Conglomerate, in a geological sense, is rock made of cemented-together pieces of rock. It’s metamorphic. It’s also cannibalistic as shown here in Mosaic Canyon, Death Valley. The conglomerate is slowly devouring the other metamorphic rock, marble. Marble is the crystalline metamorphic form of limestone, and must be very tasty. Only I could hear the infrasonic slurping; the ears of the other people with me are still good at hearing high frequencies, but not yet ossified to the low-rumble-detecting extent I possess.
When taking pictures, the time of day is critical. When we explored Death Valley’s various canyons, it became obvious that we were there when picture taking was crummy. When the sun is high in the sky, so many textures vanish due to straight-on lighting. Most photographers won’t take a picture after 10 in the morning or before 4 in the afternoon because the light is so flat and uninteresting.
From www.spaceweather.com comes this picture of the International Space Station in 3D. For a much bigger picture, click here. I recommend the big picture, especially if you’re seeing this on your iPhone. To get the 3D effect, look straight and level at the picture and cross your eyes to merge the two into one.
Here is what is called a natural bridge. Even if you were totally ignorant of what a bridge is for, just looking at this formation shouldn’t suggest the idea that it’s a bridge. First off, to the left it is way too steep. If you were strolling along and encountered this rocky heap you wouldn’t think of it as a good place to walk across. Bridges are for crossing difficult-to-cross places. It would be so simple to drop down to the flat place where Karla and Hilary are walking and cross there. This formation should be called “A mess of crumbly rock with a really big hole through it down at the level where walking would make infinitely more sense.”This is from neighbor Bill, who used to own a Weasel, a military snowcat thing. The way the driver handles this machine makes me think he must have a cast iron sphincter. I wonder if it floats?
According to one of the guides on the tours we took through the castle, Scotty was a fraud. He didn’t have a gold mine, he didn’t design the castle, he didn’t own the castle, and he didn’t even live there. But he was a very entertaining man with all of his tall tales. The whole place was inspirational to Karla and me since the materials are essentially what we want to use in our own house.
Looking down into the courtyard inspires a ton of ideas. Notice the stairway leading downward. The heavy wooden doors are gorgeous, as is all the quarry tile work and glazed ceramics used everywhere in the design. Ironwork is everywhere; the railings, the hardware on the doors and decorative screens were all made of iron.
The seeming randomness of the roof tile spacing is achieved by using different lengths at the top line. Laying roof tiles starts with the bottom course, so in order to keep the exposure (amount of tile showing) constant, you have to do some fiddling at the bottom to begin.
In a parking lot in Death Valley was a Volkswagen with an add-on cupholder on the door. I never saw the occupants, and wondered if they were obese and/or diabetic. I read recently that high fructose corn syrup is now being blamed for obesity and its attendant diabetes. As part of a truly comprehensive health care program, the US Government should mandate that all new cars come without cupholders, and that all older cars have their holders filled with concrete. It would make me feel much better to have the proper authorities take the bull by the horns and save us from ourselves.
Boy, here’s a tale for the grandkids! Hilary and Karla are being blown out of the crater of Ubehebe (sounds like you be, he be), in Death Valley. When we parked beside the crater, it was very difficult to open the doors on the truck since the wind must have been blowing 50 MPH (80 km/h)! The two had ventured close to the edge of the crater when the flying sand and rocks finally overcame their bravery. As we drove down the road to get away from the crater, we noticed some motorhomes coming up. It’s a good thing the wind was blowing away from the crater, rather than toward it.
This one has me going. Are people supposed to:
This sign warns people to avoid catching vomit from the feral chihuahuas that populate the desert. As the graphic shows, the chihuahuas levitate to the height of your outstretched palm then suddenly vomit. You never know what they’ve just eaten, so you are cautioned against catching it. I am always surprised to find signs that warn against things I wouldn’t do anyway.
Luke and Hilary were innocently hiking up Mosaic Canyon when they encountered one of those old 49er types, the guy on the right. Old 49er types are people who cling to the impossible hope of finding gold. They usually only have some hardtack, dried pork, salt, a burro and maybe a whole lot of whisky; they have the impossible dream of finding the next eldorado. Since the old geezer looked kind of like Hilary’s dad, they agreed to pose for a photo with him. Then he asked for some money to fund his search for gold. Since they had left their wallets in the pickup far below, he asked for their credit card numbers, social security numbers, mother's maiden names and other silly stuff, which they willingly invented on the spot and gave to him, seeing that he was simply stupid and only did that to look sophisticated.
Sometime Tuesday morning Karla and I piled into the Dodge pickup and drove. And drove. And drove some more. About quarter past nine in the evening, we arrived in Furnace Creek and were greeted by Hilary and Luke at their winter home. The dogs, the famous Sioux, the not as famous Sallie, the so far unknown Bella, and the two cats, Boots and Florence, were beside themselves with joy at the sight of us. We were beside ourselves with joy at the sight of a nice king size bed!
For the first time in about a hundred years, the sun is really really quiet. Coronal Mass Ejections, commonly occurring several times a DAY, are now occurring maybe once a MONTH. Without those ejections, there isn’t much energy blasted toward earth, and we could get a little colder as a result, despite the warnings of warble gloaming.
So many acres—so few horses
On today’s venture into the wilds we came upon a place that is simply bursting with popcorn flowers. Above is a close-up showing the buttery center that gives this particular species, Cornus poppus redenbacheri, its yummy flavor. And if the hill of flowers below seems familiar to you discriminating coffee aficionados, it’s the hill shown on bags of Blind Dog Coffee Roasters’ Tanner’s Roast.
Bringing you the best of the Web, today’s installment is from Spaceweather.com. It shows a 3-D view of the particles left over from the collision of two satellites last month. Cross your eyes till the two globes merge and you can see what I mean. Too small? Click here for a large version, a screen-filler. The yellow dots are pieces of the Russian satellite that will be entering the atmosphere this month.
Good ol’ buddy, Pal, has a problem. The facial swelling shows that one of his teeth, part of which was removed (by drilling through the horse’s cheek with a power drill!) in July of 1992 and replaced with a fiberglass plug has a problem again. At the time of the surgery, Mike the vet said that he was buying the horse a little time. Seventeen years is more than a little time! (I hope he’s still under warranty.)
Our second-closest neighbors (3.5 miles down the road) paid a visit Sunday. Bruce and Candy rode up on their Honda quads to visit with Nessie, the new giant. Here Candy keeps granddaughter Indie from jumping onto Zeus’s back and galloping off. The bay looking on from behind, Cola, is trying to get some more of those yummy baby carrots.
Antonio Pasin, the creator of the Radio Flyer wagon, named it so because of his fascination with radio and flight. What if he’d liked toast and swimming? Or concrete and bombers? Or burgers and fries? The mind reels.
Imagine my surprise this morning to see part of our roof in a tree! Last night was dark and stormy. At about 4 in the morning a very loud clap of thunder got my attention. There had been plenty of lightning, but this particular thunderclap had a very long duration. Karla said it sounded like sheet metal. It was.
As a public service, here is the story behind the Monday March 2 asteroid approach to our fair planet. It’s been difficult to find much information about it, but I have been able to put together this much: It was the size of a 10-story building. What kind of building?—A skinny hotel with a view from every room, or a mighty distribution center that covers four city blocks? If we had been hit, it would have had the power of a nuclear weapon. Which nuclear weapon? They range in size from the artillery shells that can ruin your day all the way up to the population-clearing neutron bombs that don’t damage buildings and infrastructure, just kill people and all other living things for miles (kilometers) around (except cockroaches, of course). Supposedly this PHA (potentially hazardous asteroid) came within 40,000 miles (64,000 kilometers) or so, well within the distance from here to the moon (your mileage/kilometerage may vary).
The ad shown here was on a page I was reading this morning. One thing about it caught my eye—the odd line between people and ready. The phrase people-ready would be correct. On most computer keyboards, the hyphen (-) and the underline (_) are on the same key. The difference is the hyphen doesn’t require the use of the Shift key, but the underline does. It makes me think the keyboardist in this case must have thought the longer line above the hyphen on the key is a super-sized hyphen, which would be a cool thing to use. Not noticing that he/she got an underline instead of a super hyphen, the ad went through its usual series of checks and approvals before being sent out the door.
Karla is removing the remaining pulp from the rinds. Then using scissors, a knife, and finally a Cuisinart the rinds were chopped into tiny pieces. A chef we know says she makes marmalade by tossing whole oranges into her Cuisinart! Blasphemy! Seeds! We are so pure by taking the time to do all of our hand labor.
Here are orange juice, cut up rinds, a ghastly amount of cane sugar, and a bunch of sterilized jars ready to receive the final concoction boiling in the big pot. Whether the final product will jell and become real jam is iffy. Supposedly oranges contain enough pectin to self-jell. But our main problem with this whole venture is that we try to make too large a batch at once. When you try to balance the amount of juice with the amount of rinds and sugar, mistakes can be made. We picked maybe one-eighth of the oranges on the tree which comes to about ten gallons (38 liters) of oranges. Nobody has a stove big enough to cook up ten gallons of marmalade! Even with the burner turned to its highest setting, our commercial stove took over a half hour to bring only half a batch up to boiling, and that’s with the whole pot pre-heated for another half hour on our wood stove!
While photographing horses on our neighbors’ place, I noticed that one of the bull pine trees was surrounded by unopened cones. That’s odd, because unless the cones are cut off the tree while they’re green, they usually are open and seedless, having let go of their seeds while still on the tree. With so many unopened cones on the ground, the squirrel(s) that did the cutting must have been removed from the scene before he/she/it/they could get to work to shred the cones and gather the nuts. A gray squirrel would be dopey enough to get caught by a coyote or other predator, so that’s probably what cut the cones.
