Right. It’s the holidays, you’re likely all busy doing holiday stuff, and even if you’re trying to avoid all that, you’ve still got plenty of Los Links you haven’t caught up on. And I’ve got a file full of geologic odds and ends I’ve collected from Twitter and other sources that I’ve meant to do something with. Since it’s all kind of jumbled together and cemented by the common theme of geology, we’ll call it conglomerate, then, shall we?
Via Brian Romans, my favorite metamorphic facies diagram ever. Pay especial attention to the upper left category.
Metamorphic Facies Diagram
For those with a time-lapse addiction, check out Finding Oregon on Bad Astronomy. I swear to you, we will turn Phil Plait into a geologist someday. All right, maybe an astrogeologist, but it’ll still count.
From Lockwood, a fun practical joke. Keep this in mind if you’re subjected to relations you must distract before they launch into yet another long-winded description of some embarrassing personal problem:
Literati observing me as a youngster might have despaired. I had no real interest in musty old tomes. For a long time, my tastes ran to mysteries and Westerns. Then I became addicted to fantasy and science fiction. I still adore all that stuff, and I believe some of the best fiction ever written is genre. Michael Hann and his ilk would faint at the idea. These, mind you, are the very same people who wouldn’t be ashamed to see clutching Homer in public – a patina of age, apparently, puts a suitable shine on monsters, demigods and other tropes of fantasy.
The poor buggers will need a fainting couch when I tell them it’s a Western writer who helped get me hooked on ancient literature. But it’s true. Louis L’Amour wrote The Walking Drum, which brought some very old texts to vivid life. I’ve sung that book’s praises more than once, and I’ll sing them again: it was one of the best books I’ve ever read.
While the Michael Hanns of the world clutch their Trollope and Proust, I’ll turn to my fantasists, thanks ever so much. Guy Gavriel Kay. Susanna Clarke. That’s all I’m saying. Oh, and these folks, too, among about a billion others. I’ll put the best SF authors in a ring with your literary greats any day, and I know who I’m putting my cold hard cash on.
So yes, I loves me my modern SF, and quite a lot of genre (excepting most romance, although there was that one book by Catherine Coulter that I picked up and read because the blurb contained this aside: “What is a marten, you ask? A marten is a sable; a sable is a weasel. What is a weasel, you ask. See marten.” And I figured anything that snarky couldn’t be half bad, and it actually wasn’t). But there are times when I love to immerse myself in ancient literature.
If you travel enough, one day you’ll be laid over in some airport city for a day. What if it were here? Sure you could party with local friends, but you could also take those friends with you on a field trip!
He’s soliciting suggestions for layover geology. I have just the thing: Discovery Park. Fantastic examples of coastal landforms and glacial sediments, gorgeous location, and conveniently located on bus lines that will zip you from the airport to the lovely landscape and back again.
On a clear day, you’ll have a view of the Olympic Mountains, Mt. Rainier, and Puget Sound. On a not-so-clear day, you’ve still got the bluffs. There’s a lighthouse and beachcombing opportunities for those in your party who may not be as enthralled by geology as you are. Birders can get their jollies. You might even run in to a baby seal.
Baby seal and lighthouse, Discovery Park
The trails are pretty simple to navigate, and they have a delightful little interpretive center.
It’s absolutely perfect if you find yourself stuck in Seattle for a day, and if you’re overnighting, it’s close enough to downtown for some fun down at Pike’s Place Market and other local city delights. You can have it all.
For a detailed description of the geological goodness, see my old post Do Ya Think I’m Bluffing, Punk? Well, Do Ya? And watch this space – it may take me a while to write ’em up, but I’ve got plenty o’ places one can visit in an afternoon when stuck at SeaTac.
Today in the Dojo: To ‘nym or not to ‘nym, and how to make it work.
Yes, I’m plucking the low-hanging fruit from the Pitch 2.0 tree, but this is actually a rather important topic. We’ve already established that a ‘nym’s not a problem, per se. Jason Black was kind enough to drop by and confirm my suspicion: that it’s about identity, not the name on your photo I.D. So far, so good.
Now, let’s explore the topic in further detail. Those of you who are veteran ‘nyms can probably skip lightly over this one and get on with the holiday traditions like trying to avoid stores and hiding from the more vexing relatives. Those of you who aren’t yet established ‘nyms and wondering whether and how you should be come so, stick around.
You may scream when you go down below. Los Links looks enormous, and it is. But there are a few things you should bear in mind:
1. It is a convenient excuse. No, you can’t go shopping / entertain the annoying houseguest / perform X unpleasant task, because you have to read all the links. Ever so sorry. It’s all Dana’s fault.
2. The Geophotomeme posts are, for the most part, extremely short.
3. You don’t have to read all of the links (despite what you’ve told people you’re trying to avoid). Just, y’know, most of them.
Just a quick update. I wanted to say a very hearty and heartfelt thank you to all those who replied to my outpouring last night. You’ve made things better. You gave me the strength to get through the day, and to begin to determine just what I can and cannot do, and be at peace with the “cannot” part of it.
I’m lucky to have you. One day, I hope to have the opportunity to buy each and every one of you a drink, and we shall toast to life and love and friends and doing the best we can.
Thanks to you, I’m not alone.
I called our Employee Assistance Program hotline today and got some wonderful folks who are more than willing to help me sort these things out. They were even more than happy to recommend counselors who are good with atheists, and giggled in sympathy when I told them why I was asking – that the last thing I need at a time like this is a counselor who would see conversion as the solution to my problems. So if I need them, I’ll have access to counselors who can watch over my mental well-being while I attempt to see to my mother’s, without bringing Jesus into the mix.
There’s a division of the EAP that helps specifically with adult care. They’re doing the legwork to determine what our resources are, and which state will be best to keep her in. That takes a large part of the burden off. And once they’ve shown me what’s out there, I can begin to pass that knowledge along to you. I know I’m not the only person with an ill relative to take care of. Knowing where and how to get assistance is important, and not everyone has union-negotiated health insurance that can help with such matters. One thing the adult care person told me today was to look for the Department of Aging in the relevant state. It goes by different names in some states – in Washington, it’s known as Senior Information and Assistance.
There’s going to be nonsense with waiting lists and talking to a myriad of departments, but help is out there, and since we’re starting before she’s in critical need, we’ll be as prepared as we can be. She won’t end up alone on the streets. There’s things we can do that won’t require me installing her in my own household, it would seem. This is all to the good.
She was also coherent enough tonight to give me the name and number of her case officer, so I can contact him and he can help coordinate things. The good news on that front is, she likes and trusts him. So, if all goes well and he really is a good guy, he should be able to help us make the right decisions for both of us.
I’m not going to pretend that this will be an easy road. There will be plenty of bumps, and probably several places where the whole bloody thing’s washed out and we’ll have to find a way around. But we’ll get there.
And you, my good people, my dear cherished readers, have given me the resolve I need to make it more than a few steps along.
Thank you.
And now, I’m going to bloody well get Los Links done for you. Almost there…
It’s been a day. I spoke to my mother, who had sounded better the last time we spoke. She sounded much worse today, and informed me my grandfather’s in the hospital, although she can’t say for what. A rehabilitation center of some sort. She thinks he’s going to die soon. And then she wants to move to Washington.
I’ll admit that cold dread fills me at the idea.
We have a history. I spent a considerable chunk of my twenties trying to extricate her from a horrible situation. She’d call me in tears every time her husband went back to drinking and began beating her. She’s really leaving him again, this time, she’d say, and so I’d tell her to come on down. She’d live with me for a few days or weeks, interrupting my writing, putting my life in disarray, and inevitably, just when we’d got things sorted enough she could begin to live a life of her own, she’d go back to him. Always. This went on more times than I can remember.
Yes, that’s the best title I can come up with. It’s late, Aunty Flow’s here, I’m on a variety of OTC painkillers, I’ve been reading for Los Links and also reading a rather mind-bending book by Oliver Sacks, and I think my brain has quietly slipped out the back door and legged it down an ally to freedom.
So it’s time for pictures full o’ mindless cute. And hideous puns.
The cat pretending she's pondering whilst monopolizing my lap
I’ve spent the last little while writing in bed. It’s easier to jockey a notebook in there – easier, at least, until the cat decides the rest of the bed isn’t good enough, and she must lie atop Mom in about the place where the notebook goes. This is exhausting work for a felid. Luckily, there’s a nice paper pillow nearby.
The cat pillows her head on the notes for my magnum opus.
Do you know how hard it is to write with a cat’s noggin in the way? And she snores. And she’s cute. It’s terribly distracting. I’ve begun to wonder why writers are so often associated with cats. We don’t actually get as much writing done in their presence as one might think.
The cat takes over the second pillow.
When she’s tired of getting bonked in the head with the ever-shifting notebook, she’ll sometimes make her way off to the side, where her pillow is. Yes, that’s her pillow. It lies flat, so that she can curl up on it and bask under the lamp. She’s spoiled rotten, that cat.
There are times, when she’s cuddled up with me like this, that I just put the notebook down and look in to her eyes. She’s got remarkable eyes, green with hints of blue and gold. She’s got a very patrician stare. Most of the time, she looks upon me as a serving wench, staring as if from a great height no matter how high above her I tower. But at times, those green-gold-blue eyes stare into mine with the purest adoration, and she purrs so loudly the whole bed seems to hum, and stretches her little white-capped paws out on me with vast contentment, and sighs deeply, as if she’s sinking in to the rightness of the world. In those moments, I get a sense of the love parents must have for their children, that vast and unconditional and heart-wrenching affection the English language doesn’t have a proper word for.
We’ve been together a lot of years, that cat and I. I have no idea how many good ones we’ve got left. So sometimes, I do take the time to just stop and cuddle with her. Gather your cuddles while ye may…
She’s over on the back of the couch right now, snoring away. In a short little while, we’ll head for bed, where she’ll probably do her usual routine of using Mommy as a trampoline before settling down for the night. I may wake in the morning to a little feline face butting mine, and some pretty urgent meowing, if I forget to fill the food bowl. I may wake to a warm bundle of fur ready for a snuggle before the day starts. I never know what I’m getting from her, except this one thing: companionship.
I never understood why getting a lump of coal instead of presents should be considered a threat. I’m a coal miner’s daughter (yes, really. Okay, so he was an engineer at a coal mine, but it counts). The best thing my dad ever gave me, aside from the pony and the playhouse and the Breyer Horse stable that I adored for nearly a decade, was a lump of coal. I’d been after him about it for a long time. “Daddy, please bring me a lump of coal from the mine! Pleasepleaseplease I’ll be good!”
If I’d had a better grasp on reverse psychology, or my dad a somewhat better-developed sense of irony, I might have ended up with one earlier. Regardless, one day, he arrived home with an enormous black chunk of ancient swamp, and I cherished it until we lost it in a move.
I’ll never forget visiting Black Mesa once. I was very young, probably no older than 7 or 8, and we drove through a black canyon gashed by men’s machines in the thick seams of coal that made up the mesa. I don’t know what I’d expected, maybe a tunnel, like I’d seen in various pictures of mining operations. I stared, slack-jawed and thrilled beyond containment, at those shiny black walls towering above me. And then there was the fire, and the truck with a mounted hose spraying an enormous rooster tail of water on it. Fires sometimes started in the seams, my dad told my astonished young self. They’d burn for years. You couldn’t really fight them so much as contain their spread. They sometimes could manage it with water; sometimes, they’d have to bury it.
I’d never considered that there might be any such thing as a fire that burned year after year, that no number of firetrucks and firemen could defeat. And when I got my hands on that hard lump of coal, and realized this tough shiny stuff was what did the burning, I was amazed. It didn’t really sink in then, but it did later. These were rocks. Rocks that burn.
What moron decided this was a disincentive to naughtiness?
But kids seemed to take that threat seriously. They’d rather have the shiny toys than a shiny lump of coal. I don’t think they were future geologists, or there would have been a considerable uptick in the naughty quotient whenever that threat was made.
Angry parent: “If you don’t stop doing X bad thing, all Santa’s giving you is a lump of coal!”
Future geologist: “Awesome! Two, please!”
My original lump has been replaced by a smaller but no less cherished lump purchased from a wonderful little rock shop down in Cottonwood, AZ. And that little delight has been joined by several bits picked up during rambles along Coal Creek (aptly named), which was my first opportunity to pick up coal in the wild. I love this stuff.
Coal in streambank at Coal Creek near Seattle, Washington
And why am I babbling about coal just now? Partly because I’ve been extremely lax in posting on geological topics lately. Mostly because one of my Twitter friends posted a link to this perfect gift for geologists: coal candy! Which you can make, at home, and use your rock hammer to break, and just seems like the perfect thing for geologists to make and/or receive. I saw that, and thought of Coal Creek and Black Mesa and Evelyn’s geophoto meme, and thus inspiration did strike.
But I’ve saved the best for last. It hasn’t much to do with coal, except it’s on Coal Creek, and it’s just the most awesome orange waterfall I’ve ever had the pleasure of getting up-close and personal with:
Orange Waterfall on Coal Creek
That lovely orange hue is probably courtesy of chemotrophic bacteria, according to a commenter on the original adventure report. It certainly adds a little verve to the scene. And what’s even nicer is that you can get to it by following a stream bed filled with chunks of petrified wood and lots and lots of coal.
And if you’re very naughty, I may venture back out there and collect a lump or two just for you.
e.e. cummings's "Buffalo Bill's," published in The Dial, 1920. Image courtesy Wikipedia
Poem’s been running through my mind since I heard about Hitch. He was outsize to me, like Buffalo Bill. Perhaps someone will put him in a poem like this one. Perhaps, if the Muse is kind, I shall.
What I like about them is that, outsize as they were, legendary as they seemed, they were human. Fully, gloriously, infuriatingly and charmingly human.
