|
|
Friday, September 12th, 2008
|
|
|
This afternoon two jackrabbits ran into our office building and when we were trying to herd them out one gave birth.
An incredible amount of blood can come out of a small rabbit.
At first I thought the rabbit's liver had fallen out of a wound, because the baby was BIG and smooth and bloody and unmoving. Soon it started breathing and tore it's way out of the birthing sack and looked like a little rabbit. The baby appeared healthy and strong, it could stand up on it's own and kept trying to crawl towards me while I carried it out on a board and put it in a sheltered place. The real mommy finally ran out of the building and found it soon after and cleaned it up, but I had to clean up all the blood in the building.
|
|
Comments: Read 4 or Add Your Own.
|
|
Tuesday, April 25th, 2006
|
|
Sunday, November 13th, 2005
|
|
Monday, October 31st, 2005
|
|
Sunday, October 23rd, 2005
|
|
Thursday, September 8th, 2005
|
|
|
Last night I got to see something really spectacular. We were doing our normal evening Box Canyon bouldering, the sky was gorgeous with heavy grey clouds and the Magdalena mountains were misty from the recent rains. As the sun started to set behind the foggy curtain of cloud, thousands of bats started flying out of a cave halfway up on Resurrection Wall. They came out in a long, black river of animals, and there were so many that even though they were about fifty feet above us, you could hear the beating of the wings as the river snaked off to the Southwest. The was a steady stream of bats for about five minutes.
It's a normal thing to see a couple dozen bats at Box on a summer evening, and sometimes you'll see a couple hundred fly in a big group, off Socorro way, presumably to eat mosquitos. But I've never seen countless thousands all fly in a kinky, squirming line towards the horizon like that before, and I never thought I'd see it a few miles from my house.
|
|
Comments: Read 2 or Add Your Own.
|
|
Thursday, July 28th, 2005
|
|
|
Laying on the grass under the moonlight. Alone. Well, there's prolly
little bugs and shit, bustling around at ground level underneath me,
going about their tiny bug eating, fighting, and collecting bits of food.
Perhaps even my own dead skin flakes and sweat and stuff. And I'm not
so much on top of the grass as down in it, as it's the wild kind of
unmowed grass about six inches tall, and it has very little smell to
it, dry and fine.
( more... )
|
|
Comments: Add Your Own.
|
|
Wednesday, July 27th, 2005
|
|
|
I was finishing what we term a "highball" boulder problem at about 12:30AM on Friday the 8th of August, 2003. My waist was about 19'5" off the ground, which was rocky and uneven. We were having a "night mission" where we drag out a generator and lights to avoid the head and bugs of the day.
( and then I did something stupid )
|
|
Comments: Read 4 or Add Your Own.
|
|
|
From a comment by ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif?v=92.2) eparchos: 'I guess part of the training at the TCC for UCs is a book called "How to Randomly Be a Stupid Fuck"'
Ah, memories.
Back in the day we would have just deleted your account and then, if forced to reinstate it, we would take two months to pull it back off just the level 0s. Then we would have set your peqs to -765971263487126348716234 and stepped on your printouts. Then we would have gone to the bar in the middle of the shift and taken the girl/guy we picked up into the UC closet and refused to answer the door for an hour, and the giant lump of silly putty would have been a little nastier afterwards, all on the clock of course.
Of course back then we wouldn't give a shit because all you'd be logged into was a tty and we'd just leave it turned off hoping the users would get confused and go away. Those things were tendonitis machines anyway that took 30 lbs of force to push the keys and then Ray would put keyboard condoms on them to make it even harder to type. We would "sushi" and then kill your shell just so you'd take a break and come into the back room to visit and interrupt the hellish white flourescent light white noise 62 degree homogenous don't-know-what-the-hell-time it is is it night? day? hot? cloudy? sunny? We don't have a goddam clue 'cause we're back in the operator's room like a two year old open box of baking soda in the back of a fridge where the door switch has broken and the light is always on.
And then we'd stab you in the ankle with the fork of the pallet truck cause we were having pallet truck races and just took out a drinking fountain, water spraying prettily onto the 480V breaker cabinet...
Damn, I shouldn't even mention the weapons and messing with the evil homeless guy living above the back men's room.
|
|
Comments: Read 3 or Add Your Own.
|
|
|
Colin, one of my bouldering buddies, has been being pestered by a fellow named "Railroad Ralph" to bring some "strong Socorro climbers" down to Hillsboro to check out some new climbing and bouldering down there. Ralph was quite excited about it and was saying all kinds of crazy things about waterfalls and purple limestone and such, prodding our curiosity glands.
( the Hillsboro adventure )
|
|
Comments: Read 11 or Add Your Own.
|
|
Thursday, June 16th, 2005
|
|
|
The forest sighs with the comfort of accquired warmth slung from
the vicious tablespoon of wrath, the black, sodden, squalid despair usually
only found at the bottom of an old cup of coffee sitting on your desk all
morning while your ideas all fail and flutter to the cold, wet ground like
leaves in fall. Pencil shavings, eraser stuff, paper dust, used greasy rubber
bands, forgotten dried ink and ancient sweat scum under your drowsy forehead,
putting tiny red marks in it like temporary little stigma of failure and
exhaustion. It's the life most people have but ignore, they are blind to
the beauty and splendor of ordinary life. Most mornings are breathtaking
displays of nature's power and complexity, but I hate mornings. They suck.
The night is my blanket, stars light the way.
|
|
Comments: Add Your Own.
|
|
|
Over the past few years the rattlesnake population seems to be dwindling. I blame the growing number of hawks and eagles, but that's just a wild guess from seeing a hawk family devour a couple of snakes an hour.
However, in the past week I've seen three. One gorgeous green (but small) Mojave rattler just South of Spook canyon, and two tiny Western Diamondbacks out at Monster Island (The Sawtooths near Pie Town). Either I'm just lucky or there's been a snake boom. All three of these snakes were small (they look almost too small to eat a mouse!) but several years old (by the rattles).
BTW, the flowers out in the Quebradas are incredible right now.
|
|
Comments: Read 2 or Add Your Own.
|
|
Saturday, April 23rd, 2005
|
|
|
I went off the road at 95 one time, that was about the max speed of the early 80s Datsun station wagon I was driving. The front tire blew out, it was about 3AM (or maybe 1AM?), and I can't remember how many times it flipped. It came to a stop upright, off against the fence uphill from the road.
At 3AM there is NO ONE on I25 North of Socorro, and back then there were no cell phones, so I managed to change the tire and push/drive the thing back onto the road, and go the rest of the way (at 35 white-knuckled). I seemed to be fine, but the car looked pretty bad, cracked windows and missing trim/mirrors. It still ran and drove fine though.
That was one of my lives used up right there.
The next day I showed the girl who lent me the car her tires (she wanted stuff from ABQ but didn't like driving, I wanted to visit my girlfriend). Except for the spare that I had put on the night before, there was no tread left on any of them, and in several places the belts were showing. Her reply? "Oh I didn't know those wore out!".
|
|
Comments: Read 1 or Add Your Own.
|
|
Wednesday, April 20th, 2005
|
|
|
|
I scrub and scrub and the stank remains. Then I get the scrub brush but it just doesn't help. Then I scrub and scrub until my skin is pink and still the stank comes through, through scented soaps and oils, through deoderant. Through every fucking cleanser and perfuming agent. As if my very soul were stained with the shame of my sin. And I can smell it. I know others have to be able to. But they pretend they can't. Just to mock me they pretend they can't smell it but I know I reek of it. The odor permeates my nostrils at night and wakes me up. I'm filled with revulsion at my own rank self. I wanted to use battery acid once but they took it away and made me sit in the quiet room for a while. Jesus, somebody just sandblast my fucking stinky body for me. Somebody cover me with kerosene and burn the rancid smell out of my flesh. Somebody tell me what it smells like so I can cover it up. Somebody treat me with the disgust I deserve.
|
|
Comments: Read 1 or Add Your Own.
|
|
|
During a bouldering session at Streambed, we watched a good-sized red-tailed hawk carry large snakes up to its nest up on North Wall. There were people climbing with one of those rope thingys on Corner Block below the cliff. The hawk threw one of the snakes onto the rope climbers while they were attempting to climb. Unfortunately, the snake was already dead. Fortunately, the rope climbers didn't know that it was dead when it fell on them, which made for an amusing reaction.
When we talked to the climbers on their way out of the Canyon, they had examined the snake carcass and found that the hawk had bitten through the snake's head to kill it.
|
|
Comments: Add Your Own.
|
|
|
This has prolly been \.ed to death already, but it's the first I heard of it. Reminds me of schlake's old trees.
"Similarly, we tripled the effective NV-RAM speed of the NSA's human test subjects. Continuing with this rationale, we removed 150MB of NV-RAM from our mobile telephones. Continuing with this rationale, we reduced the effective tape drive speed of our network to better understand our decommissioned Commodore 64s. note that only experiments on our trainable testbed (and not on our system) followed this pattern. Finally, we removed 7MB of RAM from our system to examine our system. To find the required 25kB hard disks, we combed eBay and tag sales."
|
|
Comments: Add Your Own.
|
|
|
