nice doggy?

As part of my consulting work, I occasionally found myself inside homes, sampling their air or their tap water. I met with a large number of dogs.

Most of the dogs I've met have been pretty happy to see me, whether they were small yappy dogs or large overly enthusiastic dogs ("Oof! Down boy!"). I did meet with one mama rottweiler who was guarding an elderly relative who was alone in the house, and the dog made it very clear that I was not going to go upstairs. Fortunately, I didn't have to go there! The only ones that I really worried about were a pair of extremely skittish and very young (think full-grown but not filled out) rottweilers that had recently been rescued.

My mother has a paralytic fear of dogs, which was understandable because she was attacked by an off-leash guard dog that had been trained to attack without warning. She transferred that fear to me when I was younger, reinforced by some bad experiences that I had. Note to owners of large dogs: if your dog associates stuffed animals with "doggy toy", then you'd better make damn sure your dog is under control so it doesn't aggressively chase after random toddlers on the playground, rip their favorite stuffed bear out of their hands, and mangle it. I didn't get over my fear of dogs until I was in high school and finally outweighed the average large dog.

Entering a house with the clear owner's permission usually means I won't have any trouble at all with the dogs (or other pets). I've been fortunate in that I've dealt mostly with residents and homeowners who are more or less ok with my presence, so I haven't had dogs set on me or been chased out...yet.

following the jobs

Chris Rowan is moving to the US, following his 3rd postdoc. So congrats to Chris! He's moving to his third continent for work.

It would be really neat to live and work in different countries, in theory. But I don't really have the constitution for it, especially right now. I'm working a couple hundred miles from my home base, working in a job that was supposed to be a temporary step but is becoming permanent thanks to an utterly horrendous economy. I don't have any connections here, other than this job and my sweetie, and it's really, really lonely.

Maybe if I had a job I really enjoyed, using the science I got an advanced degree in, things would be different. But I can't imagine living any further from my support network than I already am.

new schedule

My evenings have become rather more busy than in the past, and I haven't been able to carve out the time to blog. So I'm trying something different - writing when I wake up rather than when I get back from work. We'll see how this goes.

...ok, I got distracted by catching up on all the recent posts by my favorite bloggers and now I really have to go to work. This morning thing may not work out as well as I hoped... I'll try posing actual content tomorrow.

wool shirts

As it starts getting cooler, I am starting to transfer to winter field gear. Among the winter gear I pulled out of the storage bin below the bed is my favorite wool shirt.

This particular wool shirt is an LLBean "river driver" shirt, from that time before their sizing got all wonky. It's two layers, with wool outside and cotton inside, and it's just the right length to not ride up and protect my belly and has perfect cuffs that fit under other clothing.

My river driver shirt dates from the grunge era, so it's getting close to 2 decades old. It has holes in the armpits, where the seams have given up the ghost, and the sleeves are getting ratty, and it has a fairly large collection of moth holes.

In spite of my love for this shirt, I do realize it is long past time to be retired. But I can't find a replacement. Does anybody know of a place that sells two-layer wool shirts that are small enough to use as an under-layer for a smaller-framed female?

gas cap follies

I've driven a staggering number of cars and trucks for fieldwork. Compacts rented from the airport, box trucks with missing side mirrors, university department beaters...

But it took me until a few months ago to realize something basic: all cars have a little arrow on the gas indicator that shows what side of the vehicle the gas cap is on.

So after years of driving to a gas station and looking like an idiot while I try and figure out where the gas cap is, now I can just read the dashboard.

My question is, am I the last person to find out about this? Or is this new to you, too?

red muck mess

I was watching the news at dinner last night, and I caught something about a red muck disaster. I was at a bar, and I only caught it from one of the far TV screens (on mute). It also intrigued some other folks at the bar.

I looked it up online, and there was hardly any mention of it. Hello?! A photogenic (look at all that bright red muck destroying those towns!) catastrophe involving a caustic material that caused massive environmental damage. Burns on contact! Wiped out four villages! Killed small children!

The NY Times does have something a little more in-depth now, two days later. In a quest for more info, I tried googling "red sludge Hungary" and got almost nothing.

A few commentators have drawn parallels between this and problems we have in the US, such as mine tailings. What do you do with vast quantities of nasty stuff, some of which accumulated over decades? Hide it behind berms and hope for the best? Spend $$$$$ to stabilize it? Whose pockets will that come out of?

We used to have the Superfund tax on the most heavily polluting industries to take care of the really messy orphaned sites. Too bad the funding for it hasn't been authorized in 15 years and the program's out of money. So instead of having the worst-polluting industries pay, now all the taxpayers do. If the cleanups are done all, that is.

long break

I think I'm marking about 1 year that my posting has been decidedly irregular. This time, illness, a tough time at work, and getting out of the habit of posting have done me in. It's (somewhat) near the start of a new month, and I'm trying to start up again.

I'm in a motel room now, nursing a minor burn on my knee. I made the mistake of testing the water in the shower, then jumping right in. Within the 10 seconds after I'd checked it, the temperature spiked to scalding - and it wasn't remotely at the maximum temperature. Isn't that a safety issue?

A few months ago, I jumped into a shower and found the opposite - that the lukewarm water in the tap was a remnant of being in the walls or something, and that I actually had no hot water whatsoever.

After a long, cold (and when did that happen), wet day, my first impulse is to peel everything off and hop right into a shower. By now, you'd think I would know to check such thing.