Dance the Apocalypso

I just found out that if a Chicxulub-size impactor were to fall in Corvallis, no one south of Panama would be directly harmed by the blast. Most everyone in North America, though, would face at least second degree burns. Sadly, since the precise location of "Corvallis, Oregon" appears to be about two blocks from my apartment, even the smallest blast (Little Boy, 15 kt) this simulator offers would be lights out for Lockwood. Fun, grim humor. Let's see... who's next?

Good Call Here, Bad Call There

Hat tip to Krugman:

Italy did for retirement financing what President George W. Bush couldn’t do in
the U.S.: It privatized part of its social security system. The timing couldn’t
have been worse.

I remember gleefully explaining to a grad student in science ed (where I was an instructor) four years ago that Bush's statement, that he'd earned political capitol and intended to spend it on "individual retirement accounts" to replace Social Security, was essentially going to destroy his second term. His desire and attempts to undermine SS basically did trash his second term (though the Terri Schiavo Fiasco later on certainly pounded a few more nails into his coffin, and the ongoing fiasco in Iraq didn't help matters).

I hadn't realized Italy made this mistake. My heart goes out to them. Please take this lesson to heart, people. (Full article, again from Krugman, here.)

Just Like "The Core"

...only better, and real. I hated that movie from beginning to end; when I confronted the friend who (I thought) had said it wasn't bad, he claimed that he'd never seen it. It was a waste of a rental, a waste of time, a waste of petroleum resources in the plastic of the DVD.

Over the past few weeks there have been several articles in my feed on the idea of fusion power, ranging from "we should just give up," to news that the EU may spend 5 billion Euros on a very large, tokomak-style reactor, to news that the National Ignition Facilty (NIF), at Livermore Labs (California) will be winding up its construction phase this spring. I found all of these articles very interesting, and recommend all three if fusion power is a topic that interests you. If you only have time for one, read the Der Spiegel piece on the possible EU project: it nicely outlines some of the problems, some of the recent insights and advances, and some emerging ideas that may yet bring this technology into the realm of commercial application. It's also the source of the following picture, the active plasma in a tokomak reactor.

Now, from the Telegraph (UK), is an article suggesting that even if Livermore's NIF fails to advance practical fusion power, the technology therein may still pay off big in terms of creating conditions of deep planetary interiors. This could lead to a better understanding of the earth's core, and even cores of giant planets such as Jupiter. The diamond anvil has been a useful, but limited investigative tool. I never imagined that our attempts to make fusion a commercially useful technology would provide tools to investigate geology. Stars, I might have guessed. Earth? Cool!

Heil Kitty!

Last night I finished the book "Gag Rule," by Lewis Lapham (limited preview at Google Books). I quite enjoyed it- terrific prose, makes a convincing case for his position, everything I want in a good piece of rhetoric. I do want to go through it again, because there were several passages that I thought were powerful and wanted to share here. However, I just came across a piece at Sadly, No! that drew my attention to a recurrent theme that I'm really tired of. (I mentioned yesterday that this past year had exhausted me- I'm probably going to end up doing a bit of elaborating on that in days to come.) And yes, Lapham commits the same exhausting blunder, which is why I bring it up. (In fairness to the author, I think he draws some meaningful and insightful parallels; it is unwarranted in this case to describe it as a blunder. It's just that coming across four or five references to Nazis, etc., in a day is tiresome.) Why is it that if a speaker or writer wants to demonize an opponent, the first characterization that springs to mind is Nazis and Fascism? On one hand, the answer is simple: to our current mindset, they are the worst of the worst, evil incarnate, Moloch manifest. I'm not going to argue with this; what I want to point out is the tiresome hyperbole here. I have from time to time described a rock outcrop as "an orgasmic experience." This is an intentionally jokey, hyperbolic, and relatively rare choice of words- maybe once every few years in conversations with friends who understand and enjoy my fascination with rocks and the earth. But what if I started describing everything I liked or enjoyed as "an orgasmic experience," or "better than sex?" At what point would my audience decide "that guy must be terrible in bed?" Or "he must really not enjoy sex." My trivialing of the metaphor would trivialize the thing itself.And that is exactly my point. We have so minimized the extremity of Hitler's Germany that it has become a punch line rather than an apt analogy or metaphor. I'm tired of conservatives referring to liberals as Nazis; I'm tired of liberals referring to conservatives as fascists; I'm tired of teenagers whose parents are worried about them referring to Mom and Dad as "the Gestapo." (From Sadly, No!)

There are reasons to remember Nazi Germany; this kind of hyperbole, oddly enough, only causes people to forget the lessons they should remember, and makes our continuing efforts to fully understand the human capacity for "evil" more difficult
So no more Nazi references this year. 'K?

Eee-yup. That's Exactly Right.

Today's Non Sequitur. I've been baffled by which pictures get bigger when you click them and which don't. As of testing a moment ago, you can see this one enlargified if you click on it.

A Simple Request

The blogosphere has been buzzing with year-end wrap ups, resolutions, predictions, well-wishing for the new year and so on. I find the human fascination with arbitrary mileposts fascinating in itself, but often tiresome. Personally I have found this past year just exhausting for so many reasons at so many levels- that's not to say I didn't enjoy it. In many ways, it's been one of the best. It just left me very, very tired. So forgive me for not playing along with all the conventions this time; maybe next year.

However, I will highlight one thing that has been particularly positive about the past year: taking my first steps in participating in the blogosphere. It's huge, it's fun, and whatever interests you or engages you, someone is putting stuff up that you'll love. I hope to update my blog roll to more fully show the (literally) 283 bloggers and sites that I follow daily- and that's not including the inumerable side links I click on each day. In particular, I'd like to send a shout-out to the geoblogosphere, a bunch of rock geeks who are as infatuated with the earth as I am, and by and large know a lot more than I do. I consider myself well-rounded with respect to geology (evidence of fluvial transport), and the way I got to that point was a willingness to learn and a willingness to ask (often inane) questions. The geoblogosphere was apparently created for me.

I also appreciate the vast number of other science blogs, humor blogs and sites, political and economic commentary and analysis, and what I have classed in my RSS folders as "This 'n That:" bloggers whose stuff is all over the map. I never know what to expect from these people, but I'm always well pleased. I put my own blog into that folder (not because I need to read it again, but because I want to see what it looks like in RSS, and as a further opportunity to catch and correct typos and grammatical errors).

Since I love to laugh, I'll preface my simple request with a simple problem: (From Talk Like a Physicist) The key quote from this post is "So the search for simplicity is guided by what Einstein taught us : 'Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.'" Which, oddly enough, was echoed in a post today from Cosmic Variance (front page here), one of the astronomy blogs I follow. The post in question is called "Blogs That Should Exist." It is basically a simple request that if you don't blog, would you please start? I hearby echo that sentiment. They offer a list of suggested names, one of which is "But No Simpler."

Whether your interests are astronomy, geology, stuff to make you laugh... whatever, there's a crowd out there that shares your interests, and wishes they could hear from you. It takes some time, first to actually do the blogging, second to connect to others, and third to actually establish some friendships. There are a number of people who visit my blog often and leave comments; I try to return the favor. Close friends? No, but they're people who would miss me if I went AWOL, and vice versa. I have only met a few of my fellow blogospherians IRL (in real life) so far, but I look forward to meeting more, to putting faces with names and personalities that have made an impact on me.

And did I mention it's simple? It is. And it's free. As I noted a while back, I showed my nephews how to do a post; later I helped them start their own blogs. These guys are grade-school aged, and if they can do it, so can you.Kris, at Just For Fun. My sister sent me a class project he did on Neptune last fall, and I'm glad to see Kris posted it. His writing is better than many college-age students.
Garette, at My Life as a Garette. Kris and Garette's posts so far have been mostly funny YouTube Clips, and I am trying to encourage them to write more. I never really learned to "keyboard," (which I guess is a verb these days) but as a result of much writing and computer use, my fingers just seem to know where the keys are. It's obviously very tedious for these two to compose on the computer, and it's almost painful to watch the ideas slip away as they struggle to peck out, letter by letter, the words to express their thoughts. But only through practice will they get better, and I look forward to hearing from them over the years as they become more fluent with the written word. (And Callan, note the prominant placement of your "Geology Rocks" Sticker. Hardly a day goes by that someone doesn't remark on it.)Kris and Garette got a Wii for Christmas; I suppose within a few years there will be some new-fangled technology that does for typing what Wii has done for bowling and boxing. That's their dad, my brother-in-law, Frank, in the back. (Is it just me, or does "Wii" sound like toilet humor aimed at kids?) But in the meantime, guys, typing it is.

And as long as I'm on the subject, a friendly "Thanks!" to the folks who follow my blog; I'm pleased and honored. Please understand that you have provided me with many hours of entertainment and education... and what more could one ask of the blogosphere?
Becca
Phil
Darius Whiteplume
Dr Monkey Von Monkerstein
Micgar
Silver Fox
Loosecannon
Jon Swift
Lost Geologist
Distributorcap

See? If you started a blog, you too could be on this list! Wouldn't that be fun?

One More From the Coast

As I mentioned in my post on Sea Lion Caves, it was pretty rainy and blustery the day we went over there (two weeks ago today). Below is the view south from the headland into which the cave is eroded.
The N/S fault that formed the major plane of weakness that allowed erosion to create the cave cuts off the stack in the midground. The coastal town of Florence lies somewhere out there in the gloom. Between Florence and the next town to the north, Yachats (pronounced yah-hahts; Oregonians get very touchy about mispronounced place names), lies a beautiful stretch of rocky headlands. These rocks, the Yachats Basalt, are younger than the Siletz River Volcanics that make up most of the Coast Range accreted terrane known as Sileztia. (More on Siletzia at the end of this post) I have never been clear about the origin and age of the Yachats Basalt, but fortunately, my focus in this post is more on the much younger stuff to the south.
The above GoogleEarth image shows fairly clearly the boundary between the basaltic headlands to the north and the dunes southward into Florence. (I have moved the scale bar to the middle of the picture.) Sea Lion Cave is about where the label "Cox Rock" is. This stretch of dunes continues south to Coos Bay, 40 to 45 miles as the crow flies. Some of the dunes rise over 500 feet high, and make for great field trip stops. From a geological perspective, dunes are pretty straightforward (i.e. simple), and for some reason I find them much more interesting when they're lithified. From an ecological and biological perspective, though, they are even more fascinating.

The above photo shows a couple of interesting features: first, there is a constant tension between colonizing plants and moving sand- the two don't play well together. Moving sand swamps and suffocates plants, while plants stabilize the sand and prevent it from moving. I imagine this as a constantly shifting patchwork of green and beige. Second, the flow of sand is fast enough that most smaller streams in this area never reach the ocean. They are impounded behind a wall of sand, then drain out to the ocean as groundwater. In the above case the two small pools have neither inflowing surface water nor outflowing surface water. I'm presuming that during drier periods these basins are excavated and eroded by strong coastal winds and local vortices. During wet periods (as during this trip), the groundwater rises above the ground's surface.

I suspect that the above lake does have an inflowing stream, but drains through the permiable sandy substrate.

Since the sand is dominantly quartz, with the remainder fresh lithic fragments, as soils go the ground is very poor in nutrients. Forest with quite large trees can become established, but only after hundreds of years of succesion, typically going through beach grasses, brushy plants like salal and Oregon grape, and finally young trees, creating and storing enough organic matter that the ground can support a mature forest.In the above picture, the leaves with a "normal" shape are salal. Since standing water prevents the oxidation and decay of organic material, nitrogen tends to be in short supply in wetlands within the dunes. The odd cobra shaped leaves are those of Darlingtonia Californica, a plant that has evolved a surprising set of charateristics to deal with this situation.
A denser patch of the plant that makes it more obvious why its common name is the Cobra Lily. While not venemous like its namesake, it is carnivorous. Unlike the well-known Venus Flytrap, pitcher plant are passive carnivores; they don't actually move to capture their prey. I had been planning to write out the various adaptations they use to do this, but Wikipedia has a photo of the sign from this wayside that explains it as well as I could. The photo linked above is from the article that discusses this small but fascinating break from geologizing along the Oregon Coast- though as I have implied here, the geology plays an important role in creating an environment where the specialized features of this plant allow it to successfully compete with other species.
The crop above is from the lower right of the previous picture, and shows the opening to the interior of one of the pitcher-shaped leaves. The upright leaf in the lower middle shows the lighter spots, or "skylights." These are translucent spots that fool flying insects into trying to fly through the "roof" of the leaf, rather than exiting from the lower opening.

Strategery I Support

Speaking only for myself, geology can be both pleasingly and frustratingly confusing. It's nice to know that anything I don't understand can henceforth be blamed on giant protists. I was tired of blaming God, anyway. (From LOLScience)

The End of the World

And I feel fine? (From Night Deposits)

Which reminds me of another self-created joke I meant to pass on a week ago...
Q: Where does the Earth hang its Christmas Stocking?
A: From the mantle.

Boom!

Dark Roasted Blend posts great stuff. Case in point:

This video was made by morphing between a number of images captured by Hubble, and shows the "light echo" created by a star burst of unknown origin as it illuminates gas and dust progressively further away from the star. You can picture the flash as an expanding shell... the radius expands at the speed of light, so the apparent diameter is expanding at twice the speed of light. As this shell reaches previously dark gas and dust, those clouds are illuminated, and the light then travels to the observer... the Hubble Telescope. Amazing and awe-inspring. A number of other astronomy-oriented pictures on this post.

And as long as I'm mentioning DRB, I got some good giggles from today's post, ridiculous signs. Following are a pair of examples, out of many

Hyperactive Squirrels

I enjoy watching squirrels, but the idea of tree rats hopped up on caffeine is disconcerting, to say the least.

more animals
On the other hand, maybe the reason they behave the way they do is that are always hopped up on caffeine...

Sea Lion Caves

More from our coast trip December 20th. Sea Lion Caves claims that it is recognized by Guinness as the largest sea cave in the world. It is the first hit in a Google search for "Worlds largest sea cave," but numerous other pages don't even mention it. I am very skeptical about commercial claims to any "most extreme" anything, and no less so here. Nevertheless, this is a very impressive sight. Is it worth ten bucks for an elevator ride? I guess my feeling is that when I have visitors, I enjoy taking them here. I wouldn't pay to go by myself, but then I've been down to the cave 5 or 6 times.

The cave is formed primarily along a fault that runs roughly north-south, and cuts through a prominant headland south of Heceta Head, and north of Florence, Oregon. A second fault running roughly east-west cuts into the headland; the intersection of these two faults has allowed wave action to erode out the cave.
The above sea lion was found dead after being shot, on a beach near Newport, Oregon. It was seven feet long. It is displayed in the corridor leading up to the north opening, where the next two pictures were taken.The linear structure is evident here; I suspect that the notch at the end of Heceta Head is where this same fault crosses the headland. Until 1961, this was the main entrance; tourists had to descend about 200 feet of steps. Weathered and storm-tossed lumber from the old staircase is still piled up on the floor of this cove. Now, as I mentioned, there is an elevator that brings visitors directly down into the cave. There is a short outdoor walk from the shop to the elevator, with about 30 or 40 steps, but most of the climb has been eliminated.

Zooming in, from the same spot, looking at the same spot. The notch is clearer, and the Heceta Head Lighthouse can be seen.

The south end, and most of the length, of the cave is fenced off with heavy chain link. Photographers are asked to forego flash pictures to avoid scaring the sea lions, so getting a sharp picture without a tripod is tricky. Remember, those fuzzy brown pinnepeds are five to eight feet long. Whether it's the biggest cave in the world or not, it really is big.

The best shot we got that day. You can see daylight coming into the cave from the left, from the main entrance opened up by the east-west fault, and off in the distance, the south opening. So we are standing basically on the north-south fault, looking south. Also visible is an ashy layer between two slabs of basalt. The ash layer is the third plane of weakness that has allowed this cave to erode out.

It smells overwhelmingly of fish, it's noisy with the sea lions barking and howling, but it's worth a visit. The link back at the beginning of the post provides several other photos, including some nice aerial photos of the outside.

Oregon Coast Aquarium

I enjoy this place, but have never had a chance to photograph it. Actually, these photos were taken by my brother Jonathon and nephew Andrew. From our coast trip Dec. 20.

Crustacea. No scale, but the carapace on that back one is about 18 inches across. This was about where I started commenting that the staff would not like me to be stuck in here over night with a frying pan, a camp stove, and some butter.Cephalapoda. About 6 feet across.

Chrondrichthyes got my brother Jonathon.
Another two primates, Jonathon's sons, Nat (left) and Andrew. From a viewing window inside the fish tank.

Cnidaria- sea nettle. This has long been one of my favorite displays at this aquarium. They are just beautiful, though I gather they can be very painful, even fatal. That's irrelevant when they're on the other side of a thick pane of glass.
Your turn... Do you recognize this critter? I don't think I would have without the label, but I'm not sure. It's the first time I've ever seen a living speciman. Another hint in the comments. Imaginary gold star, and actual admiration, for the first commenter to get it right.

No Passing

(map and road cams from the ODOT TripCheck page)

So today we need to get back across the Cascades, and of course the weather is being uncooperative. Here it's a mix of snow and rain, with the temperature around 35. Up on the Route 20 passes (Santiam and Tombstone) it's snowing heavily. Throughout the region, the wind is gusting up to 30 miles per hour. It's been howling all night.

And the cables that my sister and brother-in-law bought for their rental van are not fitting well. Each of them have broken a link. We've wired down the loose pieces, and they seem to be working well, but none of us are experienced with chains/cables.

We're considering driving up to the Gorge (I-84), which goes through the Cascades at just above sea-level. The problem there is that we've got to get to the gorge, which might also require chains.

So our choices are 1) Head straight over the mountains, and hope that the chains hold for an hour to an hour and a half. If they break we may have to come back to Sisters or Bend to find traction options, and waste several hours. 2) Take the chains off, and head north on 97 toward the Columbia River Gorge, hoping we don't hit areas where chains are required (more importantly, truly needed). And if we have to waste time putting them back on, will they hold? Not only does the latter option add 115 miles to the trip, we might end up in exactly the same position as we could by just trying to dash through the Cascade passes.

As I've commented several times, Corvallis has spoiled me. It's mild and we just don't get winter weather, with unusual exceptions. The temperature there now is low forties, with a predicted high of 47 degrees today. I have enjoyed the snow here in Bend, and taken many pictures of it over the last few days, some of which I will post sooner or later. But I've had my fill, and snow is great as long as you're just admiring it. Actually dealing with it is a pain in the butt.

18.9

Inches of snow Portland has seen this month as of late Thursday, according to the National Weather Service. That's the most in December since the state started keeping records in the 1880s.

(From Oregon Live)

And according to the Mt Bachelor website (as of this writing), they have had 168 inches of snow this season. Less than two weeks ago, I was worried they might not have enough by Christmas; there were only 8 inches on the ground, and 18 are required to open. So 160 inches- over 13 feet- have fallen in the last two weeks or less. (In fairness, that has packed down to only 67 inches.)(picture from the Bachelor website photo album, Christmas day)

I'll bet Corvallis has set a record too, though from what I saw on OSU webcams today, it didn't look like they had a white Christmas there.

And the Bend area is expecting more snow tonight. Hope we can get home safely Saturday.

Merry Christmas!

Can you say it too many times?
Christmas sunrise over Newberry Volcano, moments ago, from our porch.

No Sign of Santa

But Merry Christmas anyways! You all have been a great gift all year (I started reading blogs regularly in late '07, but didn't start blogging myself until May), so I don't really need to wait up for the jolly old elf. Have a good one!

The Growth of Continents

This month's Accretionary Wedge topic is "What recent geological advance has been most important to your geological work?" I'm paraphrasing, but that's basically my understanding. I had been thinking about writing on paleomagnetism, but the roots of that sub-discipline go back to (if I remember correctly) Cox in 1956- please don't quote me on that: I'm trying to dredge up memories from 20 years ago. (Late Note: See this article excerpt- I have a little more confidence now. Note particularly, "Paleomagnetic results for the Mesozoic and early Tertiary might be explained more plausibly by a relatively rapidly changing magnetic field, with or without wandering of the rotational pole, than by large-scale continental drift.) So the early work in that area predates my birth. Furthermore, the results that have been most important and, yes, inspiring, to me all focus on a particular topic: accretionary tectonics, or as we used to call it when I was an undergrad, "flake tectonics."

Oregon is composed of a fairly large number of discrete terranes, or "flakes" that have distinct and different histories up to a certain point in time. After that point, the geologic history of a particular terrane and its neighbors are congruent and coherent.

As a brief aside, note that "terrane" refers to a particular tectonostratigraphic unit, while the word "terrain" refers to landscape.

So to choose an imaginary but typical example, picture an island arc volcanic system. In the above cartoon, subduction is under the arc to the left, and is consuming oceanic plate between the arc and the continent to the right. Sediments (in tan/greenish?) are accumulating in the basin between the continent and the arc.

The volcanic arc continues to approach the continent, and the basin accumulates more sediment.

As the arc approaches the continent, the sediments continue to accumulate; thrusting and folding start to thicken the sequence. Ultimately, when the oceanic crust is consumed, subduction ceases.
The overlying sediments are severely deformed; while not of the same magnitude as the India/Asia continental collision, the processes are similar. The now accreted island arc and the continent to which it is attached will henceforth share the same sedimentary and tectonic history. In a practical sense, that means events and sediments can be correlated between the blocks. And in reference to my first idea for a topic, they will share similar (basically identical) paleomagnetic histories. Often, subduction will resume on the outboard of the newly accreted block in an opposite direction. This has been called a "polarity reversal," but with a very different meaning from a magnetic polarity reversal.

Geologists will immediately see that I have grossly simplified the diagrams above. For example, the magma rising in the subduction zones that does not reach the surface will crystallize to granitic rocks. Much of the sediment and volcanic rock will be metamorphosed. Faulting and folding will jumble things terribly. A further complication is that an accreted terrane may itself be composed of two or more terranes with independent histories up to a certain point, but share discernible spans of history prior to continental accretion. This is the case in terranes of the Klamath Mountains of southwestern Oregon and northern California. Back arc spreading following a polarity reversal in a subduction system (as happens between the second and fourth cartoons above) can emplace ophiolites- again, this can be seen in the Klamaths.The above diagram shows schematically the kinds of terranes that have formed much of western North America. The article in which I found it has a larger version, and discusses some of these ideas with respect to the Klamaths.

I had the privilege to take a field trip to the Snake River Canyon area with Tracy Vallier toward the end of my undergrad years; the geology there is somewhat less complex than the Klamaths (at least it seems that way to me), but is still best described as "a mess." This article focuses primarily on Idaho, but provides plenty of insight into northwestern Oregon as well.

The accreted terrain with which I am most familiar was referred to as "Siletzia." I say "was" because I haven't really followed the professional literature; I'm not certain that it still is. Actually, quick check, it does look as if it still is- see here and here. This block extends from approximately Coos Bay, Oregon northward to the southern end of Vancouver Island, British Columbia. The eastern margin, as far as I know, has not been tightly constrained, but probably lies along the eastern edge of the Cascade forearc basin, or along the western edge of the Cascade arc; in either case it is buried in basin sediments and older Cascade volcanics. At a first level of approximation, it consists of oceanic crust, apparently thickened by hot-spot volcanism, overlain by a thick sequence of turbidites (the Tyee Formation, correlates, and similar units of slightly different ages), then a shallowing sequence of marine sediments. During the time I was getting my degree, extensive research into the provenance of these sediments, along with paleomagnetic analysis of units of varying ages, showed that the history of this block was far more complex than the essentially simple sequence of rocks would suggest. Paleomag showed that the oldest rocks were oriented about 90 degrees counterclockwise from their modern orientations- that is, this block, approximately 150-200 km by 700-800 km, originally had its long axis in an east-west orientation. It now has its long axis in a north-south orientation. Progressively younger rock units show progressively less deviation from the modern orientation. Provenance analyses of the sediments suggest that the bulk of the Tyee turbidites were derived from the Idaho Batholith or chemically and isotopically similar granitic rocks, since hidden, further south. Given the age of the Tyee (Eocene), and hypothesized drainages in the northwest, it has been suggested that the drainage from the Green River Basin (home of the marvelous fossil fishes, and an enormous amount of petroleum reserves in the form of oil shale) was the stream that carried these sediments to the head of the Tyee fan.

When I was doing some volunteer teaching for OSU's experimental college, the way I explained this to (non-science) students was that the rock sequence is easy to describe and understand, but if you want to describe where the rocks came from and how they got where they are, it gets very messy very fast.

So even though I don't consider myself a professional geologist, and can't claim that there's any particular breakthrough or advance that has had great implact on my career, my avocation for the last few decades has been to try to make sense out of Oregon geology. When I started my education, tectonics was used primarily to describe the cause of the Cascade arc. By the time I finished my education, accretionary tectonics was considered fundamental to making any sense at all out of Oregon's geologic history.

C'est Moi

My mom gave me an early Christmas present: a digital camera! A pretty nice one, too. It's the one she's had for a while, so there's been some confusion over the manual (found it online), the camera to computer data transfer (couple of trips to Wal-Mart- or as my brother calls it, Wally World, and a little common sense), and coming up to speed on digital vs. film technology (mostly I've just used auto-everything so far; as I have more time, I'll play with other variables and learn how to take advantage of them). But I have managed to get a not-too-flattering self-portrait, which I have now loaded.

I've been spending most of my time with my family, several of whom are also not skiing, so posting has been light, but I'll try to get up some pictures and descriptions of the magnificent vacation area soon. Since all my family is on the eastern part of the continent, I don't see them too often, and they're my first priority right now.

Only Oregon

Well, here I am in Bend. We do have wifi here and I'm showing my nephews, Kris and Garette, how to write a blog entry. Maybe soon I'll show them how to start their own blog. My other nephews and I went over to the coast yesterday. It was rainy and stormy, but we had a good time. We got to Florence, and I was reminded of this video from about 1980.

Yeah. Only in Oregon