The obvious result of all of which is:
Sunday, June 28, 2009
Photo Booth
Coz and I went to a gallery showing which was a fundraiser for Second Chance, the animal shelter where she works. Because it was a fundraiser for an animal shelter - and because this is Flagstaff - we assumed (correctly) that dogs were welcome, and took Darwin and Roo along. The exhibit on was kind of cool; the artist set up one of those automatic photo booths in a variety of places around town, and collected a whole bunch of the strips of photos, which he mounted in a strip all around the outside of the gallery. There were some fun photos in there, and it was kind of cool to see some of the groups and progressions, and guess where the booth may have been at the time. And of course, to make the whole thing properly recursive (or reflective, or self-referential, or whatever wank term I'd use if I were a true artiste...) he had the booth set up at the exhibit (and was donating half the proceeds to Second Chance, so don't be too hard on the guy.)
The obvious result of all of which is:
The obvious result of all of which is:
Friday, June 26, 2009
Swine Flu coming soon to a keyboard near me
Came back from lunch today to find a colleague telling us all that there was a confirmed case of Swine Flu in the organisation. Specifically on our floor. Specifically in the bank of desks just around the corner from us.
This is a hotdesking office, although it doesn't really need to be. I love the reaction so far. Instead of stating that we should all stop hotdesking to ensure the germs don't spread too far, which might be an easy and predictable management response, they have instead chosen to order us more screen and keyboard wipes.
Oh, and sent our manager around to tell us not to panic. I quote "there's no need to run around screaming and waving your arms in the air because someone's been confirmed with swine flu". (I promptly asked him if we could run around doing so for the fun of it, being the absurdist that I am. He said, yes, and smiled)
I like the understated nature of it all.
-I'd like you all to note that I have resisted the urge to rant about this 'pandemic', and the actions that have been taken so far. Brownie points please!
This is a hotdesking office, although it doesn't really need to be. I love the reaction so far. Instead of stating that we should all stop hotdesking to ensure the germs don't spread too far, which might be an easy and predictable management response, they have instead chosen to order us more screen and keyboard wipes.
Oh, and sent our manager around to tell us not to panic. I quote "there's no need to run around screaming and waving your arms in the air because someone's been confirmed with swine flu". (I promptly asked him if we could run around doing so for the fun of it, being the absurdist that I am. He said, yes, and smiled)
I like the understated nature of it all.
-I'd like you all to note that I have resisted the urge to rant about this 'pandemic', and the actions that have been taken so far. Brownie points please!
Thursday, June 25, 2009
Tuesday, June 23, 2009
Monday, June 22, 2009
Lechon
Normally Lechon is a whole roast pig, which D recently sampled on a trip to the Phillipies for work. He was so impressed that he did a version for me.
First he got a (boneless) roast shoulder of pork from Woolies and baked it. Then once it is baked you take off the crackling and roughly chop the pork into large chunks and put it back into the oven at about 180 degrees for 15 minutes. You can snack on the crackling while you wait. Then you take a small bowl and fill it 3/4 full with white vinegar (just plain white vinegar, white wine vinegar isn't as good for this) and a finely julienned clove of garlic. Once the pork has finished its second cooking pile it onto a plate and put it on the table with the bowl of vingear and garlic beside it. Then grab a fork get a bit of pork and dip it in the vinegar. Then eat. D also made garlic rice to have with the pork. Which is cooked rice with garlic flakes mixed through. Really yummy subtle garlic flavour. If you were being good you could even have some steamed asian greens with it. Great way to use up left over roast pork, or a great reason to have a pork roast.
First he got a (boneless) roast shoulder of pork from Woolies and baked it. Then once it is baked you take off the crackling and roughly chop the pork into large chunks and put it back into the oven at about 180 degrees for 15 minutes. You can snack on the crackling while you wait. Then you take a small bowl and fill it 3/4 full with white vinegar (just plain white vinegar, white wine vinegar isn't as good for this) and a finely julienned clove of garlic. Once the pork has finished its second cooking pile it onto a plate and put it on the table with the bowl of vingear and garlic beside it. Then grab a fork get a bit of pork and dip it in the vinegar. Then eat. D also made garlic rice to have with the pork. Which is cooked rice with garlic flakes mixed through. Really yummy subtle garlic flavour. If you were being good you could even have some steamed asian greens with it. Great way to use up left over roast pork, or a great reason to have a pork roast.
Sunday, June 21, 2009
Little Colorado Adventure
So the week before last I get a call from my friend Ed, who wants to go hike the Little Colorado River canyon, or LCR as its known hereabouts. This is one of the main tributaries to the Colorado, coming in just at the beginning of the stretch that most folks think of as the Grand Canyon. Unlike its bigger brother, however, the LCR is fairly hard to get to, and consequently not very well-traveled. Chance of a lifetime - wrangle time off work and sign me up. Unfortunately its a 4 day trip, and Coz was scheduled to work 3 of them, so there was no chance of her getting the time off. And the trail sounded kind of rough for dogs (possibly should have noticed the ominous foreshadowing music at that point) so I'm on my own for the weekend.
Friday - Into the Abyss
The Grand Canyon is pretty famous for a hole in the ground, but what a lot of people don't know is that its more like a hole within a hole; it drops off sharply at the edge, then levels out in a kind of shoulder or plateau, then drops again to get to the river. Up by the LCR the first drop mellows slightly and the shoulder actually widens out to the point where its not really all one canyon anymore, which was 
most obvious when we went rattling down the equivalent of that first drop on a dirt road in a truck. Don't get me wrong though - just because we were driving it doesn't mean that this is easy terrain! We stopped just before the trailhead to have a look at where we were heading...
The first days hike down the Blue Springs Trail was only a mile according to some guide that Ed had read, but he'd been there before years ago and thought he remembered it as longer. That would be because its about a mile on the map sure, but its also a couple of thousand feet down, and another mile or so zig-zagging across the face of the cliff trying to find a way down that doesn't involve plummeting... Its not really hard core rock-climbing as such - the ledges are pretty wide and the hand-holds are huge - but you're still hanging over several-hundred-foot drops with a pack on your back (or lowering it by rope in the trickier bits.) Here's Ed demonstrating his trail-finding technique - I don't know if you can tell from the photo, but the upper left-hand corner of the background is about 1,000 feet lower than us at that point. No, dogs would not be a good idea on this trail.
But we reached the springs before dark (just, for some of us) and its a gorgeous camping spot on a beach with a clear, blue-tinged spring gushing out of the canyon wall. Photos of the LCR I'd seen had showed the water as a striking turquoise color, but I just figured we must have come in the wrong season or something.
Saturday - The Seven Mile Walk
On Saturday, Ed informed us, we were going down a stretch of the river that he'd never been down before, but that it should be about seven miles to the confluence with the main Colorado. For at least the first bit there were no trails though, just walking down the middle of the river with occasional ephemeral muddy banks on either side, so we got an early start. By a couple of miles down the river the water started to pick up the turquoise colour I'd been expecting - lots of side-springs coming in loaded with calcium carbonate, and the chalkiness shows up the blue that was mostly transparent at Blue Spring. The same minerals deposit out as river-wide dams made of travertine, which makes for some pretty spectacular waterfalls:
At the largest of these we met a man and his two sons, who were staying in this section of canyon for 10 days, subsisting on nothing but a 7-pound lump of quinoa. He informed us that we'd come about 4 miles from the springs... and it was about 7 more to the confluence of the main Colorado.
We started to find trails on the banks at about this point, and though they were barely-visible tracks through the head-high grass, they speeded us up a fair bit. We'd left Kent and Ed behind to set their own pace and hadn't seen them for a while, so we were starting to worry that maybe they'd missed the trails and were still slogging down the middle of the river, so we stopped to wait for them to catch up (Turns out they had just stopped to make coffee.) We stopped just below Big Canyon at a place where the Hopi Salt Trail drops into the canyon, and there were a couple of guys who had come down it just for the day... who told us, among other things, that we'd gone about 3 miles since meeting Quinoa Man, and that we had about 7 more to go before we hit the confluence! In fact, every single person I met all day who I asked about the confluence said it was 7 miles away - I stopped asking eventually. So now its 3 in the afternoon and we're a LOT further from where we're going than we thought, so we started to buckle down and cover some miles with less faffing about. The LCR canyon is still beautiful below the Hopi Salt Trail, but less striking, and the trail ends up covered with low sticker bushes so its not much fun to walk; when we go back, we'll probably stay in the upper canyon. But we did finally reach the elusive confluence, after what we guess is about 14 miles, and just on dark. I don't know about the other guys, but my legs were barely functional. Reminded me a bit of the Great Lemming Claustral Canyon Crusade.
Sunday - Down the River
Sunday had us heading down the Beamer Trail above the river, mostly high up on the walls looking down on the occasional pack of rafters drifting by. The trail was pretty exposed, but we'd got an early start again so we did most of it before the direct sun found its way down to our depths. Once we got back down to the beach we had a quick but refreshing swim (the Colorado maintaining a fairly constant and chilly 45F / 7C from its dam-fed origins upstream) 
and the whole day was only about 9 miles. I had some minor twinges from my knee which worried me because, after all, we were going to have to climb out of the Grand Canyon the next day, but all-in-all it was a very pleasant day; the clouds and the light were fantastic all day, and we got to watch the rafters run the wave-train at Tanner rapid from our camp.
Monday - Ascencion
On Monday we knew we had a long climb up the Tanner Trail out of the canyon, and also a good 5-hours worth of car shuttle to drive (we had to drive back out all those miles of dirt road we'd driven to the trailhead, get the car we'd left there, and drive back.) We also knew from experience by this point that Justin and Ed were quite a bit faster than any of the rest of us, and noone wanted to be hiking the next day in the hot sun. So Justin and Ed bravely volunteered to get up before dawn and hit the trail with headlamps, then run the car shuttle while we slogged up the hill. The only problem being that we only had one alarm between us, and it was running low on batteries - Justin will take it and get on the trail by 4, resetting it to wake the rest of us a couple hours later.
Except in the execution, Justin woke and checked the clock at 2 just as the batteries gave their last gasp. Rather than chance not getting up, he and Ed left then - in complete darkness - and were on the canyon rim almost before the sun caught them at 6:30. I woke up sometime before true dawn (about 5:30 that day, we think) and was on the trail soon after. The Tanner Trail isn't easy - anything starting at the Colorado in that neck of the woods has about a mile of up in it, after all - but it spaces the up out nicely until the very end (when it makes you switchback up a vertical wall for a bit, just to remind you who's boss.) It was nice hiking in the early morning before the heat, and my knee didn't bother me at all; I was out by about 10:30, and Ed turned up with the car not too long after that.
This is the view from the top. To the left of the dead tree, you can make out a tiny patch of river. That's where we hiked from this day, and you can actually see the bluffs we walked along the day before, and almost all the way back to the confluence in the distance. It was a mighty trip, and if there are bits I wouldn't necessarily do again (the bottom half of the LCR canyon, for instance) I'm still glad I did them once. Coz and I are already plotting to do the Hopi Salt Trail and spend a couple of days swimming in those travertine falls up the top.
Ed, Kent, Ed, and I at the top; Justin, alas, is missing.
More photos can be found at Coz' Flickr site.
Friday - Into the Abyss
The Grand Canyon is pretty famous for a hole in the ground, but what a lot of people don't know is that its more like a hole within a hole; it drops off sharply at the edge, then levels out in a kind of shoulder or plateau, then drops again to get to the river. Up by the LCR the first drop mellows slightly and the shoulder actually widens out to the point where its not really all one canyon anymore, which was most obvious when we went rattling down the equivalent of that first drop on a dirt road in a truck. Don't get me wrong though - just because we were driving it doesn't mean that this is easy terrain! We stopped just before the trailhead to have a look at where we were heading...The first days hike down the Blue Springs Trail was only a mile according to some guide that Ed had read, but he'd been there before years ago and thought he remembered it as longer. That would be because its about a mile on the map sure, but its also a couple of thousand feet down, and another mile or so zig-zagging across the face of the cliff trying to find a way down that doesn't involve plummeting... Its not really hard core rock-climbing as such - the ledges are pretty wide and the hand-holds are huge - but you're still hanging over several-hundred-foot drops with a pack on your back (or lowering it by rope in the trickier bits.) Here's Ed demonstrating his trail-finding technique - I don't know if you can tell from the photo, but the upper left-hand corner of the background is about 1,000 feet lower than us at that point. No, dogs would not be a good idea on this trail.But we reached the springs before dark (just, for some of us) and its a gorgeous camping spot on a beach with a clear, blue-tinged spring gushing out of the canyon wall. Photos of the LCR I'd seen had showed the water as a striking turquoise color, but I just figured we must have come in the wrong season or something.
Saturday - The Seven Mile Walk
On Saturday, Ed informed us, we were going down a stretch of the river that he'd never been down before, but that it should be about seven miles to the confluence with the main Colorado. For at least the first bit there were no trails though, just walking down the middle of the river with occasional ephemeral muddy banks on either side, so we got an early start. By a couple of miles down the river the water started to pick up the turquoise colour I'd been expecting - lots of side-springs coming in loaded with calcium carbonate, and the chalkiness shows up the blue that was mostly transparent at Blue Spring. The same minerals deposit out as river-wide dams made of travertine, which makes for some pretty spectacular waterfalls:
At the largest of these we met a man and his two sons, who were staying in this section of canyon for 10 days, subsisting on nothing but a 7-pound lump of quinoa. He informed us that we'd come about 4 miles from the springs... and it was about 7 more to the confluence of the main Colorado.
We started to find trails on the banks at about this point, and though they were barely-visible tracks through the head-high grass, they speeded us up a fair bit. We'd left Kent and Ed behind to set their own pace and hadn't seen them for a while, so we were starting to worry that maybe they'd missed the trails and were still slogging down the middle of the river, so we stopped to wait for them to catch up (Turns out they had just stopped to make coffee.) We stopped just below Big Canyon at a place where the Hopi Salt Trail drops into the canyon, and there were a couple of guys who had come down it just for the day... who told us, among other things, that we'd gone about 3 miles since meeting Quinoa Man, and that we had about 7 more to go before we hit the confluence! In fact, every single person I met all day who I asked about the confluence said it was 7 miles away - I stopped asking eventually. So now its 3 in the afternoon and we're a LOT further from where we're going than we thought, so we started to buckle down and cover some miles with less faffing about. The LCR canyon is still beautiful below the Hopi Salt Trail, but less striking, and the trail ends up covered with low sticker bushes so its not much fun to walk; when we go back, we'll probably stay in the upper canyon. But we did finally reach the elusive confluence, after what we guess is about 14 miles, and just on dark. I don't know about the other guys, but my legs were barely functional. Reminded me a bit of the Great Lemming Claustral Canyon Crusade.
Sunday - Down the River
Sunday had us heading down the Beamer Trail above the river, mostly high up on the walls looking down on the occasional pack of rafters drifting by. The trail was pretty exposed, but we'd got an early start again so we did most of it before the direct sun found its way down to our depths. Once we got back down to the beach we had a quick but refreshing swim (the Colorado maintaining a fairly constant and chilly 45F / 7C from its dam-fed origins upstream) and the whole day was only about 9 miles. I had some minor twinges from my knee which worried me because, after all, we were going to have to climb out of the Grand Canyon the next day, but all-in-all it was a very pleasant day; the clouds and the light were fantastic all day, and we got to watch the rafters run the wave-train at Tanner rapid from our camp.Monday - Ascencion
On Monday we knew we had a long climb up the Tanner Trail out of the canyon, and also a good 5-hours worth of car shuttle to drive (we had to drive back out all those miles of dirt road we'd driven to the trailhead, get the car we'd left there, and drive back.) We also knew from experience by this point that Justin and Ed were quite a bit faster than any of the rest of us, and noone wanted to be hiking the next day in the hot sun. So Justin and Ed bravely volunteered to get up before dawn and hit the trail with headlamps, then run the car shuttle while we slogged up the hill. The only problem being that we only had one alarm between us, and it was running low on batteries - Justin will take it and get on the trail by 4, resetting it to wake the rest of us a couple hours later.
Except in the execution, Justin woke and checked the clock at 2 just as the batteries gave their last gasp. Rather than chance not getting up, he and Ed left then - in complete darkness - and were on the canyon rim almost before the sun caught them at 6:30. I woke up sometime before true dawn (about 5:30 that day, we think) and was on the trail soon after. The Tanner Trail isn't easy - anything starting at the Colorado in that neck of the woods has about a mile of up in it, after all - but it spaces the up out nicely until the very end (when it makes you switchback up a vertical wall for a bit, just to remind you who's boss.) It was nice hiking in the early morning before the heat, and my knee didn't bother me at all; I was out by about 10:30, and Ed turned up with the car not too long after that.
This is the view from the top. To the left of the dead tree, you can make out a tiny patch of river. That's where we hiked from this day, and you can actually see the bluffs we walked along the day before, and almost all the way back to the confluence in the distance. It was a mighty trip, and if there are bits I wouldn't necessarily do again (the bottom half of the LCR canyon, for instance) I'm still glad I did them once. Coz and I are already plotting to do the Hopi Salt Trail and spend a couple of days swimming in those travertine falls up the top.
Ed, Kent, Ed, and I at the top; Justin, alas, is missing.
More photos can be found at Coz' Flickr site.
Friday, June 19, 2009
Ministry of Skepticism
Some friends of mine (who many of you would have met at our wedding - my best "dude" Alyssa and her partner Jesec - mostly Jesec) have started a kind of skeptics society circle of friends sort of thing, which is currently going under the title of The Looking Glass Logic Society (Lewis Carroll reference++). Its got a blog, entitled the Ministry of Skepticism. I tend to rant less there, but I've been posting some of my normal ranting fare over there, so I thought I'd invite you all to join us if you like...
Its a group effort, so if you feel like posting instead of just commenting, let me know and I'll get Jesec aka Bigfrozenhead to sign you up.
Its a group effort, so if you feel like posting instead of just commenting, let me know and I'll get Jesec aka Bigfrozenhead to sign you up.
Friday, June 05, 2009
It was 20 years ago today...
This is cut and edited from my blog...
So today, we decided not to get the old ForBattle! sign out and head on up to Tian'anmen Square to have a bit of a squiz. Although, from what we understand, we could've, we just would have had a hard time taking photos for all the umbrella action that was happening up there...
We did get some rain today, so I guess their efforts weren't completely in vain...
So today, we decided not to get the old ForBattle! sign out and head on up to Tian'anmen Square to have a bit of a squiz. Although, from what we understand, we could've, we just would have had a hard time taking photos for all the umbrella action that was happening up there...
We did get some rain today, so I guess their efforts weren't completely in vain...
Tuesday, June 02, 2009
Ok LoL's Bring It On
Ok not that funny a caption I admit. But I know you all can do better....Bring it!
In case you don't know the human is Rob, the blue eyed freak is Roo and the other two are foster pups.
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