture, subsidence, dams realigning watersheds, toxic rain, mountain-top-removal coal mining, and so on and so on. There's a new top 10 list of manmade environmental disasters at truthout, but i distinctly recall in college writing a paper on this, and the top historical anthropogenic environmental disaster was usually considered the deforestation/desertification of the (once) Fertile Crescent (references once/if i can ever find them again). Plato even wrote about deforestation, already a notable issue in the 4th century BCE. For a bad time, i took the bait & googled "top 10 anthropogenic environmental disasters" leading to a world... of... something. Hadn't even heard of the Italian dioxin or the Spanish cyanide spills before... (and good lord, i'm not googling that again soon, thinking about Bhopal makes me cry every time).

And as for worst disaster ever? It really depends what you consider a 'disaster.' "Disaster" literally means from the stars; that is, totally from left-field, unforseeable; things that couldn't be anticipated before hand. Evil dues-ex-machina, if you will. One of the things that unites anthropogenic 'disasters' is that most of them can be (and were) anticipated. If we cut down most of the trees, there will have few trees left. If we take water out of an aquifer faster than its recharge rate, it will become drawn down. If we build hundreds of big, complex, oil-locating metal machines and staff them with under-trained, exhausted people, one of them will eventually break down. To me, the BP spill is in no sense a disaster, it is the result of a series of bad decisions without proper contingency plans and a small smudge of bad luck. The spill is the end result of an economic system that rewards greed, cutting corners, specialization of labor, at the same time as demanding an ever-increasing energy supply. We are quite literally getting what we (America) asked for, and seeing first hand what the end of the oil age looks like.

And of course the Earth itself has gone through a whole bunch of actual disasters, meteorites--actually being from the stars in the sense the ancients who coined 'disaster' understood--primarily springing to mynd. Chicxulub finishing off the dinos being the most well-known of these. The bigger Permian-Jurassic extinction event was also possibly caused by a meteorite, and so on. Earth has gone through warmings, coolings, stoppings-and-startings of oceanic circulation, major volcanic activity, and on and on.

So to actually answer the question, i think that the P/Jr extinction event was the worst environmental disaster in Earth history, because 90% of species alive at that time died, but i also think there is a huge difference between disasters and forseeable consequences of our actions.  ¶ 20:08 0 comments