I Can't Complain... But I Will Anyway!

I swear, today was just determined to not be my day.  Woke up out of some weird nightmares that I couldn't shake all day (the kind accompanied by vivid imagery that keeps popping back into your head), tried to run but felt awful, tried to elliptical but the machine was broken, tried to eat a healthy breakfast but the only things that taste decent at hotel breakfasts are fat- and sugar-laden, the breakfast area was packed with vacationing families following the "I don't need to watch my kids, I'm on vacation" method of parenting, etc.

And then there was work!  Got off to a late start, nothing was working out like we intended it to, was trying to make decisions on the fly and on an empty stomach, the weather was brutal, etc.  Just... not my day.  Didn't get back to the hotel until 7, and by the time I'd gotten rehydrated, mentally recovered, showered, talked to Stefano, caught up on my work email and put out other fires at work, it was 9:30 and I just didn't have the energy/motivation/time to go out to dinner. Didn't help that we didn't have lunch until 2:30, and I'd been chugging water and gatorade so I wasn't very hungry.  So I made microwave popcorn for dinner.  And maybe later, I'll have some trail mix.

I guess no one in their right mind goes into civil engineering for the glamour... Well, maybe the structural engineers and construction managers who build skyscrapers.  But that's like the fighter pilots of the military world.  Most soldiers are just guards and soldiers.  Most civil engineers are just grunts doing a dirty, unpleasant, and mostly-thankless job.  I'm especially bitter right now because I have four more week-long trips coming up this summer.  Really? Really?  Even if Stefano ever comes home, we're barely going to have any time to hike or camp.  Argh.

But to end on a positive note and a bit of americana, we are staying across the street from the Flintstones theme park and campground.  I love our country.

Oh, and I passed a British family in our hotel, all five or six of them wearing stereotypical Wyoming/South Dakota cowboy hats, just like this one:

Edit/addition:  I realized I wanted to show the type of hat they were wearing, since the reason it stuck in my mind is that they weren't the typical touristy cowboy hats that people get, like this one is:

The fact that they all had really nice (probably $60-80) hats just really amused me for some reason.

Oh, and I'm really really missing camping right now because the Black Hills look (and smell) like the sparse pine forests that I love to camp in in Colorado.  I couldn't stop just standing around and sniffing the dry piney air this morning.

Driving Across the Prairie

I drove for six hours today.  Probably the longest I've driven in a while, if not ever-- I did have that ridiculous road trip from Chicago to Montreal once, but we swapped drivers a lot.  My colleague (and project manager), Tim, offered to take over, but I was actually having fun most of the time.  It helps that the speed limits were high and it was mostly in Wyoming, where no one seems to care about speed.  Unfortunately it was mostly on two-lane highways and there was kinda a lot of passing required.  Gets nerve-wracking after a while, especially driving a rental with an underpowered engine with no pickup, and the roads are hilly and curvy.

So now I'm in scenic Custer, South Dakota, where I'll be taking a look at another gravel road test section.  Livin' the dream, I tell ya.  At least I have a good job and I'm staying busy!

Ooh, one funny story from the road... We stopped at a rest area in the middle of nowhere, Wyoming, which was obviously not in an area with a) an abundant water supply or b) a sewer system.  Therefore, instead of flush toilets, they had vault toilets (aka latrines).  Let me say that these were the cleanest and freshest smelling latrines I have ever encountered in my life.  Really nothing to complain about.  Well, there was a family with stereotypical Georgia accents (think something out of an antebellum romance movie) where the woman and the daughter (despite the fact that "Mom, I really have to pee" and the nearest town is about 40 miles away) refused to use the toilets.  The girl kept "trying" as in lifting up the lid and screaming "EWWWW" and then they were all bitching nonstop: "why would they do this" and "I can't believe they don't have toilets" and "what is wrong with them??".  Some tourists should stick to the interstates.  And east-coasters need to understand just how EMPTY our part of the country is.

I tell ya though, my stir-crazy feelings during the long drive today are not making me optimistic for my next two trips, which will be driving all over eastern Colorado (AKA Kansas West) for airport inspections.  At least I won't have to drive for those, though CDOT's truck has a terrible suspension so the drive won't be comfortable.

Molly loves to hide under things

Yep, she hangs out under the car when she's in the backyard -- when she's not digging in the mulch for ants or terrorizing the birds by trying to play with them. And yes, there's shade in other parts of the yard, she just loves the shade under the car.

Whole Wheat Tortillas

I'd been meaning to try these for a while, and honestly thought they'd be harder.  The recipe is simple -- basically 2 1/2 cups whole wheat flour, 1/2 cup oil, 1 teaspoon salt, and enough warm water to bring it together (about a half cup).  That amount makes a dozen 8-10 inch tortillas.  I was afraid they would be hard to roll out, but they actually came together really well.  The only problem I had is that it's tricky to find the right temperature on your pan.  Also, I think you have to use cast-iron or enameled cast-iron (I used this, which I just bought yesterday since I had a gift card to use).

Nutrition info:  165 calories, 9.5 grams fat, 18 g carbs, 3 g fiber, 3.3 g protein.

Large-Batch Italian Comfort Food

Three hours.  67 spinach whole wheat ricotta ravioli.  Lasagna noodles with the leftover pasta dough.  Huge batch of homemade marinara with sausage.  All the dishes that go with it.  I'm beat!  Time to walk the dog (she's incredible insecure since she doesn't understand why Stefano isn't home) and hopefully that will help my back (and my dog) relax!

Homeward Bound (sorry about all the parenthetical comments [I went a little crazy with them today])

So to my surprise, everything came together perfectly for my work in Calgary, and I actually get to go home today instead of next Thursday. We must have used up our bad luck and just had good luck the rest of the time, considering how many things went wrong the first day:

•  The project manager missed her flight, I had to handle the kickoff meeting without any maps or preparation
• I tried to send the map to someone else who would be at the meeting to print and bring with but the email didn't go through and Outlook decided not to inform me before I shut down my computer
• There was about an hour wait for customs (every other time I've been through it's been ten minutes)
• They decided I needed a work permit (I've done this same type of work in Calgary twice before without a problem but I guess I caught a real stickler for rules going through customs)
• There was about an hour wait in the immigration line to get my work permit, and I was stuck between two large foreign families with screaming children (by the way, I decided that immigration is just like the DMV, only instead of taking a number you have to wait in line,you don't even know if you brought the right paperwork to get through, and almost everyone else is foreign [note: I'm not saying this because I'm racist-- I really don't care that they're foreign, it's just that most people from other countries have no respect of other people's personal space, which makes me crazy-- that's why the fact that everyone was foreign was bugging me])
• It took close to a half hour to process my work permit, and I kept having to ask the border patrol guy to speak up.  Seriously, after I asked you about ten different times to repeat yourself, wouldn't you realize that you're not speaking loudly enough in the first place.
• I was starving during the whole ordeal since my flight got in around noon and I'd had a small breakfast at 6am.
• I basically grabbed a sandwich at Starbucks and ran to the rental car counter, since it was 2:15 and I had to be at the meeting at 3pm and it's all the way across town.  Thankfully, Enterprise has super employees-- they even handed me a bottle of water as soon as I got there, which was a godsend since I was also really dehydrated after spending all that time in customs and immigration.  Got my car relatively quickly, and they helped me find the quick and traffic-free way across town.

Anyway, the meeting turned out alright, and my colleague got into Calgary at about 6pm, in time to meet the airport authority and the project manager for the prime contractor (we're a subcontractor on this project) for dinner.  She stuck around the next day to help with the inspections, and we flew through most of the airfield.  We ended up losing Thursday to rain (every day while I was planning on being here had about a 60-80% chance of rain) but I got caught up on paperwork and data entry, and got everything ready for the rest of the airport.  We flew through that yesterday, and I got my flight changed to today!

Bummed Out

It's shaping up to be a pretty tough summer work-wise.  Started out with the San Diego trip for the half marathon, which was awesome, but Stefano left for Chicago immediately after that.  I went home for a day and then hopped on a plane to South Dakota for gravel road inspections for a research project.  Just got home yesterday, and I'm flying out tomorrow morning to Calgary to inspect their general aviation airport.  Haven't confirmed it yet, but I'll probably head out again the following week to do some more gravel road inspections in western South Dakota (which will be awesome scenery at least).  After that I get a bit of a breather for the Fourth of July (who knows if anyone will actually be in town to celebrate with me) and then I'm off again the next week to eastern Colorado.  Then a week home, then another Colorado trip.  Then I think that might be it for the summer.  I'm really not trying to complain about this-- in a lot of ways I set up my schedule like this on purpose.  I'm trying to front-load my field work this summer since Stefano is gone anyway and I'll have family visiting sometime in August, but it's just emotionally exhausting!  I'm really grateful we have a friend willing to watch Molly, since I would feel awful boarding her so much.

But what's really bumming me out tonight is that Stefano and I have concert tickets to see one of our all-time favorite bands tonight.  As in, one of the two bands that we listened to and bonded over on our road trip to concrete canoe nationals and we realized that we had a ton in common and he asked me out right after that trip and we lived happily ever after.  I was able to schedule my trips around the concert, but then he had to go to Chicago anyway.  And our only other local friend who's a fan (and who would have been up for going to a concert on a Monday night) also had to go out of town for work.  I could theoretically go on my own, and it's really tempting, but it would mean for a late night (and I need to leave at 6ish tomorrow morning to catch my flight) and it's in a part of town that I'm really not that comfortable being in alone at night.

Bummer.  Just bummer.  That really sums it up pretty well.

But to end on a happy note, I took a walk at lunchtime today and it was absolutely beautiful.  Sunny, breezy, and just shy of 80° (which since it's not humid feels really nice).  I'm really lucky to live here.  And I'm really lucky to have a great job that I love at least 80% of the time.   And I'm really lucky to have a job that sends me cool places like Calgary and the black hills of South Dakota.  But sometimes I just want to sit in my house and live a quiet little life.

Catching my breath!

Well, I'm home for a day and a half before I head out to Calgary.  Got home at about 3 today, and I've already cut the grass, vacuumed, and laundry is about halfway done.  ::pats self on back::

It was a good week overall in South Dakota.  The field work went as well as could be expected, and I even branched out and went to a few local places to eat!  Of course, I got stared at for not being a local, but oh well.

Calgary should be fun.  We're doing the airport pavement management for the first time, which is always kind of fun from a really nerdy standpoint.  Hopefully the weather isn't miserable, though it looks like 40-60% chance of rain every day I'm there.  Sigh.

At least I can escape the smoke!  The huge huge huge Arizona wildfire is spreading smoke all over the front range, so there's this nasty brown haze out there.

Also, home-cooked food is amazing.  I had a chicken, veggie, and brown rice stir fry out of ingredients from the freezer for dinner.  Mmmm.

I feel like this was a very scattered and strange blog entry.  Sorry!

Random Thoughts

1) There is a billboard for a hospital on the way from our hotel to the worksite here in South Dakota which says: "Cancer.  I don't have time for this!" advertising for nearby prostate cancer treatments.  I understand the point, and that there are many cancers nowadays that are fairly well understood and treatable, but this still seems rather callous to people battling life-threatening / untreatable cancers.

2) I swear tic-tacs used to be the "1 1/2 calorie mint".  Bought some today and they're 1.9 calories.  So...  Did they change?  Were their tests wrong before?  Did the government change their rules on how you could round calorie values?  Also, I would not be surprised if I ate the entire box of them tonight.  Oh well.  It was better than many of the alternatives.  After spending all day outside kneeling on a gravel road and taking hundreds of measurements, I knew I needed something candy-like to munch on.  Candy while traveling is a serious weakness of mine.

3) I went to DQ this afternoon and had a mini blizzard since it was an incredibly frustrating / tedious / painful afternoon.  Even a mini blizzard has almost 400 calories.  Hello, Subway for dinner.  I don't mind really... I like Subway.

4)  I flew from Denver to Pierre in a 19-seat plane: two seats across with an aisle, no bathroom, no electronics allowed at any time (silly me, I only had my Kindle so I just had to look out the windows the whole time), and the "door" between us and the cockpit was open half the time so I could see out the front of the plane.  It was pretty awesome.

Oh, and this photo that I found?  Taken at the airport in Grand Junction, Colorado, which I surveyed last summer for work.  I recognized the mesa in the background!  It must be an old picture, a charter, or an unscheduled stop; Great Lakes no longer flies to Grand Junction.

5)  I need a haircut. I'm home for one day between this trip and my next one, and I don't think I'm gonna have time for a haircut.  Go long bangs go!

Apex Park

Stefano and I took Molly on her first hike on Monday.  She did awesome!! About four miles in about two hours, and she even learned to avoid mountain bikes and trail runners.


View Apex Park Memorial Day in a larger map

Not smog for once... Think this was just humidity!