Ron's Big Life Update - April 2001

"Are you adequately prepared to rock?" - Principal Skinner from The Simpsons

"Monkeys are taking over New Delhi." - Bob Edwards, on NPR's "Morning Edition", 3/22. Now THAT's the way to start the morning!

Well, I'm working again, and I'm completely settled in with the new job. Seagate is history (well, the company is still around but I'm gone), and I've been a full-fledged ADC employee for about two months. We do fiber optics stuff for telecom, and our stock is in the toilet right now (which is just fine because I'm buying...) My group is about 17 people, and about 13 of them are from my old optical group from Seagate. It's been a very easy transition for me, despite the fact that I can't walk to work anymore. I guess I could walk, but it's about 13 miles and it would take the whole work day. The ADC cafeteria is excellent; if I were in a restaurant and they served me this food, I would be pleased. I haven't put on any weight, though (bless my skinny ancestors), but I stopped working out. Muscle tone? Who needs muscle tone when you eat a good lunch?

Happy Passover and Easter and All That. Margaret put on our ersatz-Seder again, where she made sushi and in the process, covered nearly all the bases required for a certified regulation Seder. We had a few friends over this time, and consumed enormous quantities of California Rolls, Sake, Sangria, wine, and weird tasty desserts from the Oriental Market down the street. A big success, and because we invited my friend John over (the same guy from the bad pizza/beer/movie night), we had virtually no leftovers. Many thanks to Margaret's Korean roommate from college, who passed on the sushi skills quite nicely. (No raw fish, though. Just seaweed wrappers, rice, cucumbers, carrots, jicama, avocado, a cooked egg, and hot dogs, which work surprisingly well in the California rolls. Wasabi was the Bitter Herb and soy sauce was the "salty tears" for dippping.)

Our big excitement lately was getting a new furnace. Our old one was made by Trane sometime in the early '60s, which puts it at about 38 years old. Each time we had a service guy out to take a look at it, his reaction was always, "My God! I've never seen one of these this old!" I know that furnaces aren't supposed to last for 38 years, and it's a credit to Trane ("It's hard to stop a Trane, but you sure can slow one down") that this one lasted as long as it did. We decided it was time for a new one when it set off the carbon monoxide detector in the basement. At first, we thought it was just the bird that had fallen down the chimney and clogged the flume (which Margaret lovingly described as a basically a piece of charcoal with wings), but even after we cleaned out the ex-bird, we got CO beeps. So The Guy came out last week with a Helper, and the two of them swore up a storm carrying out the old furnace. We got a new Trane, and so far so good. It's remarkably quiet, and it's been unsettling for us because the only time it's been that quiet is when the blower motor died. It's ninety-something percent efficient, compared to the old one (maybe, oh I dunno, how about 10%?), and it's got air conditioning. We'll only need the AC for about two weeks in August when it's so humid that you want to die, but if we ever sell the house it will certainly help.

We saw Chinatown, The Producers, and Manos The Hands Of Fate all in one weekend. All bona-fide classics, and all even better with repeated watchings. Six thumbs up.

We also drove around last week at midnight on a weeknight to see the northern lights. I'd seen them a few times in '91 driving from Rochester MN back up to the Twin Cities, so we hopped on US52 and drove about 50 miles toward Rochester, watching backwards over our shoulders. A dangerous way to drive, but worth it. The northern lights just looked like some red clouds that were illuminated by city haze, but once we realized that we were 50 miles away from city haze, it became clear that that was it. We got to sleep about 1:30, but we saw a cool natural phenomenon. Like it oughta be.

We just went through the KFAI pledge drive, a twice-a-year fun-fest where we solicit financial support from the listeners. (No commercials; this is how we pay the bills.) Crap From The Past broke all kinds of records by raising over $2000 for the station, which is completely unheard of for a show that's on Sunday nights from midnight to 2. Thanks to all the listeners that contributed, and maybe I'll be able to convince the station management that CFTP deserves a better time slot. (I'm not holding my breath.) The website www.crapfromthepast.com has added a Milli Vanilli tribute section, and now it's getting more traffic than anything else on there. Scary, and worth checking out.

I mentioned in my last e-mailing that I would be taking three glorious weeks off between jobs. The time off did me a world of good, and I'd recommend a long break to anyone switching jobs, much in the same way that I recommend relieving some wedding day tenison by eloping and having a reception afterwards. I slept late for two weeks straight, and for the third week, we packed up Margaret's Honda and drove to Yellowstone National Park. It was awesome - Yellowstone in February is great!

We'd had such good luck with road trips before that we just decided to follow the map to Yellowstone. The route was pretty straightforward - I-90 west across South Dakota and Wyoming. We drove all day and pulled into a hotel when we got sleepy. We drove toward the eastmost entrance, and discovered that the eastmost entrance to the park is closed to auto traffic for the winter! (Doh!) The nice folks at the hotel in the tiny Wyoming town informed us of this before we got on the road, and we had to take a whole lot of 2-lane highways across Wyoming to get back to I-90. We turned south at Livingston, Montana, then another 2-lane highway took us into the park.

I have to say that it's absolutely beautiful across Wyoming and Montana, two states which I'd never seen before. It's also part of the "West", with the cowboys and all that, which I didn't realize at all. (I always associate the "West" with Tucson, just because I lived there and hadn't thought much about it.)

And yes, Montana has a speed limit (it's not infinite, as previously believed.) It's 75 MPH by day, 70 at night. We drove significantly faster than the speed limit, though, and found out that your gas mileage tends to be pretty crummy at 90 MPH.

The teensy town at the edge of park is Gardiner, which is mostly some restaurants, junque shoppes, and a hotel or two. Gardiner is pretty much deserted in the winter, and virtually everything was closed in the town except for a gas station. It was creepy. There was a sign in front of one Gardiner hotel advertising, "Elk stay free." And sure enough, there were about a dozen elk lounging on the snow-covered lawn in front of the hotel. Very cool, and it set a very nice tone for us as we drove into the park.

You buy a 7-day pass at the edge of the park, so you can come and go as you see fit without paying a fortune. There were another dozen or so elk inside the park right near the gate, as if to thumb their noses at any potential hunters. (Yes, I know elk don't have thumbs. It's just an expression. After another five miles or so on a twisty, wind-y, two-lane road, we arrived at Mammoth, which is one of the lodges inside the park. There's a hotel, some gift shops and historical buildings, some really nice scenery, and not much else in Mammoth. It's actually a nice gentle way to ease yourself into the park, and there's about 2 miles worth of hiking trails near the hotel. There were a few hot springs along the trail, and we were awe-struck how you can have near-boiling water (it's about 170-180 degrees at the surface) right next to 18 inches of snow. It was plenty cold, and I got good use out of the hood on my ice-fishing jacket.

The Mammoth hotel was really nice, and really old. It was designed in the mid-'20s (I think), when the economy was booming and plans were BIG! During construction through the Depression, it was scaled back to something more reasonable. The rooms were historically accurate to the period, complete with push-button light switches, giant claw-foot bathtubs (no showers!), radiator heating, and no TV or radio. Neat! Outside, there were magpies everywhere. Margaret tells me that magpies are pretty birds that tend to soil their reputations by being scavengers, and they were everywhere. We also saw a big raven in the parking lot eyeing a small yippy dog (a WEINER dog no less!) in one of the parked cars. Dogs is tasty!

We spent a night there, then took a snow-coach down to Old Faithful. The roads are closed to cars, but open for snowmobiles and the park's snow coaches (basically a van on skis!) We're not adventurous enough for the snow-mobiles, so we took the vans-on-skis. It's about a 4-hour ride from Mammoth to Old Faithful, and the van-on-skis makes a few stops for scenery and snacks. It's driven by cool tour guides, who come from all over the world to work in Yellowstone. One of our drivers was from somewhere near Russia (I should have written most of this down when it was fresh in my mind...)

The park had a serious forest fire in the summer of 1988, and you can still see the effects. Lots of burned trees still standing, and lots of new little saplings that are all about 3 feet tall. I was really surprised that nearly everyone working at the park saw the fire as a positive thing, and an almost necessary step in the natural progression of the park. They talked about how some of the tree species need the extreme heat of a fire for their seeds to sprout, and how the animals actually had plenty of food after the fire because the oxidized bark was edible and digestible for them! Who'da thunk? It almost makes me want to watch the Discovery Channel more (but just almost.)

The scenery was astounding, and I'd like to think that I learned a lot. We saw buffalo a-plenty, and I learned that buffalo is a more common (and less correct) term for bison. Buffalo/bison are enormous creatures, and we saw hundreds of them from the van (and up close later on). They're also tasty as I learned from some burger places out east, but oddly enough, no one out there serves buffalo as burgers. I dunno why.

We saw elk a-plenty as well. They're everywhere, and they're pretty big as well. We had a spectacular bald eagle sighting from the van. It just sat there, perched on a tree branch, much to the delight of the Japanese photgrapher in the van with us. As if on cue, it stretched its wings, yawned, and turned to the side.

We also saw some coyotes eating an elk that had fallen into one of the hot springs and died. It was pretty much elk soup by the time we arrived, and it was very cool to watch the coyotes carefully walk out along the carcass, and rip off pieces with their teeth. You could tell that the water was hot by the way the coyotes reacted when they got their feet wet. Good pictures indeed - as if it were staged for the Discovery channel.

Now imagine this - if I described a couple where he was an engineer, she has an art degree, they have no kids and 2 cats, one of which pees in a corner of the basement, she drives a Honda Civic and used to drive a Pinto, they had no proper honeymoon, and he used to do community radio, you'd think I was describing Margaret and me. Nope - this is a description of Dan & Kristin from Portland, Oregon, who we sat next to in the van. We were all pretty shocked at the similarities, and we walked around the park together. Very cool people, and I owe them a letter and a set of pictures.

There's a lodge at Old Faithful, and we stayed a night there for a night. The park at Old Faithful is superb. The hot springs that we saw in Mammoth were nice, but they were peanuts compared to the geysers at the Old Faithful park. Old Faithful itself is excellent, and I was somewhat relieved to learn that you can't exactly set your watch by it - it erupts every 79 minutes, +/- 11 minutes. It's the +/- part that sets my mind at ease somewhat - otherwise nature would be really scary in its precision.

So we strolled around the Old Faithful park with Dan and Kristin on the nicest, sunniest possible day in the middle of winter (I got a bit sunburned on my face). The paths were shoveled, but the park had about 2 feet of snow on the ground, and the air was crisp crisp crisp. We'd walk up to a geyser, it would erupt, we'd applaud, then walk on to the next one. After a while, we realized that Dan had the magic touch for geysers - "Kazaam!" and the thing would erupt on command. He had the Kavorka! And it worked repeatedly as we wandered along the trails. It was only afterward that we saw the expected eruption times; Old Faithful's average eruption separation is about 79 minutes, but the geysers in the rest of the park tended to have a few hours between eruptions, like 4-11 hours! So it really was a total fluke that the eruptions followed us around, but it's nice to believe that someone actually has the Kavorka. And somewhere on Dan's roll of film, we have a picture of a buffalo standing right in front of Old Faithful, taken from about 25 feet away. (We know you're not supposed to be that close to them, but it was standing right in front of us on the path.)

There are some really cool pools in the park. Not erupting geysers really, just warm pools that have some fantastic colors in them from minerals and bacteria. If you were going to install a decorative pool in your backyard, you'd want it to look like one of these. There was a "Do not mark bacterial mats" sign that we interpreted as "Don't pee in the pools."

I did observe one of the coolest optical phenomena I've ever seen, and I'll try and describe it to you fellow optics geeks. It was a very clear, cold day at the park, and we were looking at one of the hot spring pools. The sun was overhead and just behind us, so that the top of our shadows fell about two feet in front of us. There was some steam at the surface of the springs, so that there was a few inches of mist where the top of our shadows fell. If I looked at my own shadow, I appeared to have a bright halo around my head - like a '70s-era basketball afro of light. And each of us noticed the same effect for his/her own shadow - you see a little light halo around your own head, but not around anyone else's. For lack of a better name, I dubbed it my "aura", and I haven't come up with a good explanation of why you'd see this at all. Probably the same math that predicts rainbows, but I'm not sure why you'd see such a sharp reflection only at near-normal incidence (near the head of your own shadow). Thank God it's not an oral exam question, or I'd have to give back my degree...

After three full days in the park, we drove home. Uber-Kudos to Margaret's driving skillz, and she guided us through a Montana snowstorm. She claims to have been in conditions like this all the time growing up on the farm 3 hours east of Denver, and had no trouble passing the semis and magically keeping the car on the road at a healthy speed. (I would never have made it home at all...)

All in all: 6 days of driving, and 2700 miles on the Civic. The best imaginable week.

Margaret would like to interject here for a minute or two for a rebuttal: A flue is a metal chimney, a flume is a log ride. The park guide from "near Russia" was from Croatia, which makes me wonder what his letters to home are like - "Yes, there are buffalo wandering all over the place, all the mountains are spectacular, and everyone that works for THIS government is a dope-smoking Granola!" Yellowstone is ideal in the winter for the reason that the biggest scavengers awake at that time of year are just coyotes, not enormous bears who can strip cars. The Korean roommate wasn't from college, it was from my "sabbatical" when I dropped out and switched schools because I was broke. Her parents were transferred back by the Air Force and threw all of the roommates out, which is why I was only there for a couple of weeks. Welcome to Tucson, your lease is toilet paper. As for the new furnace, it is much too quiet. I keep checking the thermostat, because not hearing the fan running makes me think the house is getting colder and colder. I'm sure that in the summer, I'll still have to run a fan just to psych myself into thinking that it's cool. Gotta go, The Guy who's estimating the shade tree removal is due here soon.

Ron's rebuttal to Margaret's rebuttal: Yes, a bird died in the log ride that's attached to our chimney. I'm sticking to my story...

One more thing, in the name of spring cleaning: The real reason you haven't heard from me in eons is that I was putting off re-typing my alias list, which is over 100 names long. I think it's all in there, but I'm sure I screwed some things up. If you could e-mail me your current info, I'd appreciate it. (And to family members, kindly pass along any other family members I might have missed.) Also, let me know your preferred e-mail address if you have multiple entries; the ADC system only allows one e-mail address per name. Thanks!

So that's what's been up at my end. The last of the snow melted off this weekend, and spring is about to spring. Hope all is springy at your end of the world, and keep in touch.

Ron & Margaret