Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in Brendan's LiveJournal:

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Monday, March 10th, 2008
10:47 pm	for Laagar Did you ever see the episode of Married With Children that features a guest appearance by Anthrax? It's pretty funny. http://metalinquisition.blogspot.com/2008/03/my-dinner-with-anthrax.html Current Music: Terrorizer "Corporation Pull In" (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Friday, March 7th, 2008
12:54 pm	While driving through South Carolina a few days ago I stopped at a gas station to get some pop and a candy. When I was walking up to the door I saw a girl, who looked like she was about 18, coming out of the store wearing this t-shirt: What was notable about her was that, notwithstanding what her shirt said, she looked terrified. I have been trying to figure out why she would look like that when I walked into the store and the only thing that I can think of was that she must have been freaked out by all the Confederate flag knickknacks for sale in there. The poor girl had probably never seen so many Confederate flags in her life. Current Music: scream - mardi gras (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, May 8th, 2007
5:54 pm	all gnatural It's that special time of year here in Illinois, when a certain foul species called the buffalo gnat emerges from wherever they come from in order to fulfill their destiny. For some of them, this destiny involves biting any exposed skin on any mammal they should encounter, which is often me. Others seem to be seeking Gnat Nirvana, which is evidently located somewhere within my mouth, nose or eye sockets, to judge from the enthusiasm with which the gnats attack these orifices. These aren't normal gnats, which can be really, really annoying but don't really cause any problems. No, these ones bite and it can cause a nasty allergic reaction (though, thankfully, I seem to not suffer from that). They also are not repelled by Deet at all. Consequently, the only way to deal with them is to wear a mosquito net, and then cover every inch of skin you have. This can be pretty uncomfortable on days like today when it's above 80 degrees Fahrenheit. For some reason, these damned things are out in record numbers this spring. Fortunately, they'll be gone in a couple weeks. Unfortunately, by then the mosquitos will be out. And then horseflies will make an appearance. Plus deerflies, which aren't as bad as horseflies, but when you get by them enough times it ceases to matter. There will also be blackflies, which also suck. And chiggers; I don't even know what "chigger" is, but they don't sound fun. The ticks, of course, are already out, but there will be many more of them in the coming weeks. And let's not forget that there will be a whole bunch of big spiders, which hardly ever actually do anything to people, but are still really scary. Yes, working outside is awesome. (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, April 3rd, 2007
8:36 pm	i really should post to this thing more Prosaic news: I am working in Illinois again, back in Jacksonville. Jacksonville is still boring, but work currently is. This is because we are working in picturesque Pike County, which is located on the western edge of Illinois, between the Mississippi and Illinois Rivers but a bit north of their actual confluence. This area was prime real estate in prehistoric times, and you can't walk more than a few hundred meters without finding some kind of archaeological site. It's fun. Exciting(!) news: yesterday I looked up and in the distance saw a whole bunch of really big white birds circling around trying to gain altitude. I couldn't tell what they were, so I got out my binoculars. They were white with black wingtips, and had big heads that they hunched back towards their bodies as they flew, and they had short legs. It took me a while before I realized that it was a flock of migrating pelicans. It was so awesome! After they managed to gain enough altitude, they formed up into a V and flew north. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, February 18th, 2007
8:26 pm	more horrors Remember a couple weeks ago when I described my trip to Wichita in a car without a working heater? That was awful. So awful that I wish to forget it. That said, that trip pales in comparison to what I went through last week. Frankly, just thinking about it makes not want to leave the house. It was Sunday evening at our dirty motel in Ponca City. We had finished the fifth day of a ten-day session. I still hadn't gotten the car fixed, because I was concerned that we might have had to move to another town at short notice and I didn't want to have my car sitting around at the garage if that happened But, that night we were informed that the evil, evil oil company overlords were (more than likely) shutting down us archaeologists. This meant that we were all screwed, but especially me and Becca, a nice girl from western New York who had flown out on short notice to work on this project. I offered to drive Becca home, though I warned her that the trip would totally suck and she accepted my offer. So the next day we were informed that we were definitely shut down, but that me and Becca could stay another day if that would help us. I was excited, because I was hoping I could get the heater fixed that day so that we could have a pleasant trip on the morrow. Unfortunately, it soon became clear that every mechanic in town had too much of a backlog to fix the car that day, or the next day either. So then I cursed a lot. Anyway, the next three days were really awful. Going without heat was uncomfortable in Oklahoma, but as we made our way farther north it became steadily more miserable. Despite the hardships, Becca proved to be an excellent traveling companion and it was really a good thing for me that she came along. Trouble was, that after I dropped her off at her folks' house I still had another day's journey just to travel the width of New York. Still, the trip did allow me to visit Joplin, Missouri, where I got to hang out with the Sluggette known as "Weatherwax" for a while. That was fun, even if it was a little awkward, like it usually is when you meet someone offline that you've gotten to know online. So that was one highlight of the trip. Other highlights largely revolved around being indoors and drinking hot chocolate. Anyway, I am now at home. I am bringing my car to the garage tomorrow, where it will remain until it has a working heater again. Eventually this all will seem like a really bad dream. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, February 7th, 2007
5:19 pm	sepia world Since I last posted, I have attended an orientation and training session, and then been chosen to start working on a crew in Oklahoma. So I had to leave the nice hotel in the thriving and thoroughly modern city of Wichita and and check into a gross motel in the gross town that is Poncas City. It was dark when I drove into Kansas, so I didn't get a good chance to look at the landscape, though it seemed nice enough from the hotel. Yesterday I got to drive Ponca City during the late afternoon. By the time I had crossed the state line, I was wondering why everything looked so dingy. The entire landscape seemed rendered in brown, and even things that were not brown seemed muted somehow. I thought it might just be a trick of the light of the setting sun, but then I looked at the sun, and it really wasn't that low in the sky yet. And really, when I got up this morning, it looked the same. It's really kind of unsettling. Anyway, I'll evidently be in this dirty zoning disaster (seriously, if Ponca City actually has a zoning code I'll be surprised, but if they do, then everyone who was responsible for drafting and enforcing did a horrible job at it and should be flogged) until next week. Let's see how long it takes me to get used to actually do work again. I am sore and tired all out of proportion to what I actually did today. (Comment on this)
Sunday, February 4th, 2007
9:50 pm	horror of horrors I am in Wichita now, but the trip here was absolutely harrowing I was nervous about the trip because I knew my car was leaking coolant somewhere. I hadn't gotten far from Jacksonville when the coolant started seeping out of the heat vents and condensing on the inside of the windshield and windows. I had to rub the windshield with a t-shirt every few minutes just so I could see out of it. I ended up stopping at a garage in Hannibal, MO. After they had been poking at my car for a while they told me that they had figured out what the problem was. They could replace the offending part, but it would cost 400-something dollars and take them 6.4 hours to complete the repair. Or--they could could bypass the problem so the car could run, but then it wouldn't have any heat. If this were an episode of Firefly, this is where Wash or somebody would say "We're humped!" Total Hobson's choice. I ended up going without heat because I my new employer had already made reservations for me in Wichita. If I had waited in Hannibal while they fixed it, I might have had to pay for a hotel room there. Or not been able to make it to Wichita that night because I was too sleepy. It was a miserable, miserable trip without heat. I had to stop a few times just to drink some hot chocolate and wait for my feet to thaw. After I made it to Kansas there was just enough snow for some of the dirty slush on the road to make it onto my windshield, where it eventually froze. For a while I could barely see out of it and I'm lucky I was able to stay on the road. Eventually, I had to pull over and just scrape that crap off. I am very lucky that I was able to make it to Wichita alive and unmaimed. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, February 2nd, 2007
10:03 pm	I hope you all had a lovely Groundhog Day. I got to spend mine outdoors on a day that was so cold and miserable that even my rugged constitution was tested. But, I found a point! Or at least the lower two-thirds of one. It was totally rad and made me temporarily forget the incipient frostbite in my fingers and toes. At least I won't have to deal with that anymore, because I am fleeing this popsicle stand for the balmy tropics of Kansas. Kansas is balmy and tropical right? Please tell me it is. Tomorrow is a special day. What am I doing with it? I'm going to Wichita. Kind of like in that one White Stripes song. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, January 30th, 2007
7:16 pm	brendan's tour of flat states to possibly continue? Well, maybe. Uncertainty rules in CRM. I never know what is going to happen. Days like today--which is to say days in which the ground is frozen solid and the wind chill is below zero--aren't good days for archaeology. Getting paid even though I didn't do any so-called "work" is pretty cool from my perspective, but it makes little sense from an economic standpoint. So I'm not sure if the client intends to keep us out here much longer. Luckily, I have a contingency plan, albeit not a very good one. I had previously applied for a job, similar to my current one, but in Kansas and Oklahoma. I sent in this application a while ago, then forgot about it until I received an email last week that said thanks but no thanks. Then they called up this afternoon to ask if I was still interested. So I guess I'm going to go do that starting next week, because they're offering another dollar per hour and seem like they can guarantee work for longer. I'm starting to think that this is an excellent career for people who want to want to see America(!), but are really cheap and don't want to make long-term plans. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, January 23rd, 2007
10:26 pm	1. The other I went and read a whole lot of my old Livejournal entries. Any of you ever do that? I'm not talking about reading my two-year-old entries, I'm talking about your own. My old entries tended to alternate between making me laugh and making me totally cringe. 2. It is snowing some more here in Not That Jacksonville. This is exciting, because, though I neglected to mention this in my previous post, I actually receive a full day's wages even on days where the weather sucks and we can't work. There's been too much snow on the ground the past couple of days, but tonight's storm ought to keep us from heading out to the field for another day or two. I may not have to do anything that is immediately recognizable as "work" this week. 3. I should have mentioned this a while ago, but under to the effects of intense peer pressure I finally acquiesced to getting a Myspace page. Now you may think that Myspace is lame... and you'd be right. But, my page is not like other people's because mine has a picture of me shoving a Bible down my pants. Also, lots of vulgarity, but that is mostly my friend Derek's fault. Except for that WASP song, that's mine. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, January 21st, 2007
2:03 am	the present and future I like how Livejournal made it so you can type in the location your posts are coming from. This is convenient for me, because my location often changes fairly quickly and I'd get behind trying to keep my profile up to date. Currently, I'm working in Jacksonville, Illinois, which is not a very exciting place, but then again most places aren't. However, if you move around frequently enough you can experience what the is to do and see in many towns, then move on when the initial feelings of novelty have faded. I am starting to weary of this particular podunk town, but I believe I'll be here for another week at least. For the moment, it will be interesting to see how the locals deal with the snow we're getting right at this moment. I'm not sure that this city even has a snowplow. I am not sure how long I'll be able to stand to be on this project. The pay is good, but a lot of that is because my employers realize that they have to give a little extra if they want people to do this stuff during the middle of winter. Once the weather gets better, the financial incentives will go away. And then I will probably start to get antsy, because there are things about Illinois which I really do not like. It is not just because the landscape is flat and boring; it is also because I see way too many Honeylocust trees. If you are a masochist or if you think that your spirit animal is a shrike, these plants are pretty exciting. If not, then you are screwed. Damn near every little ravine and woodlot is chock full of these baleful plants, which, I fear, have evil designs upon my corneas. I would love get away from this ungodly tree. One thought: the company that I was working at during last November and December is evidently going to be doing some Phase III work in the Southern Tier. I guess that they are going to be pulling a ridiculous amount of hours per week on that, but doing Phase IIIs would be nice. I could certainly go for excavating an actual site, as opposed to just poking holes in the landscape. If that doesn't happen, then I'll see what's available and who will hire me. Hopefully, I'll get out of the Midwest, because there's so much of the United States that I have never seen and would love to experience, and I feel like I've gotten my fill of this part of the country. (Comment on this)
Thursday, January 18th, 2007
7:02 pm	my sordid past dotdorsner just posted this thing, which is somebody trying to put together a comprehensive history of a message board that I used to post to frequently and even moderated for a while. Heck, at times the Sluggy boards were my social life. During the spring semester of my freshman year at Geneseo, I would go days at a time without talking to anybody in person, but I sure had a lot of fun posting in the WGARS forum. During their heyday, the Sluggy boards seemed to be far more interesting than your standard message boards, the ones where people talk about Star Wars and Dungeons and Dragons and other stuff you can discuss anywhere. Instead, there might be a rousing discussion wherein someone would cite Kierkegaard and others were expected to know who the hell Kierkegaard was. Or there might be a thread full of terrible (meaning awesome) puns. The level of discourse was high, the jokes were funny and everyone was expected to be (and usually was) polite. Many of my friends, especially on Livejournal, came from the Sluggy boards. I even met a few of them in person, and they were great fun. But, things change. Many of the people who made the forums fun left because of boredom, an increased work load or incipient insanity. Other people replaced them who were OK people, all in all, but just slightly lame. The Star Wars threads slowly replaced the Kierkegaard threads and the games that were truly side-splittingly funny the first time were repeated constantly until they stopped being funny at all. By this time I had friends I could hang out with in real life, and my interest in the Sluggy boards waned until I wasn't even logging on anymore. This little personal history oversimplifies things, but it's true in the macro sense. While I'm certainly not the same person that I was back when all this stuff was going on, it's still fun the reminisce. That said, I'm barely even mentioned in that history thread. Come on man, I did some cool stuff while I was there. I started the original "fake mod-edits" thread, remember? That was hysterical. And the time that I set up a dating game for FTM? Never mind the irony of me finding a date for someone else, that was an awesome idea. It was a fun time, and unlike other dating games it was not at all degrading. (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, January 15th, 2007
1:47 am	what is it with south dakotans and pheasants? So I got a quarter back as change a few days ago, and was surprised to see this: At first I was confused, but then I figured out that I was looking at official the South Dakota quarter. OK, neat. But what the hell is that thing soaring above Messrs Washington, Jefferson, Roosevelt and Lincoln? It's not eagle or any bird of prey or anything like that. In fact, it looks more like a pheasant. But they wouldn't put a pheasant on their quarter, would they? Actually, they did. But why? South Dakota's governor says this about the design: "To us, this isn’t just money; it’s a lasting image of South Dakota. This South Dakota quarter symbolizes our passion and our beliefs, which will not only circulate in our pockets, but in our hearts for years to come." It is curious to me that this pheasant is used to represent anything special about South Dakota, since this is a bird that was introduced to America so that hunters would be able to shoot them. You may or may not think that this was a worthy goal, but it was not a light undertaking. Captive-bred pheasants are extremely stupid birds that tend to die quickly in the wild, so a whole lot of them would have to be released so that a few might live long enough to reproduce and produce potentially savvier offspring. It's also worth noting that it wasn't like there weren't already some small, vaguely chicken-like birds around for the people of South Dakota to shoot. Majestic, native birds like the greater prairie-chicken. The greater prairie-chicken: a domestic product having a hard time competing with Asian imports So anyway, I realize that probably nobody else finds this interesting, but I just thought it was curious that South Dakotans would choose a something foreign-made to represent their fair state. (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, December 20th, 2006
7:05 pm	screw you disney Does anyone else wonder why Disney made a special package for Pirates of the Carribean One and Two on DVD? I mean, there's going to be another movie, right? So basically they are just putting this out there in hopes that people will be distracted by the shiny DVD package and buy it, and then buy one for all three movies in another year or two? Greedy bastards. It stuff like this that make me wish that the majority of Disney executives would be gutted by javelinas. Not content with the money they make from their occasional good movies--movies that end up being decent despite the efforts of the studio, not because of it--the have to crank out execrable sequels to every halfway successful movie they put out. These slapped-together movies are always only a poor reflection of the original, devoid of the care that made the original good. Their animated direct-to-DVD sequels are always made on the cheap, with half-assed animation and imitators instead of the original voice actors. And the second Pirates movie was one of the worst movies I have ever seen, and this is coming from someone who watches terrible movies for fun. I refuse to believe that the second Pirates script was not the fan fiction of a fourteen year girl (probably named Britany--her parents wanted her to be unique so they didn't spell her name correctly!) who has a crush on Johnny Depp, and had just read something written by Lovecraft and just loved it, and thought it would be a great idea to put these two things together. Also: this hypothetical Britany is really not that good of a writer, even for a fourteen year old in love with Johnny Depp. Oh well, I suppose that there will be another Pirates movie coming out eventually. Hopefully, Britany didn't write this one as well. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, December 7th, 2006
8:58 pm	inane cynical rambling Wow, I never meant to go this long without updating this thing, but I wasn't really feeling like I had to go a tell everybody about my (less than) exciting life and career. Archaeology, of course, is really, really fun. Except when it isn't, like when you're trying to dig holes in a stupid field where the landforms have obviously been smushed and rearranged by a bulldozer and there are different soil colors and textures in every third hole and you have identify them and force that crappy, bulldozed dirt through a screen. Meanwhile, this entire field is simply thick with the kind of vegetation that thrives in disturbed areas, which is to say briars. Also, the temperature is below freezing because it is December in Michigan. Oh, yes, Michigan. Last time I updated this it was Illinois, but now it's Michigan. Midwestern craziness! So anyway, the point here is that being a field tech isn't always all that awesome. Keep that in mind while I describe I job listing that I saw on the internet. This was for work in Ohio, Indiana and Kentucky in the next few months. The starting pay was $10 an hour, and you had to pass a drug test. Now, archaeologically, Ohio is a really cool place, but I can think of a whole bunch of other places where I would rather spend the winter working outside. $10 an hour is not great, especially for someone who (presumably) has a degree. And having to submit to a drug test is, like, a total violation of your civil rights, man (not to mention that the percentage of archaeologists that can pass a drug test is significantly lower than the population at large). So what kind of response do you think that this posting got? They got buried under an avalanche of respondents. My friend says that there are just too many field techs. The surplus of labor keeps wages low and means that companies can do things like make their (mostly temporary) employees do things like work 10-hour days during December, when there may or may not actually be ten hours of daylight, or work in a place nationally reknown as a destination for trophy hunters on the first day of whitetail deer season. The former is the case in a job listing I saw posted this week, the latter was what the company I left was planning to make its employees do. At any given time, there is more labor available than work, and a lot of it is always in the form of kids just out of school, like me. I large proportion of these people will leave archaeology when they find out that they are far more likely to look down and find more ticks crawling on their pants than they ever thought they'd see in their lifetime than they are to find a Folsom point. More replacements then arrive in the form of that year's graduating class. All that said, I'd rather do this job than work in an office. In an office, you don't get to see migrating swans fly overhead, like I did the other day. (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, September 11th, 2006
9:16 pm	license to Ill One of the exciting things about my job is that I get to travel to all sorts of places that I otherwise would not have an opportunity to visit. The downside to this is that sometimes I end up in places like Decatur, Illinois, where I am now. We are surveying in an area east of here where every available plot of land is either a cornfield or a soybean field. Trees are few and far between, the land is perfectly flat, and the roads are all perfectly straight and arranged in a grid. It's like a big chessboard. My job consists of wandering through cornfields while staring at the ground looking for artifacts. It gets to be a surreal experience, because I can hear the other people around me, but I can barely see them. Today I stopped for a minute because I thought I might have found a flake. While I was contemplating it, everyone else got ahead of me, so briefly I was all alone. It can get pretty scary, even if you aren't claustrophobic. We are finding sites with regularity, but we are also finding a whole lot of uncomfortably large spiders. (Comment on this)
Monday, July 24th, 2006
11:00 pm	i've been having entirely too much fun... And that's the main reason why I haven't been updating this thing. When I was back at Geneseo, some of my fellow students were trying to get me to go to their field school out in Ohio. "C'mon, it'll be so much fun," they said. But I took notice of my rather precarious financial situation and instead signed up to spend a few months in Wisconsin. And this turned out to be a really great decision, because I ended up having tremendous amounts of fun in WI, and making a whole bunch of new friends, while get a paid a fair amount of money [Geneseo peeps: we're still cool, right?]. Anyway, this awesome project is apparently going to be coming to an end on Friday. However, there is another project with the same company that will be starting in mid-August and continuing for several more months. Many of the fine folks on this crew will be involved with that. It'll be a ton of fun, despite the fact that this project will be taking place in Illinois (yuck) and therefore will consist largely of stumbling through cornfields (lame). Anyway, it appears as if I may have some time off between the two projects. If so, then I'll be driving back to New York to hang out at home. Along the way though, I'll need to stop at Geneseo in order to take care of some stuff in order that they will cease holding my diploma hostage. Then I'll head home to deal with whatever I need to do there. Would anyone want to hang out when and if I end up going home? (Comment on this)
Monday, May 29th, 2006
6:11 pm	Brendan visits the highest point in Wisconsin and laughs Lots of stuff has taken place since I last updated this, but very little of it is exciting. In Superior, me and the rest of my little cadre spent more than three days attempting to dig and screen a heavily disturbed field that consisting almost entirely of nasty, unyielding red clay. We finished early on Thursday and then had to drive way the hell back to a town in central Wisconsin called Medford. This is an extremely boring and creepy little town. We did our thing on Friday, and then most everybody split town for the holiday. I was stuck in Medford, however, until today. The boringness and creepiness was made much worse by the fact that I could not get on the internet. But, on Saturday I was looking at my road map, trying vainly to see something interesting to do, when I noticed that the highest point in Wisconsin was within half an hour's drive. So, I went there; this peak is called "Timms Hill" and it's just a big hill. It's only 1,952 above see level, which is about 40% of the height of some of the peaks in the Catskills that I've been up. And those are nothing. I never felt like much of a rugged mountain man until I went to the Midwest. In light of this, I think that it's hilarious that Wisconsin native sometimes refer to Illinoisians by the derogatory term "flatlanders". This is very much a case of the raven calling the crow black. It's kinder than the other word for people from Illinois: FIBs. This is an acronym for F@*$ing Illinois Bastards. Wisconsinites resent the vast hordes of Chicagoans that travel to northern Wisconsin for recreational purposes. I'm just glad that New Yorkers aren't the bad guys for once. On both Saturday and Sunday nights me and another crew member, Derek (we get along good because the insane understand one another), tried to go bowling, but were rebuffed both times. On Saturday, the entire establishment had been rented out for a high school graduation party. On Sunday, we got a late start because I was watching my Buffalo Sabres lose in overtime after they held a two-goal lead in the second period. By then it was after 9:30, and we arrived at the bowling alley to find out it was closed. Then I went out to try to find something to eat, because I hadn't had time to get any food during the hockey game, and found out that nothing was open. Come on Medford, I know it's 10:00 on a Sunday, but it's not a real Sunday. Tomorrow's Memorial Day! People don't have to work. Anyway, I am now lodging in Ladysmith. My proposed motto for Ladysmith is "We may be just another boring town that caters to tourists, but at least we have a funny name." This place fancies itself a city, even though it has fewer than 4,000 residents and about two-thirds of the businesses on its main street are gas stations. This motel is one of those faux rustic places you find in tourist areas, complete with stuffed dead animals in the wall. The whole effect of the motel and the town is rather similar to what you would find in the Adirondacks, minus the mountains of course. (Comment on this)
Sunday, May 21st, 2006
7:50 pm	i feel so superior I have now been shipped off to the northwestern corner of Wisconsin. I am in Superior, which is located on the shore of a lake whose name that you can probably guess. I'm getting a tour of this whole crazy state. And make no mistake, Wisconsin is crazy. How crazy, you ask? So crazy that they have entire radio stations devoted to polka music. Seriously, I listened to it on the way up. I got bored on the way up, and turned from the beaten path three times. The first time I ended up at a small lake (this isn't hard to do in this state; there are lakes everywhere) where I got out to take a walk. The second time I ended up driving through an Indian reservation. The third time I ended up getting lost in a maze of awful logging roads. After that I stuck to well-marked roads until I reached Superior, which is an extremely manly town with lots of heavy industry in the form of factories with tall smokestacks and docks with lots of cranes. Duluth, Minnesota, is right across the lake, which is narrow enough at this end that they have a bridge that connects these two cities. I'll be here for a few days, before heading back south. Hopefully I won't have to dig downwind of any of the smelly factories. (Comment on this)
Wednesday, May 17th, 2006
5:43 pm	greetings from Stevens Point Hi everybody. I am at a motel in lovely Stevens Point, Wisconsin. On Sunday I packed up all my stuff and drove down to my grandma's house in Corning. I left a bunch of my stuff there, and on Monday I began the long trip out to Wisconsin. It was awful. It rained all day Monday (of course). It was raining when I left Corning at noon. It was raining when I stopped for gas in what quadrophenic86 would consider the coolest town in Chautauqua county: Sherman. It was raining when I hit Cleveland at rush hour--stupid me for forgetting that it takes five hours to drive to Cleveland from Corning. Heck, it was still raining when I got off the interstate somewhere near Bristol, Indiana at around ten. I was really tired by that point, and I had to laugh at the recycled town names at that particular exit: Bristol and Goshen. There is also a Bristol and a Goshen in both New York and Connecticut. After getting off, I turned north and ended up in Michigan after a couple of miles. After I managed to go back into Indiana, crashed at a motel in Elkhart, which is a pretty funny name for a city. Yesterday I got up and continued my journey. It was only a bit drizzly, which was a major improvement over the day before. It was also seriously foggy in Indiana. I had decided by then that Indiana was a really boring state, but I was really awed by Gary. Gary is dominated by enormous steel mills, and when I got there it seemed like the smoke that they were producing was what had made the entire northern part of the state foggy. It was probably the most starkly industrial landscape that I had ever seen. I mean, I've seen industrial-type places before, but not for miles and miles like in Gary. The stores and residences there almost seemed like an afterthought. Unfortunately, after that I had to drive through Chicago, and that totally sucked. First there was all sorts of construction and traffic was moving really slow, then things opened up so it became just a terrifying urban freeway. Also, every other vehicle on the road seemed to be a tractor-trailer. Chicago must be the tractor-trailer capital of the world. After making it through Chicago proper, shaken but still standing, I was really looking to leave Illinois behind me. Illinois, however, does not take kindly to people trying to flee it, so it constricts its interstates with incessant construction and frequent stops for toll booths. By now I had grown so peeved at this state that I was determined not to stop and eat lunch with it. I held out until I reached the Wisconsin border and stopped at a Wendy's just over the state line in Beloit. I ended up reaching Stevens Point around 4. My reservation was actually made to someone named Brenda, so me and the girl behind the desk had a good laugh at that. This is a pretty nice hotel, and it has internet access, as you can see. It's just not very fast, or at least it isn't when I'm in my room. Stevens Point really is a very pleasant town, probably because there's a college in it: Wisconsin-Stevens Point. There is also a town nearby that's called Plover, whichI think is a delightful name. The project I'm working on is a pretty big one; there must be two dozen people working on it. It's a big oil pipeline that this Canadian company is building clear across the state. Our job to take care of any archaeological sites that might exist along the right-of-way. This morning we had a meeting where we filled out a bunch of papers, then another one where a Canadian guy from the pipeline company showed us a safety video. This was pretty pointless, considering that what we're doing is certainly not dangerous. When the actual pipeline is put in place, then it will become dangerous. The pipeline company is also making us wear hardhats and orange vests out in the field, as per company regulations. I'm not sure why I have to follow company policy when I'm actually a temporary worker for a subcontractor of a subcontractor of the pipeline company, but that's how it goes. We got to go out to the field after lunch. Because this is a pipeline, we're spread all over the map, digging in likely areas. The crew I was part of got to go to a town called Wisconsin Rapids, which has a paper mill and consequently smells awful. It's going to take a bit of getting used to for this project, because they are making us use hand screens. These are screens with a couple of handles and no legs, so you have to hold it up as you shake it. So far, I hate them. Given time, I may warm up to them or grow to hate them even more. Our work was interrupted today by scattered thunderstorms. In other news, I cut my finger open in my trowel. At least now I know that I put a real good edge that thing. That bastard file that my dad gave me as part of my graduation gift has a downside, I guess. (2 Comments |Comment on this)