I'm back home, in case it's not apparent

but i like to post random things here, like this:

Millions of cats (and dogs) are killed in animal shelters every year because there simply aren't enough good homes for them. Please do your part to help end animal homelessness by refusing to buy animals from pet stores and breeders. And always spay and neuter your animal companions. If you haven't already done so, please sign PETA's pledge to end animal homelessness today!

Battlestar Galactica's Tricia Helfer's
'Angel for Animals' PETA Ad

If you contribute to animal cruelty, Six will smash your head into a wall!

Last project

REally really quick post here.

Watching Phantom Menace, while writing our final report that's due at 6:00 pm today.

At 7:00, we're all being treated at a local diner called Sparky's Garage for dinner!!

We leave Montana tomorrow after turning in our keys to the dorm, any time from 8:00 to 9:00 am, whenever we can all get breakfasted and packed up and checked out of the dorms.
The schedule is to be home at 2pm on sunday!!!!!

The tornado alarm is going off. It's actually not for a tornado or anything, it goes off when they call the volunteer fire department to respond to accidents (Mary, the owner of Rookie's, the bar next door, told us all about it, when I was worried about a tornado the first time we heard it)

Last day in the field.

My field partner and I hiked up the tallest point of our field area today, it was at least 700 feet of gain, in maybe 45 minutes? it was SO HOT OUT, but it was worth the great view from the flat on top of a basalt flow looking out on the rest of the area. Thanks definitely go to my field partner for egging me on up the hill.
Here's the location in google maps:
View Larger Map

hope that html worked...
It got harder on the way up cuz we worked up to above 7100 feet, where everything is harder, especially breathing and hiking, haha... Then we had lunch up there, with our professor, then with two other classmates that joined us for the rest of lunch and for garnet-hunting.

Our hope was to find huge (golf ball sized) garnets in the gneiss unit on the way down the hillside of Timber Hill but we spent hours, and it was SO HOT, and we found nothing... we apparently walked right past them. Oh well!

Tomorrow's our last day in the area, and it's a half day, then we visit the reservoir to maybe swim in it and to look for garnets during the second half.

We're not going to be having a field exam, because we're so awesome, so the reports are due on friday evening, and we're coming home on SATURDAY MORNING probably!!!! Two days early!! So I should be home in california on sunday evening or afternoon, give or take - Cross your fingers!

ka-san

My mom is the best!

I got my final care package from her today, just a few essentials to get me through the rest of camp.
TONS of primal strips vegan jerky. Cactus jerky, which is revenge for the cactus poking me out in the field and making me bleed.
An aluminum water bottle, which is awesome because I hate my leaky camelbak, and I only have a 1-liter (32 oz) nalgene bottle that i've been using in the field, which runs out around 1-2pm because that's not enough water for the hot days out in the field. So yay for hydration!
AND two bags of my favorite brand of vegan cookies, Uncle Eddie's. Mmmm joy!

I found something really cool in the field today. I'll give you a hint, it blended in with the dead sagebrush branches. Guess! I'll post photos later.

Here's photos of giant garnets, in an archean/proterozoic (1.8 to 3.5 BILLION years old!) gneiss.

Our work on mapping on our fifth and final field area started this morning. It is gorgeous, but there are huge hills and mountains in it and it's just over four square miles. It's located on the Anderson Ranch, private land which is owned by a really old historic Montana family.

On a complete off-note, Doctor Who is awesome. that last episode... man!

Rodeo

We turned in our 3rd and 4th projects tonight at 4pm. Then we had dinner.

Nearly everybody in my class is going to the town rodeo tonight, but I am opting not to. My awesome roomie also doesn't want to go, so that's cool that I don't have to be the only one not going and hanging out alone in the dorms.
I told my field partner the only way I'd go to a rodeo is if I were protesting it.
Meh

I just heard a crash of thunder outside my dormitory room window and it filled me with glee. I love thunder and lightning!!

The past few days have been crap.
Our field area at Lime Gulch was enormous, had HUGE peaks to climb, which we did cuz we rock, and confusing metamorphic/igneous contacts to map.
The area we started today, with no break in between, is large, but (smaller) rolling hills, and packed with confusing metamorphic Archaean and Proterozoic gneisses and TONS of quartz and granite dikes.
The cool things about the area however, are that the metamorphic gneisses are 3.5 billion to 1.7 billion years old - so old, no life existed on earth except bacteria mats and mounds (stromatolites), and the mineralogy of the planet was such that basalts didn't exist yet - the material in the mantle was still too primitive (far too low in silica).
Also, there are HUGE FUCKING GARNETS in the gneisses/schists.
Pictures to come later.
Mostly, we just mapped a shitload of dikes today.
Anyway, it's cool to me...



Oh, AND my digital CAMERA broke today. No more photos of rocks for you guys. The zoom is jammed/broken off it won't even turn on it says "error", but at least I can get the pictures I took before it broke today off of it. I didn't do anything to it either, I took photos this morning of the mountains and then after I took photos of some garnets and put it back in my pocket, it broke. Did nothing! Gah. Oh well.


Tonight they're serving VEAL in the school cafeteria, so I'm not going. I think most people I talked to aren't going to eat it, but I wouldn't want to see anybody else in my school group eat it, it would alter my opinions of them, as strange as that sounds... and I just plain don't want to see it.