I'm back!

I've finally gotten internet access at home after my move last October. Phew! It took almost six months of wrangling with my provider to get the correct gadget with the correct software with the correct locational settings, and hours of phone calls talking to several folks (some helpful, some not) each call. Thankfully, it's done, and I can get back to the enjoyment of reading you all's blogs, writing comments, and writing my own posts. I have lots of photos and musings that I'm anxious to get into the blog and I hope to have two or three postings a week, now that I'm reconnected. Thanks to those of you who queried as to my whereabouts over the last months. Cheers! Coconino

Thoughts spurred by newly found blog...

Silver Fox over at Looking for Detachment posted about a newly found blog, Accidental Remediation. Short Geologist's posts are primarily about working in the HTRW investigation and remediation arena, a field I left about 10 or so years ago.

One of her posts talks about the "indentured servitude" of entry-level geologists (aka field grunts). This type of activity on the part of consulting firms was certainly a portion of why I left that field of work.

I had friends who worked for firms that would charge their clients for overtime worked, but not pay their employees for that overtime. They were on salary, right? I myself worked for a firm that had me work 5 months' worth of hours in 3 (I was working about 12-15/7) - unpaid overtime - and got a lovely $500 bonus that year. Other folks in my firm and other firms in the area were similarly overworked. I had one friend who got herself hooked on ritalin to accomplish the senior project manager work that she needed to get done (more 15/7). I've heard of firms that had a very "enhanced" (aka stimulant-laden) atmosphere to produce results from their junior and senior project managers. Not all engineering/geology firms are this way, of course. There are a lot of very good firms out there who treat their employees well and understand the relationship between sound product/reputation.

Regardless, about 10 years ago I decided it was nuts and changed fields within the environmental industry. Luckily, I had the background that helped me accomplish this transition. The consulting in my arena, wetland delineation, is much more sane and not as subject to that type of servitude. It's harder to get crappy work by the state and federal agencies as they generally need to field-verify the work firms are doing, which is highly visible and mostly above ground (except for those hydric soil indicators). Projects tend to be smaller, and when large, the clients tend to be savvy enough to understand that good data is necessary.

That said, the quote about consulting I continually tell people is "Good, fast, and cheap; pick any two. You can't have it all." And it's true.

Kids and science

I am quite proud of my 4-year-old daughter. She takes catching bugs to put in her bug box, my somewhat feeble explanations of scientific principles and processes, being taught minerals in stone countertops and my continuous absences for work (with or without her along) in stride.

Yesterday was one of those cases in point. On our way to that horrid bastion of low-cost consumerism originating in the south (aka Wally-world), she asked me very pointed questions about the difference between dry ice and regular ice. For background explanation, when we travel to larger communities with decent food stores (TJs and Whole Paycheck), I bring a large cooler and go gaga. The last time this occurred, she was along for the search for dry ice to keep the frozen things frozen and the rest well-cooled. [Note: In NM and AZ, Smith's almost always has dry ice. Occasionally, Wally-world will have it as well. Albertson's recently dropped selling it.]

It was interesting to see her reaction to the explanation, especially that carbon dioxide comes from air and is separated out and cooled from a gaseous state to a solid (ie., frozen) state.* It's a difficult concept for a small child, first that air that you can't see is actually made up of different gases, and second, that you can actually separate out one of them and cool it to a solid state.

The non-scientific world tends to think of ice in terms of frozen water; most preschool teachers and day care workers don't have a scientific background and have limited ability to present difficult scientific concepts to children of small age. It's one thing to explain to a child what you can see (trees, bugs, plants growing, rivers flowing); it's quite another to explain what you can't (and really don't understand yourself).

I've noted gender-related test score differences for verbal and math/science in the school district to which I will (hopefully) soon be sending my child. Girls lead boys in test scores in every elementary school in the district for both verbal and math/science until 4th grade. At that point, the verbal scores equalize and the girls' math/science scores tank (from about 95th percentile to 75th or less). In discussing this with friends who are both educators and mental health care professionals, we came up with several possible explanations, the most plausible being a combination of non-science background for the teachers and a male-oriented curriculum (scientific ideas and processes being presented in a way easier for boys than girls to grasp). Before you gasp about this statement, anyone with children of both genders will tell you that boys are very different from girls in the way they play and verbalize (certainly with ranges of behavior in each - my ex had his dolly along with his tonka trucks and my girl is not much of a girlie-girl). With the differences in learning abilities and behaviors, it is not a stretch to imagine that an elementary school science curriculum taught by a non-scientist could be easier for one gender to grasp than another.

I'm obviously very concerned about how well my girl learns math and science (and English - see May 15 post) in school. Occasionally, my fears are allayed and today was a case in point. She took the explanation of separate gases forming air and freezing one of those to make dry ice in stride. Her questions made it clear she grasped the basic concepts. Though she may have a bit of a difficult time verbalizing what she understood, I'm quite proud of her ability to understand the concepts, and grateful that she gets the opportunity to do so.

*[1. I left out the discussion of its liquid state existing at higher-than-atmospheric pressures and low temperatures. 2. She easily got that it was colder than regular ice.]

[As another aside, her 13-year-old babysitter can drive a backhoe and dress an elk with the same ease as sending a text message or doing her hair and makeup. I'm quite proud of her, too.]

Art and Architecture in Geology: Accretionary Wedge #10

As I am in the middle of redesigning a kitchen with my significant other and just spent many hours looking at hurking slabs of rock in near three-digit weather (I picked a garnet granite in the remnant yard), my contribution to this version of the Accretionary Wedge (#10) are two of the buildings in downtown LA that had some of my favorite geology in architecture.

The first is 601 Wilshire, or the Figueroa at Wilshire: http://skyscraperpage.com/cities/?buildingID=1357
Construction was finished in 1990, and the architect was Albert C. Martin. As monolithic downtown office buildings go, this is one of my favorites. I spent many hours both inside and in the outer courtyard of this building, faced with pink granite apparently from Brazil (also used on the inside). My favorite building feature: the pink marble sconces in the hallways, sliced thin to be translucent and give a warm pink glow to the interior. I've craved marble sconces like that since, and just raved about them again to a friend, while discussing use of stone in the home.

The other is the Los Angeles Public Library: http://www.lapl.org/central/art_architecture.html
and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Los_Angeles_Public_Library

I also spent many hours in this building, constructed in 1926 by architects Bertram Goodhue and Carlton Winslow in that quintessential southern California meets Egypt style, like many other buildings in SoCal constructed during that era. It apparently had an arson fire in 1986 and was restored to be called the Richard Riordan Library. Unfortunately, the websites don't have a discussion of the floor tile, a beautiful Devonian shale/slate apparently quarried in the British Isles. I don't quite know if this is correct, as I emailed the docents and received that info in reply. It is a beautifully calming dark green clearly showing the sedimentary structures contained within the stone. I've also craved a floor of this, to bring calm to home and a reminder of the ebb and flow of the tides and the seas.

Not my summer vacation...

I'm off to tribal lands tomorrow, to look at a proposed small ag dam rebuild location. Then I'm off to an unnamed location in NM, to make home decisions with my significant other. Then back home, a week of work, then it's off again to give two talks and do some field work on the way. The rest of the summer runs somewhat similar. In between all the travel, I need to organize my both my home and work belongings enough to be able to be schlepped to the above-mentioned unnamed location at the end of summer. And amongst, all of that, I need to take care of child, make child school decisions, regular work, home, meals, bills, and dog. phew. When's that lottery ticket gonna win?

Let it snow...in May?

This is the view out my significant other's back door yesterday. I'll be moving here in August. The elevation is close to 8000 ft. This was a somewhat freak system; there were slight accumulations at lower elevations across NM and CO from this event.

One of the little pieces of local wisdom I took to heart when I moved here is that the gambel oaks won't leaf out until after the last danger of frost has passed. I don't think that was the case this year. It's ten minutes to seven, and it's 33 F outside.

Regardless, I don't put out plants until after the oak leaves have shown up (that was around the beginning of last week). It seems as if the hummingbirds appear around the same time. I'm looking forward to the wildflowers this spring. More to come.

Go to the source before forming your opinion...

I somehow came across this http://womanscholar.blogspot.com/2008/05/do-you-know-what-your-government-is.html blog post this morning. I had not intended to get this political in my blog, but this post raised my ire.

The author is seriously misinformed and is using a quote from a politician to form her opinion instead of the actual text of the bills before the House and Senate, and the judicial, regulatory, and technical history of the issue. [Personally, I rarely form an opinion in direct response to a politician's quote, noting that there is almost always an underlying agenda. I form my opinions surrounding political issues based on fact, not party line.]

Due to the 2001 SWANCC and the 2007 Rapanos-Carabel Supreme Court decisions, the federal government has had isolated waters lacking interstate commerce and waters without a "significant nexus" to a navigable water removed from regulation. This has reduced the reach of the Clean Water Act and limited the ability of the federal government to regulated discharges of pollutants to the waters in question, ranging from prairie potholes and vernal pools, to ephemeral washes and arroyos in the southwest. In the absence of federal regulation, theoretically, states are supposed to fill the void. In reality, that only happens in the most progressive of states. Most states have limited ability to emplace new water regulation due to state and local politics and funding limitations, much like other sorts of regulation, like health care and education.

The persons who brought those cases to court and the supporting interests had the underlying interest to reduce the scope and breadth of the federal government's regulation and reduce the regulatory burden on the regulated community. Unfortunately, it has had the opposite effect, making the determination of regulation much more difficult, time-consuming, and burdensome on both the regulators and the regulated community. Where federal jurisdiction was once clear-cut, now it is fuzzy and takes considerable time and effort on everyone's part.

Personally, these two cases have made my work, my customers' work, and especially the work of regulators I work with much more time-consuming, onerous, and burdensome. It has also confused the cross-regulation of different sections of the Clean Water Act, making communication between several different branches and agencies of local, state, and federal government critical. A behemoth task.

The Clean Water Restoration Act mentioned in the above blog would restore the previously-removed regulation and effectively ease the regulatory burden [on the federal government, on states, localities and private interests] by making the geographic scope of federal Clean Water Act regulation crystal clear.