Fandom

Greetings Bloggies.

This post is in response to having met people I consider myself a fan of. Specifically Spider Robinson, author of many books and even more terrible puns and George Hrab, author of 1 book several albums and a similar body of puns. In generally I have not self identified as a FAN. Outside of geography, I have no affinity for sports teams, and like any non fan I only care if the team in my city is winning, the rest of the time I don't even know they are playing. Similarly, movie stars and most famous performers fail to engage my interest.

The people I am fans of have reached me in ways more personal then the players on a sports team or an actor on the big screen. Spider Robinson, has made me laugh, taught me some of the principles of truly horrible puns, I have lost count of all the books of his I have read. I have stopped reading him in recent years, I have had my fill and even when a writer is good I will over time want to move on to new voices. That said his more emotional short stories still linger in my memory and the community that existed in the Callahan's pub series made me want to have some of that for my self.

I only saw Spider briefly, he did a reading and a signing afterwards. I exchanged only a few words, enough to convey my appreciation. This limited dialog is what I expect from a content producer in the traditional media. The other side of the coin is the relation that can exist in new media, those people who have carved out a space for them selves on the internets because the old school distribution and sales methods fail for something as fringe. The best example of that in my life is George Hrab.

Some where along the line I started to listen to podcasts, downloadable, generally audio content, generally free, often amateur. Many of them simply suck. Since at the time I had a boring job that did not always require my full attention I listened to many such shows, this chain eventually lead to the Geologic podcast. Its mix of dry humor, strait up silly skits and random factoids entertained me. This precipitated an exchange of emails that has continued in an off and on trickle over the last few years.

Upon hearing that George was going to be in Vancouver, I ordered my tickets as soon as I knew the site was online. To be fair he was a guest host on another podcast which I have been listening to for roughly the same amount of time, but he was coming to Vancouver non the less. So colour me surprised when, I was recognized in as I spoke introduced myself. Two me an interesting illustration of the way the internet has opened up media.

I conclude this with saying that, within my interests I am as prone to fandom as most though I feel I am a laid back supporter. I am also glad that now that I live in Vancouver that I can indulge my fixations better as many things come to town, because of that I can start checking off personal goals rather then count missed opportunities.

Stuff.

Greetings Bloggies.

Its been a while since I have written. I am back in vancouver. I came back on the 5th. Its good to be back but thats a separate post. This is a post I thought up while at Rabbit lake. Stuff, we all have it especially the people who read blogs.

I would say I am not the most materialistic of folks living in industrialized consumer economy, but I have my share of stuff. What got me thinking as my aged steel toed work boots absorbed water through their partly delaminated soles was that how little of the stuff I own has really brought value or utility to my life. In this case value stemmed from devices that have helped me earn money. I could do a separate post on items of personal or sentimental value.

I'll start with the foundation. Boots. I have two pair of quality boots between the two of them nearly every dollar I have made was spent standing in them or walking in them. Acquired first were the Scarpa hikers, my third pair of proper hiking boots and the first not to fail on a poorly placed seam. They have been resoled once but the resoling left them tighter then they were originally. Many an afternoon or evening was spent tramping across naked metavolcanics in a greenstone belt. That 2.5 billion year old pressure cooked volcanic rock wore those soles out.

Boot number two the work boots. Heavy bricks of hard rubber and leather. Not much for walking but a great boot to stand in. Stand I did, looking at rock in boxes for days on end leads to standing. They had one weakness I did not know about till after I got to the north. It turns out the hard compound rubber in their sole gets piss poor traction on snow or ice, worse then nearly any shoe I have have ever owned. Despite that they have still managed to have a huge number of hours logged in them. I debate resoling them. They might be worth it but that would also be a symbolic admission that I believe I will return to the lines of work that those boots represent, something I am aiming to avoid.

Next up is the multi tool. The least used item on it is the can opener. The knife has most often been used to sharpen wax china markers. I once tried to one of the longer narrow, not knife parts to pry off a hubcap on a truck. The truck was stuck with a flat on Prosperous outside Yellow Knife. I was trying to change the tired and had never seen the arrangement that truck presented to me. There was a plastic hubcap which had on it plastic lug-nuts. In the kit was a second tire wrench sized for the plastic nuts. Never having seen a hubcap that did not just pop off I could not image an arrangement as insane as that. So I did what I thought made sense, try to lever off the cap. I failed and had to beat the tool back into shape to fit it back in the housing.

Of the items that make me money perhaps most iconic is the hand lens. When pressed I will answer that I am a geologist. This is a suitable answer to outsiders as I have not yet attained a standing in the related professional organization. After a rock hammer the hand lens is iconic of geology. The pair, a cheap 10X and a vertigo inducing 30X have often let me identify tiny specks of gold that would have other wise passed me by. The flip side is true, they have also removed false positives from my data collection.

The art to using the 30X one is to focus your eye on the target and then slip the lens between you and it, you will never find what you were looking for if you go at it half assed.

Camp life

Greetings Bloggies.

This institutional life.
I am in an institution. I am sane, well on the average. The people around me seem generally normal but I can't shake the fact that I am in an institution, in this case Cameco's Rabbit Lake mine.

As a mine it has a mix of dangers and red tape. One of the first things I noticed is that almost no one walks any where and there is almost nowhere you can walk. This is a producing mine, an environment I have not worked in before, it also a Uranium mine. Add wolves and bears in the endless wilds around us, a no walking alone policy makes sense. This is not what I am here to say. I do not want to degrees into whining about the things I miss in Vancouver. The first draft of this when there and that paragraph died.

No I am here to try to describe, the character, as seen by a outsider of an institution. I have worked in exploration camps, 20 odd people or less. This camp is larger, but it has one thing overwhelmingly in common. These places are here to get work out of people. Every thing is rules. And that is how I think of an institution, a place with internal rules above and beyond the ones of society, hence no walking.

Out in the world, where people live, not just work and go into bed or the gym for maintenance, there are rules. Societies grow around rules, some rules die a well deserved death other new ones come into play and some stay the same for ages. As a law and generally rule following citizen, I follow the rules that keep me out of trouble and follow my own for there reasons or lack of. What separates institutions out here form the world out there seems to be extra rules.

No walking alone is a good example. Out here, that rule makes sense wolves and bears, haul trucks ( 500 tone), and Uranium all make going for a stroll a poor idea. I know I want to but rules, that and the fear of walking into a hot zone. Other rules, no drugs or alcohol, your here to work, and work safely. We the company want to get our 12 hours out of you and you will damn well play some other time. Also everything happens at a set time. On the other hand things are free. You can eat your fill, get your sweet tooth filled and come back for more later.

Other odd rules include no touques or hats of hoods in the dinning hall.

Signs, clutter the walls in places like this. I don't know what the lowest common denominator is but there is an assumption about it being fairly low, if the toilets have pleas flush after use signs.

Rabbit Lake

Greetings Bloggies.

So, this time I will return to my more positive tone after several whiney posts. It could not be be helped, I was down and not doing the right things for my self so I bitched over the internet, a truly modern past time.

So I am working in the north again. Norther Saskatewan. Things are different here on many levels. I am working for an engineering company not a exploration company. The site is a producing mine. In this case Camico's Rabbit lake, one of this countries oldest continuously producing Uranium mines. Thats right not gold, no the soft pretty metal people dig up to hide in vaults, but the 10th most abundant element in the crust and one of the best energy sources for the future, Uranium.

Though I like the fact that I am working in a support role for a uranium mine, I am glad that my work takes place away from sources of radiation.

The differences between Rabbit lake and exploration jobs, are large, for one thing at the small exploration camps, the geologist were king, the camp existed to make sure our drilling got done and the data came in. Here we are a small subset of a huge operation. This camp can hold up to 700 and might currently hold 300. What the exact number is don't mater, I have been used to camps of 10 to 40. Other things that are different. The job I don't know how to do it yet. I am learning and have a good teacher. I know the core of many of the tasks but not the specifics. It is refreshing to do new work.

What I know of the work is that I will be doing tests on the hydraulic nature of the rock and I have a fancy tool to do it with. The tool has an odd mix of simple tough elements and finer nearly delicate elements. As I said on facebook some times I feel more a plumber then a scientist, but tools get data and without data, there is no science.

The following sentences were written the day after the bulk of the post.

It should be said, after today that there is still no shortage of drudgery as part of the job. Today I was tired and hand to log my first hole for engineering purposes. It was fairly smooth, I need to pick up the pace and fight the strain that comes from too much of the same thing.

Somethings are the same. The food is industrial bland. Engineered to not offend any one and to provide calorie rich fair to those who need it and those who do.

The question I still can't answer is can I do $30,000 or hours of work of this and feel satisfied and have the life I want. Though I am slated to be here for three weeks I don't know when or what I might get called on to do again, if any thing. How often and for how long will I have to be away. It is a question of both. Three weeks is a sane amount of time away.

So I am unresolved. I still think that gaining work closer to the city I live in and coming home at night are my long term goals. The long term keeps getting interrupted by the short term demands of money. That stuff is like crack, every time you start to run low you or you bills just keep demanding more.

Rabbit Lake

Greetings Bloggies.

So, this time I will return to my more positive tone after several whiney posts. It could not be be helped, I was down and not doing the right things for my self so I bitched over the internet, a truly modern past time.

So I am working in the north again. Norther Saskatewan. Things are different here on many levels. I am working for an engineering company not a exploration company. The site is a producing mine. In this case Camico's Rabbit lake, one of this countries oldest continuously producing Uranium mines. Thats right not gold, no the soft pretty metal people dig up to hide in vaults, but the 10th most abundant element in the crust and one of the best energy sources for the future, Uranium.

Though I like the fact that I am working in a support role for a uranium mine, I am glad that my work takes place away from sources of radiation.

The differences between Rabbit lake and exploration jobs, are large, for one thing at the small exploration camps, the geologist were king, the camp existed to make sure our drilling got done and the data came in. Here we are a small subset of a huge operation. This camp can hold up to 700 and might currently hold 300. What the exact number is don't mater, I have been used to camps of 10 to 40. Other things that are different. The job I don't know how to do it yet. I am learning and have a good teacher. I know the core of many of the tasks but not the specifics. It is refreshing to do new work.

What I know of the work is that I will be doing tests on the hydraulic nature of the rock and I have a fancy tool to do it with. The tool has an odd mix of simple tough elements and finer nearly delicate elements. As I said on facebook some times I feel more a plumber then a scientist, but tools get data and without data, there is no science.

The following sentences were written the day after the bulk of the post.

It should be said, after today that there is still no shortage of drudgery as part of the job. Today I was tired and hand to log my first hole for engineering purposes. It was fairly smooth, I need to pick up the pace and fight the strain that comes from too much of the same thing.

Somethings are the same. The food is industrial bland. Engineered to not offend any one and to provide calorie rich fair to those who need it and those who do.

The question I still can't answer is can I do $30,000 or hours of work of this and feel satisfied and have the life I want. Though I am slated to be here for three weeks I don't know when or what I might get called on to do again, if any thing. How often and for how long will I have to be away. It is a question of both. Three weeks is a sane amount of time away.

So I am unresolved. I still think that gaining work closer to the city I live in and coming home at night are my long term goals. The long term keeps getting interrupted by the short term demands of money. That stuff is like crack, every time you start to run low you or you bills just keep demanding more.

September

Greetings Bloggies and other readers.

Well its time for me to be honest with my self. September was a wasted month. Effectively nothing forwarding my longer term goals was accomplished. I can not blame external forces. These failures were all mine. A cold that lasted much longer then I would like, gave me the excuse to slack off for part of the month. Minecraft, a game wedged it self in my weak mind and sucked up even more time (Joe, I admit it its not minecraft's fault).

I made other foolish choices. A set of decisions at the end of august or start of september put two opportunities in conflict. One was a reasonably likely geology gig in the Yukon, the other an interview with a instrument company. I admit that I want to step away from exploration geology as a career, but a 2 to 3 week job, and a chance to see the Yukon is a foolish thing to skip out on. I feel that I botched the interview, its nearly two weeks and not a peep back. The conflict was between the opportunities was of my own creation, I could have arranged the interview later, by the time I started wrangling the people to get me that interview I knew the time line of Yukon job and could have done things differently.

The interview was approached with false confidence and being under prepared, add to that I was in the tail end of the cold and life was not at its best. I did some research prior but still got stonewalled at some basic questions. One question that got me was about where I saw my self in N number of years. It was pointed out to me that I should have had a vision as to where I was going after BCIT, with the diploma form there. The truth which is I wanted an office job, to get away form the periodic exile that geology can cause so I that I could have a more balanced life, would not have fit the expectations. With greater knowledge of the prospects there it became possible to question if the opportunity was a good fit. There is uncertainty about weather my current thinking that role fit. Either I gained enough knowledge to conclude that the role was not right for me because the technical and creative aspects were above me, or I have retrofitted those thoughts on to it because I have not heard back.

When I step away from my attempts at a professional life, September was good month. By and large I ate well. I cooked some new things. I have gone out to pubs, I have started to establish my self as a regular in one or two places and have a greater sense of community. I got someones phone number but forgot to call her because well I realized I felt no chemistry, I can only throttle back my geek so for. Bike rides, kayak adventures, walks and other activities killed some of the time, at least I don't feel as much like the dough boy. As a Dough boy, the best loaf of bread to come out of my kitchen was created last week.

From the inside of my head things were up and down and backwards. The backwards was the worst. The earlier half of the month, confirmation bias a side, saw me dreaming about my ex girlfriend, some of those thoughts have leaked into waking. If living in Vancouver means one thing in my life its moving forward and the motivation to chase away that past from the front of my mind is a good starting point for getting out the funk I drifted into. To be fair there is a place for those memories and emotions just not in quantity or persistently.

Thats all for now.

In the past this would have ended up in a bound note book in an illegible scribble.

More gripes

Greetings Bloggies.

I have been delaying writing this for some time. But for some time stress has been building. I suppose its normal. I am not busy enough, nor am I getting my head in gear enough to really fix it. The cumulative effect of this is I find me self more bored and lonely then I would like. The key symptom is tension in my jaw, to the point of nearly being painful.

As I had said on facebook, the trouble with the current period of my life is that it got started with such a completely emotional decision that following up on that with rational actions leaves me second guessing things. On July 20th , when I left the Elkhart job, I was certain of what I did not want to do. The life style desired was clear in my mind the means to support that less so.

A flurry of activity to get settled kept my mind occupied for some time. But as time passed and the obvious targets for jobs came back with negative news my mood and motivation weakened. I always have this irritating thought, running through my head when ever I am looking for work. I am educated I have a couple peaces of paper to prove that I passed through some programs, but I don't really know what I can do. I don't have an clear idea of what jobs I am qualified for. Often enough I wonder if I could find a form of happy working at a coffee shop with people hipper then I. I feel that would not really work.

Right now my best prospects will take me out of town if they pan out. On a short term basis. I am not sure how I feel about that all in all. Certainly, the money will solve the problems it can solve. I just wonder how far I can go on that path. Ultimately I want to have a job in town. In the end I will take what I can get and make the best of it. Lacking a clear passion to steer me that is just how I am going to have to stumble through life.