Missing in Action

Well, Missing in Idaho anyway. I apparently haven't been in a blogging mood lately. I tend to get out of touch when I'm travelling for work. I get some news and such, but my only real connection to anything else is Franny. Outside of her (and by extension, the Mizz), I don't really deal with the rest of the world much. Odd, since I have more free (stir crazy) time out here than I do at home, so I can't say I've been too busy.

I'm in Pocatello (still). We've been here since Friday night. We had Sunday off, but that's it. Other than that, it's been pretty busy days.

We actually had a pretty rough day Monday. We went to Soda Springs, Idaho, which is a little town not on the way to anywhere. From what I hear, at the time when Brigham Young founded the town in it's current location, there were a number of geysers in the valley that had coated the area in mineral deposits. So of course we built a dam and made a lake over the geysers. Now the best they have is the only man-made geyser in the world. Building a hotel, they dug in the wrong spot and found the aquifer that fed the old geysers, which started leaking or geysing or whatever. They decided to attach a bunch of plumbing and regulate it, so now they have their own old faithful. All the excitement of a small town fountain mixed with the slight smell of rotten eggs. Cool.

They also have, and actually are proud of, a slag heap. For those who don't know, slag is the leftover stuff from smelting ore into metal, in this case, into phosphorus. And a heap is a big pile. In this case, a REALLY big pile. Anyway, the slag comes out of the furnace REALLY hot, and when they pour it on the heap at night, it supposedly looks like lava flowing down the sides. This was mentioned to me several times that day, so either it's REALLY cool looking, or they REALLY don't have much to do there. From the looks of the town, I'm guessing the later.

I actually worked at the phosphorus plant with the slag heap. Apparently they make the purest elemental phosphorus in the country. It's used in all sorts of things: food, fertilizer and weed killer (go figure), toothpaste, etc. Plus it's insanely reactive in air and melts at around 100 degrees, both of which make it interesting to handle. It's kept under water at all times, as it bursts into flame when it touches air. Nice stuff. But, mix some other chemicals with it and it whitens your teeth or grows your potatoes.

(start complaining) Anyway, this place made for the rough day. When we first got in town and contacted them, they said that we'd have to wait until later because their power was going to be cut off for a couple hours. I went to help our other guy work on some stuff elsewhere, when I got a call that the power wasn't going to be cut off after all, so come on over and get started. Needless to say, after an hour of safety video and discussion and stuff, the power went off. I was resigned to having to make the trek back some evening to finish, but the other guy got so delayed working on his stuff that we were still in town when the power came back on. By this time, it was too late to do anything back in Pocatello, so my partner waited in the van while I went in and calibrated for two hours plus. He hadn't done the safety stuff earlier, so he was out of luck. Longer work for me and boredom for him. Everybody wins. Anyway, we rolled back into our hotel at 8:30 that evening after leaving at 7:00. And by the end, we had barely managed to do work that should have taken one person a normal day to finish. Good times. (end complaining)

Other than that, it's been long days, but not near as annoying. One of our customers even gave us cake today. It was their September company birthday party, and they weren't taking "no" for an answer. Since they had triple chocolate something cake, I wasn't giving "no" for an answer. Everybody wins.

My Favorite Applebee's

Applebee's isn't really that cool of a restaurant. I've been to many of them, but never really cared about them one way or another. They are one of those safe restaurants where you know what you're in for and you're okay with it even though you'd probably never bother to recommend it to anyone. But I've now had a really good time at a particular Applebee's location twice in a row, separated by six months. I'm in Pocatello, Idaho now and this restaurant is located within walking distance of our hotel, which, after a long day of driving, is a clear bonus. However, it's the experience that's been fun.

When I was here in March, Rob (a coworker) and I sat at the bar for dinner due to a huge waiting list. It turned out to be a great decision as we sat around with a bunch of locals playing "Guess the 80's Song Currently Playing". We had a good time guessing, but it got way better when the bartender decided to reward correct guesses with free beers. It even got ridiculous when a student who was there pulled out his laptop and cellular PC card to Google things for us. The bartender decided that he did not deserve free drinks for that and he decided that his minutes were to valuable to waste on a bar game. We kept thinking that the bartender was going to get tired of giving out free drinks, but we didn't pay for anything for the rest of the night and had to cut her off from giving us any more, since we did have to work in the morning. The best part was when an old guy (not old, maybe 50, but old enough that 80's music wasn't his music) pulled out his Blackberry and found a particularly stumping one for us. He made the laptop guy feel pretty silly too.

Tonight we pulled the bar thing again due to the line out the door. And tonight we had a great time with a couple guys from the gulf coast. Both were from Louisiana, but one lives in Houston now. They were up here on business too and were a hoot. They one still living in Louisiana was especially playing up the fish out of water game. He's apparently from a bayou about 90 miles from New Orleans. Every time you see Louisiana in the movies, that's his town. The swamps and mosquitoes and alligators and everything. He's very proud that he lives at +9 feet elevation. Much smarter than those NO folks. The Houston guy seemed to think that everywhere smaller than his hometown might as well be run by Boss Hogg. (For those keeping score, Houston is the 4th largest city in the country, behind, New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago.) He wasn't sure he was going to know what to do with himself in Pocatello, Idaho. Both guys worked together for some consulting firm that was closely related to the oil industry. The main thing that they had to say about that was that maybe we should give the industry a break and if we really want to get away from it, we should stop buying stuff and driving everywhere. They didn't seem too concerned that we might do this, but if we do, they are ready to jump into other industries instead. Good consultants can suck money from whoever has it.

I suppose I'll have to go back next Spring when I'm back this way again, just to see what's going on at my favorite Applebee's.

More-Ida

Well, I'm back working in Idaho again. More of the same stuff from last year. First, it was Boise for a couple days. Now we're in Twin Falls, and tomorrow it's on to Pocatello and the rest of the eastern end of the state. Colleges, food processing plants (cheese, sugar beet, potato, etc.), government labs, and all sort of other fun places. The theory is that we'll work straight through as quick as we can manage and be home next Friday. That'll probably mean late days and working through the weekend.

However, if I can get home Friday, then on Saturday, Franny and I and the Mizz can turn around and hit the road again to see my folks new house on Whidby Island. I need to see it before they remove too much of the 70's from it. Plus I hear the view is awesome.

I happened to notice a weird story in the Oregonian the other day. The main bridge coming into Twin Falls over the Snake River Canyon made the news. Some genius was parachuting off it when a gust of wind caught his chute and gently snagged him on the bridge. By gently, of course, I mean he broke his leg, ankle, and arm and dangled in the breeze for two hours. I'm not sure jumping off bridges is such a great plan. I'll try and avoid it myself.

Idaho Pics

I've tried to put these pictures up several times, but Blogger acted like it took them and then gave me the stupid red X boxes. Anyway, better late than never. These are a few of the cool things I saw in Idaho. Lots of potatoes, but this stuff too.

This is the Snake River Canyon from just under the bridge to Twin Falls, Idaho. I'm sure it wasn't at this spot, but this is the canyon that Evel Knievel jumped in the 70's. The green spots you can see on either side of the river are golf courses. My co-worker that was with me in September was drooling over these, but he didn't get a chance to play them. The best thing about this canyon is that you don't suspect it until you are right over it. This part of the Snake River Valley is really, REALLY flat, so you are going along a very flat very straight road and then BAM, you're over this crazy deep canyon. Very cool.

This is Shoshone Falls, a couple miles upriver from the picture above. Most of the snow had yet to melt when I was there, so most of the flow was going through that power station on the left. For comparison, that building is several stories high. During the late spring and early summer, all the rocks on the right are covered by the waterfall. The pictures I've seen look very impressive, but I've never been there at the right time.

This was a tree growing out of the lava at Hell's Half Acre, the geological point of interest at the rest stop on the way to Idaho Falls. The lava is pretty thick and is only about 4000 years old, so only really hardy things have grown over it so far. These trees are relatively old, but they apparently have a rough life. I'm sure the cold of winter and the hot dry of summer make for tough living in a place with no flowing water and no wind shelter.

This is the dam at the falls in Idaho Falls. The dam runs about a quarter mile along the length of the river to divert water through a power station at the lower end of the falls. It was very windy on the day I was there and the waves running along the river held together as they went over the falls. The lines you can see above looked like they were running along the face of the dam. It was very cool. I took a video with the camera I had, but it had a hard time focusing, so it isn't very impressive. This picture will have to do.

This is old fish hatchery in Idaho Falls. Now it's part of a park on an island between the river and the power plant diversion canal. It's also a graffiti gallery. I've seen better. Some of the stuff is concrete, but a lot of it is made out of local stone, which in this case is lava rocks. I've only seen construction like that in Hawaii, so it was interesting and unexpected.

There. I had a few other pics that might have made it too, but Blogger gave me enough trouble with these, so they'll have to do.

Payback's a b...

...aby. For all the time's I've felt bad about the Mizz crying and potentially keeping people up, now I get a taste. I'm in the crying baby section of my new hotel in Burley, ID. Across the hall is a baby who is apparently not happy with the accommodations. Even better, I can hear Mom over there trying every trick she knows to calm him/her/it down, but no luck. Actually it's not that bad. I hear the baby occasionally, but like most very young ones, it doesn't last long. There's also a kid that once in a while decides to run down the hall yelling back at his sister. I have nightmares of Mizz doing this. It's cute right now while he's doing it at home and he can't run very fast anyway, but that won't last long I'm afraid.

In other news, one of the cool things about my job is getting inside industries and seeing where things come from. However, one of the occasional bad things is seeing where things come from. I worked at a place that processes potato starch, which shows up as an ingredient in all sorts of things. It helps keep McD's fries warm longer than what you can do at home. It sticks the corn to the dog. It keeps paper-thin fast food burgers from falling apart when cooked. Anyway, it's a staple of lots of mass-produced processed foods. However, now that I've seen where it comes from, I'm not as happy. No details today, just ewwwww. Logically, I've seen the precautions that go into the food industry, and everyone has seen the mass hysteria that happens when something bad slips through. Emotionally though, I just have to shiver sometimes and give a big "YUCK". As my boss put it one time, "It's the kind of place that makes you want to grow your own food."

Where's my freakin' snow?

Once again, the weather forecasters have failed me. Instead of the 4-8 inches of snow promised, we got just a hair under 0 inches. Not just less snow, but not a single flake hit the ground. We did have a few flurries out here, but I'm very disappointed.

It is crazy cold though. And windy as hell.

I took a walk out today, trudging through the bone dry and climbing huge drifts of nothing to check out the feature for which Idaho Falls is named. They looked pretty cool, and again, due to forgetting the camera cable, you don't get to see them. The original falls have been augmented with a concrete wall that stretches about a quarter mile along the length of the river to divert some of the water through a power plant. There's also the remains of an old fish hatchery under one of the bridges that is now a graffiti gallery. And in an odd twist, I found the only non-redneck thing I've seen here in the park along the river. Right next to the falls, in a very picturesque location, was a pagoda-style pillar with some Chinese writing on it. It might have been Japanese, but I don't think so. Anyway, there was no other plaque or anything to tell me what it said or why it was there. Odd.

I'm outta here in the morning. After I finish working in town, I'll head out to Burley, Idaho. Friday, I'll be working there and Heyburn and then hitting the road as far as I can stand and then home Saturday. Finally.

What's new in Idaho?

Saturday, I moved from Pocatello up the road an hour to Idaho Falls. On the way, I stopped at a rest stop that had a sign for a point of geological interest. Turns out it was Hell's Half Acre. Unlike Eastern Oregon's entire canyon, Hell couldn't afford as much in Eastern Idaho. It was actually an area of fairly recent lava flow (4000 years old) that was only lightly covered in soil and vegetation. It was fun to see lava in the middle of Idaho and an interesting stop on a day when I wasn't in a hurry. It was also fun to know that even here, they use the term pahoehoe. What did white people call ropy lava before they found Hawaii?

Had I known how close I was to Craters of the Moon, I would have gone there instead, but I didn't know it was so close until Sunday, and by then I was working. Maybe next time out here.

When I was working on Sunday in Rexburg, I had some time to kill at lunch so I took a ride around town. It took about 9 minutes total. Anyway, I found that they had a BYU campus, and everyone was on the way to the temple. I've seen Mormons before, nothing special there. It just amused me to realize that the entire campus was going to church at the same time. At every other college I've ever been to, the Sunday exodus usually involved a bunch of people with their shirts inside out stumbling home squinting and holding their heads. Not quite the same thing.

I'm in potato land up here. Further down the Snake River Valley, there are also sugar beets, cattle and corn, but up here, it's pretty much just spuds. The place I was working on Monday was in Dubois. (Doo-boys, not Doo-bwah, what are you, foreign? Seriously, that's how they say it.) Dubois had exactly two places to eat. On one side of the road was the Exxon food mart, but on the other side was the Phillips 66 food mart. 66 was much bigger, but not as good as you'd expect. Potato processing plants are interesting. Most food processors work very seasonally, but potatoes can be stored almost a year, so they can be done anytime. Fresh french fries and hash browns all year round. That might mean more if most everything wasn't either dried or frozen before it left the plants.

Today I was working for the nukes at the Idaho National Lab. During the cold war, that place was making bomb parts, but I don't know what they are doing these days. Mainly cleaning up and closing building it looks like, but I'm sure there's something else that I wasn't invited to. Driving out there, you can see the Three Buttes. They're three huge cinder cones that grew up out of an otherwise flat landscape. It was pretty cloudy today though, so I'm guessing it would have been cooler on the weekend when it was sunny and 70 degrees.

It's supposed to snow tonight. 4-8 inches. It snowed a little this afternoon, but then went back to rain. But it's been getting colder all day and should be down below freezing tonight, so we'll see what happens. I'll still probably be able to get around, but the guy working with me was supposed to get over the mountains into Wyoming tonight, and I'm wondering how far he got or whether he'll make it back tomorrow if he did get there.

It's late. I was tired when I got back to the room this evening and took a nap. For 3 hours. So now I'm awake at the wrong time. But morning will still come, so I should at least try to sleep. We'll see how that works out.

Hey, wait! I resemble that remark...

The local NPR station out here in Pocatello is doing its fund drive right now. Normally I can't stand listening to these fund drives, but it was on when I turned on the van. Anyway, they were interviewing a couple of kids who are forced to listen to NPR with their parents in the car. Although the younger kid could name some of the station's personalities, the only other thing he could say he knew about it was that he didn't like it. His older sister was a little more nuanced. She admitted that she sometimes liked it, but sometimes not. A lot of times it was a little boring. When asked whether she understood much of what she heard, she said that no, she didn't, and that's probably why it was boring. When asked why she thought her parents liked it, she answered, "because they're kind of boring too."

One more thing...

I'm sure everyone reading this (all 3 of you) have seen the cattle guards where roads cross fences, you know, the bars across the road that cows can't get past. Well, apparently Idaho has the dumbest cows in the country. Here, you get on a highway off ramp and you go through the fence like anywhere else, but instead of bars across the road, they've just painted a few white lines. So, either Idahoan cattle are dumber than average, or Idahoan people are so nostalgic for good-ole' open range cattle herds that they paint lines on the road to pretend it's still true. Which is weirder?

Where's Dave?

Since Sunday, Dave has visited Baker City (by accident) and Durkee in Oregon, and Caldwell, Nampa, Twin Falls, Rupert (seriously), and Pocatello in Idaho. I've worked at a cement plant, a paper chemical manufacturer, a state wildlife forensics lab, a seed distributer, a potato processing plant, a hospital, 3 wastewater treatment plants, and a cheese plant. It's been busy. For the next few days, I'll be in Pocatello, Blackfoot, Idaho Falls, Rexburg, and Dubois, Idaho doing all sorts of stuff, and then some more places on the way home. I'm at about 800 miles so far and it's only been 4 days. Today at least, I did have a little bit of time to stop by Shoshone Falls in the Snake River Canyon. I sort of thought it would have more water going over it in the spring than when I saw it last fall, but it wasn't too impressive. It's still pretty cool, but not as wet as I was hoping. I have some pictures and you would be looking at them right now if I had remembered the cord for the camera. Maybe later.

Plus I ran over a groundhog that jumped out in front of my van. Stupid rodent.

It's a great trip so far.