Addicted to MOSH!

Some friends were asking me about getting some new music, and while I haven't gotten anything new in a little while, I had to tell them about Violator.

If your not listening to Violator, then you are failing at life.

Check out the track "destined to die" on their discography page....its SICK.

superfast, old school sounding brazilian thrash done RIGHT!


c'mon dude: jean jacket vests, thrash-patches, tight pants, supertongue basketball shoes, and feathered hair....the only thing they need is a machete.

hell yes!

I bought a machete!

People don't believe me when I say that the area where I'll be hiking this next week is really really densely vegetated.

Take a look at this picture:



there's a field surveyor in the picture, he's about 6 feet tall, has a yellow trimble GPS backpack on, and a mouthful of copenhagen.

do you see him? he's right in the front there....take a good look.

All Engineers are Moronic Assholes, Part 3

So today I'm sitting in my cube and I get a phone call from this engineer.

he's driving around in St. Louis trying to figure out how to buy 5 gallon buckets to place rock samples in...he's freakin' out...can't handle it, can't figure out the world around him.

Him: "Joe, how can I get buckets!"

Me: "Go to the nearest home depot/lowes/hardware store/whatever"

Him: "but how do I find one of those?!"

Me: "stop at gas station, ask fat guy behind counter"

Him: "ok I'll try that...and also where's the nearest starbucks coffee at?!"

Me: "Kill yourself please" (I didn't say this, but I thought it.)

I mean seriously, he calls me up and wants me to help him get to the nearest hardware store.

I asked him why he didn't just bring out the 200 buckets that I had already purchased for the project..he mentioned something about how high his billing rate is and how it wasn't worth the cost to the project.

so I said "oh, that makes sense, instead of spending a day driving buckets out to the project, you are gonna spend a day driving around st. louis looking for buckets...."

Engineers, man...complete and total moronic assholes.

Its times like these

So Here I am, out in Arizona...working on a project that I don't want to deal with, I'm tired of traveling, I don't know when I can go home, I just want to crawl into my bed in denver and not think about anything...

and I'm standing on a mesa, in the middle of fucking nowhere- about 2 hours north of Phoenix, at the transition from basin and range geology to colorado plateau geology, there's nothing but the sound of the wind in my ears, and all I can think of is "how could I ever have been anything in life besides a field geologist?"

I feel like a belong in places like this: standing on a mesa top, hawk soaring overhead, basalt cliffs looming, carbonate allvium underfoot destroying my fucking boots. Arroyo, coyote, rattlesnake, mesquite, prickly pear, faulted landscapes. Jagged Peaks, breccia, scraped forearms, falling down a talus slope. Desert silence pervasive, undying sunshine and heat, sweat, and geology all around. Just me, a USGS Topographic quadrangle, a rock hammer, a brunton compass, a pencil, and a fucking canyon, its the perfect job. There's nothing that compares to mapping geology in the desert southwest. if you've never done it, you've never lived.


my Jeep, an angular unconformity between the Gila formation and overlying alluvium, basalt mesas, blue skies...no fucking people, just the desert.



yes, you are seeing this correct: its a photo taken from the top of an active landslide. the scarp is the white line along the back of the photo, in the foreground are dilational fracture sets, the ground surface is dipping at about 12 degrees to the south. this it what it looks like when a canyon tears away its constraining mesas. Today I mapped a landslide the size of Mile High Stadium. it was amazing. I sat and listened for about ten minutes to the silence and I could hear the rocks falling, the mesa flanks failing.


self-portrait, who else will take your picture when your alone in the desert?

Some Pics from Sacky

I've been out for the last 2 weeks or so working in Sacramento on the Levees.

we're doing galvanic resistivity surveys.

anyway...here are some sweet pics from the last week or so.



this is my coworker Collin "sweetwater" Strine-Zuroski demonstrating the instruments we're using out in the field. Colllin's from Maryland. If you need help with Woot.com or with certain blogs, collin can help you out.



here's a picture of some of the equipment...note that this rental vehicle is also our field vehicle. as with all field vehicles, by the second week of work, it smells horrible inside - think sweat and feet mixed with rotting vegetables and battery acid.



We went to lake tahoe for the weekend, since its only about 100 miles or so from Sacramento. it was beautiful. In addition to the gambling, ridiculous amount of alcohol consumed, and eating some of the most artery clogging food I've ever had, we went hiking along the rim trail. The rim trail is a 156 mile ring that goes around the lake...on all the trees out there is this crazy almost neon-green moss that grows only on the northern side, and equally spaced between branches. its wierd.



Finally, here's a self portrait of me that I took right after they informed me that instead of spending a weekend in denver at home, I'd be flying right to Arizona where I am now...FUCK.

Cool shit my parents brought for me.

I'm starting a new catagory of posts on this weblog. A few weeks ago, my parents came out to see me and brought out like 6-7 boxes of my old stuff. some of it is pretty cool, some of it is well...garbage...but its all the shit from my youth, packed up.

here's a good example:




this is a hand-made cabbage-patch style Mr-T. doll that my grandma made for me back when I was maybe 10-12 years old or so. its awesome, check out the hand knitted socks and crocheted chuck-taylor all-star shoes. the eyes are painted, and the earrings are real.

sweet.