exhaust, border surveillance, burning bridges, flames, exhaust fans, and mesquite

Today I learned that if the motorcycle exhaust blows me out of town this weekend, I can go see where they're going to put up the virtual border fence in Arivaca, about ten miles north of the border. Residents are worried about "loud-hailer" horns, among other things. The horns are apparently to be used if someone comes over to a tower and threatens it. I still don't see how that's going to help if someone chooses to shoot at it instead, but I guess we'll see. And since wildfire season is coming up, I also wanna know if the towers are sensitive to flames. Because bridges and female tech-nerd bloggers apparently are.

But back to exhaust. It appears that if we want to park our car in our attached garage, which according to this, will kill you, it needs some serious ventilation. I'm voting for at least a 50 CFM continuously operating fan with an accompanying vent, which, if you price bathroom fans, will cost at least $150, and I don't know that a bathroom fan is what I want. I do know that I want a quiet fan, and fan noise is measured in sones, which is some scale based on dBA, which, as an engineer, I get. Sones, not so much, but less than one sone sounds ok.

In other news, the pollen that definitely keeps me in the house is mesquite pollen. All I have to say is that I really, really hope that the mesquites at Colossal Cave can hold off until the ones around here quit.

chemo brain and poison bulbs

You remember yesterday I complained of irresponsibility? If you read far enough into this article about "chemo brain," it is clear that people who've been given high doses of toxic chemicals to cure cancer get the same thing.

Doctors apparently have figured out that it's the chemicals that cause chemo brain. I found this sentence particularly interesting:

About 15 percent — roughly 360,000 — of the nation's 2.4 million female breast-cancer survivors, the group that has dominated research on cognitive side effects, remain distracted years later, according to women who say they have the condition.

and the following one particularly annoying:

Nobody knows what distinguishes this 15 percent.

I suppose it's technically true that no one knows because we don't have common tests that would allow us to point and say, "You, there's something funny with your detox pathways, so you could have a hard time getting the chemicals back out of your brain," but that 15% of the population is bad at processing chemicals is not new information, and it shouldn't be news to doctors working with chemical injuries.

Ok, so I'm not sure why the affected patients got cancer instead of MCS from the chemical exposures I'm assuming they had before chemo, but I'm just some loudmouth blogger, not a doctor running a study on results of chemical exposure.

And in case you needed to know, and I suspect I would if I didn't know a bunch of people who have a terrible time with fluorescent bulbs, dropping a compact fluorescent bulb can cost $2000.

making a mess

I don't expect you had any trouble identifying the trench we dug yesterday, and I was, in fact, able to help lift the trencher back into the truck, but only because I got the light end.

Today I learned that if I overextend myself, I get all irresponsible, which is upsetting because even when I was a teenager I was overly responsible, and I tend to depend on it. This is the kind of thing that gets you a certificate from you college roomate for being "The Competent Bridesmaid" at her wedding because you not only followed directions, you also showed up with a pocket knife, and sometimes, a lady with a pocket knife is exactly what you need.

Speaking of my college roomate, the other thing I learned was that when you need to plug a hole in your irrigation box, you can block it off with a piece of one of those tiles left over from the stepping stone. When you break a tile to create such a piece, it sounds exactly like that time our other friend took a film class, and for his final project, decided to film my roomate breaking dishes by throwing them on concrete.

She couldn't keep from smiling.

fun with dirt

Today I learned that even if you start at 4 pm, you can still dig a pretty long trench before dinner if you had the forethought to rent a trencher.

Tomorrow morning I will find out if I am strong enough to help lift the trencher back into the pickup we borrowed.

I'd show you a picture of our trench, but the picture-posting thingy isn't working. I might also explain that our irrigation system has gone all blooey, so that's why we're digging a trench, but I have to get up in the morning and help lift the trencher into the truck.

war

Today I got to wondering about all this Iraq War stuff. In particular, our politicians have been doing the bring-the-troops-home/cut-and-run dance long enough that I've tuned them out, so I have no idea if anything reasonable has been said on either side.

Lacking input from my deceased career-officer grandfathers, I tend to collect my war-related information from other retired military types, so I note that:

• Various retired generals have refused the post of 'war czar'. I recognize that the military has changed since Vietnam, where my soon-to-retire grandfather threw a party when my sister and I were born, but I can't imagine career officers refusing posts because they disagree with a war. I can only see them refusing if they thought the people in charge were idiots. I mean, I'm sure he knew some actual bad words, but about the worst epithet my older grandfather had in his arsenal was the word 'foolish.'
• Senator McCain, who thinks we need to stick around to fix this up, thinks Bush's handling of the war has been "a train wreck."

Having established that the war is going badly, or maybe that the retired generals who think the war is going fine are soft-spoken, I still have to figure out the viability of cutting and running or staying the course. If we:

• Stay the course.
  • A Google search of 'why we should stay in Iraq' got me a bunch of documents produced in 2005, so the arguments there are that terrorists will declare that they've won if we leave, and I think I remember the overuse of the word 'embolden' from back then, so it's not clear I learned anything there, except for the fact that there was an exit strategy: beat up the insurgents, get the Iraqi government and security forces on their feet, and bail in an orderly fashion.
  • Leaving will cause a civil war. I haven't heard this one for a while, so I don't know if it's still in use.
  • "We're fighting for freedom," if used correctly, actually means that we're trying to free Iraqis from oppression, instead of just sounding like something you chant at 'cut and runners.'
  • Pottery Barn has no 'you break it, it's yours' policy, so if we stay in Iraq to clean up the mess we made, we can't blame trendy household goods.
  • As far as I know, Orson Scott Card, the science fiction and fantasy author, has no military background, but he writes much more compellingly on staying the course than I do.
• Cut and run:
  • Two unrelated McGoverns think that we're stuck in a quagmire, and instead of losing credibility if we leave, we'll gain respect for admitting an error.* Also stubbornness and face saving are not good reasons to keep getting people killed.
  • Again from 2005, ten reasons we should get out, among them that we're blowing a lot of money on this, people are dying, everybody hates us, and our presence feeds the insurgency.
  • Bill O'Reilly concluded in early 2006 that there are too many crazies over there, and we should get the heck away from the nutballs.**

Stop the presses! I just learned that there's a whole page of links from a political science class at the University of Michigan, and since I very carefully never took poli-sci the same way everybody else carefully never took physics, I have concluded that my current project looks, in the face of all those links, daunting. Ok, since I'm not a politician, stultifying.

But based on what I learned so far, my original supposition that since Bush seems to be totally incompetent, so whatever he wants to do is wrong, isn't working out for me. I don't want our troops to be stuck in Iraq for fifteen months at a time; I think that's unconscionable. However, it's not clear to me that wars can be won quickly, and there is something that looks like a government over there, whether or not it's getting safer in the Bagdad/Indiana market. Ok, after reading about the security in the market, now I'm not sure again. Crap.

For my last-ditch effort, I'm going to try actual history. They didn't teach Vietnam when I was in school, so I'm going to look at Afghanistan. The USSR tried to prop up the government there, and after nine years, they gave up and went home. We called them losers, and Afghanistan turned out, um, Talibany. But I found an interesting article about the thoughts of some of the people who fought the Afghans, and they advocate getting out since the insurgents just get better and better with more practice, even when your own government keeps touting its progress.

I guess this means that my next task is to hunt up some credible information about US progress. I think I'm screwed.


* I don't know what planet they're from, and I identify as a raging liberal.
** I don't know what planet Bill O'Reilly is from, either.

blowin' in the wind

Today I wanted to go for a ride. My neighborhood is covered with blooming palo verde trees, which don't agree with me, and I didn't want to spend the time to get all the way to Colossal Cave, so I drove down to Fantasy Island, the place with the mountain bike trails just to the east of the Air Force base. I got sick at the trailhead, so I had to go home. These things happen, so I promised myself a trip to Colossal Cave tomorrow and went for a short tour of the local palo verdes for today's entertainment.

Here is what I saw:


I thought to myself, that smoke could be coming from the Air Force base, but it could just be somebody's house burning down. I kept going for about another mile before I saw this:


which really made me think something icky was going on at the base.

But actually, this is all I really know:

• I got sick near the base.
• There were puffs of black smoke from the general direction of the base.
• I have no way of distinguishing a really serious pollen reaction from, say, a delayed food reaction, or some hypothetical mysterious evil chemical on the military base.

So, see? I can take crummy pictures of black smoke with my new cell phone. I'm still glad I don't live near the base.

As long as I'm playing 'pix' with my phone, here's one I took for my dad from the freeway so he can see that we do, too, have a downtown, and it's not at Wilmot and Broadway. Wilmot and Broadway is right near one of the malls, and we don't have a crosstown freeway, so it might just as well be downtown since no one from this side of town drives to the real one if they can help it, hence the whole Rio Nuevo thingy.


And the guardrail looked fine in real life.

taggers, guavas, bees, and barbeque

Today I learned to ride my bike down the front steps, right at the hour when everybody in the neighborhood paraded by with their dogs. I may, after living here for two years, finally get to know all the neighborhood dogs. And for the record, it's April, and the palo verde trees are blooming, and this time last year I couldn't even go outside, much less ride down the stairs.

In other news, I learned that taggers have started using craft-store glass-etching products to tag windows, and if you get any of those chemicals on your hands, they go in straight through your skin and start leaching the calcium out of your bones, which is apparently quite painful. I wouldn't expect that particular brand of tagging to really catch on, but I'm not a teenage boy.

In less destructive news, my parents' guava tree looks to be a pineapple guava, and the Master Gardeners of the University of Arizona Pima County Cooperative Extension think that's a fine thing to plant in Tucson. The only drawback to planting a guava tree in my yard is that then my parents won't have anyone to pawn off all their yummy guavas on.

Speaking of food sources that require the help of bees, the NY Times says in an article about bees getting lost that beekeepers feed their bees nutritional supplements "akin to energy drinks and power bars" when they're traveling around the country to various fields. Canadian bees apparently don't get lost nearly as much, but they don't get driven all over everywhere and fed as much weird stuff. That's not exactly conclusive, but if I kept bees, I think I know what I'd be doing.

In yet more food news, barbeque will kill you! And broiling and frying! Ok, I actually have to admit that I'm not sure that if I let my hash browns get too brown, I get in trouble with them. So huh.

shelves and bags

Today I learned that 2x4s from Lowe's make me dizzy, not that I expect Home Depot's would be any better, and that you can make pretty cool garage shelves out of $40 worth of wood. If I didn't already live here, I'd want to live here just on the basis of those shelves. Ok, and the non-carpeted floors and extreme lack of air fresheners, pesticide, and mold, but still.

Also, I found a wonderfully complicated answer to the ever-popular question, 'paper or plastic?'

new-age math, singing, and expensive trips

Today I learned that in the 1990s people taught kids new-age math, where you are supposed to use a calculator and become proficient at estimating things, and with that kind of background, it turns out that then kids don't learn things like addition. The funny thing is that based on my experience, if you teach people regular math first and then the 'new-age' concepts, they end up being physicists. [Ed. note: tangent alert] It seems to me that if physicists were aware that what they did was new-agey, they might have to get all PC and rename their reverse Polish calculators, but we're just a bunch of socially-clueless geeks. And yes, I'm still a geek, despite the fact that I'm so popular that I actually know what my call-waiting signal sounds like on my house phone and my cell phone. The cell phone thing I learned today, but still.

In other news, singing is good for your immune system, and tripping over curbs is expensive. I learned that last one from my dad, a veteran backpacker who, on Friday the 13th, tripped over a curb and broke his elbow. He got it screwed back together on Wednesday and reports that with one arm immobilized, contact lenses are a real challenge.

good ride

Today I learned that I can do that thing my husband did all the time last year where you go for a really fun ride, and then you come home and sleep all day. It doesn't leave a lot of time for learning other things, but there's always tomorrow.

spiny poisonous plants and phobias

Today I learned that there are these agaves in people's yards around here that spread like crazy if you water them, and when they bloom, they send up what looks like a giant asparagus stalk, and then they die. They're also poisonous, which seems to be a requirement around here unless there are spines involved.

In other news, I screwed up ordering pizza and got one with mushrooms on it, and instead of picking them all off because mushrooms are a mold relative, I just ate it anyway. Now, it's entirely possible that I'm reacting to something in the gusty winds we had today, but I think it's going to be a long, long time before I try another mushroom.

My mother worried that when I got sick, I'd develop a bunch of the crippling phobias that EIs sometimes suffer from. Today I kind of wish I had some slightly more crippling fears, mostly because it would keep me out of things like mushrooms.

ye olde random-seeming assortment

Today I learned that according to the guys at the appliance parts place, the reason gear oil is nasty is that it contains some kind of sulfur something or other, but don't worry, I'm not going to go all nuts on washing machine repair again. Also:

• I can go in Lowe's for a while,
• Wild Oats has a little cafeteria area hidden in a corner, and
• the Grease Monkey near us closed, and the next nearest one is practically across the street from Wild Oats, so now we can multi-task if we happen to need an oil change and groceries at the same time.

Also, my husband reports that the drive-through coffee place next to the Grease Monkey smells better than it tastes.

ethanol and key information

I already learned that ethanol is only good for global warming if you give it points for being renewable, but here's where it says it's actually worse for air quality.

In other news, the media is excited about some researchers' Star-Trekian deflector shield, but their reflection of the general public's scientific understanding is the quote of the day:

The group has begun testing a simple magnetic field generator that consists of loops of wire with electric current running through them.

In related news, I hear that newspapers contain stories that consist of words describing news.

washing machine eof

Today I learned that just above the clutch on your direct-drive washing machine, that little thing that just looks like a cap is actually the thrust bearing, and it needs to go on top of the thing that looks like a funny-shaped c-clip and is actually the support ring. If you screw that up, then your motor overheats when it tries to spin the basket.

Thus we learned that direct-drive washing machines are only hard to put back together if you gas yourselves with gear oil right around the time you take them apart. Fortunately, Appliance Parts Depot's website has a whole little book that covers everything except the transmission, which appears to be behaving itself nicely despite the fact the book implies that we're idiots for fiddling with it.

In other news, in an effort to find a tough fabric that didn't smell like canvas, I got some tan denim at WalMart for $2/yard, and in the process of decontaminating it, which involves washing it six or eight times, its smell transferred to my hands. Soap, Bon Ami, cooking oil, and alcohol haven't helped. Making a paste out of baking soda and scrubbing with that seems to help. I'm thinking about making a rule about only bringing home white denim after this, either that or one about wearing gloves.

Paris is right!

Yesterday I learned that I'm enough better that I can go outside when it's windy out, but with the extra pollen and dust load, I get in a lot more trouble with exhaust fumes, so I should just stay inside. So, I misjudged that, and afterwards, I wasn't good for anything, which is why you're hearing about it today.

Today I learned that the reason I don't understand the washing machine transmission is that I react pretty hard to the oil in it. I thought I was keeping my nose out of it, but apparently machine oil is just not something I should be playing in.

Having established that I've been a bit of a moron lately, the other thing I learned today is that Paris Hilton would rather milk cows than give people enemas.

the patient

After three days of battling systemic plastic failure, from which most washers never recover, the washing machine has made it off the operating table and into intensive care. It requires round-the-clock care, and the doctors aren't sure it's going to make it, but at least they have clean underwear.

And in case you needed to know, nutria are on the decline, and someone named a kind of cricket 'pinhead.'

f***ing washing machine

Today I learned that we still don't understand the transmission on our washing machine. I'm really not going to learn anything until this problem is resolved, so if I disappear over the weekend, I'm just trying to learn how the #%^%$#@ washing machine works.

This is the worst part of being a sick physicist: I understood every part of the dilution refrigerator I ran in graduate school, and I could do quantum mechanics, but I appear to need help with a washing machine transmission.

And never mind that it took a bunch of engineers years to think of a design that had a transmission instead of belts.

gears and tipping points

Today I mostly learned about transmissions of Whirlpool/Kenmore direct drive washing machines. They take 90 weight gear oil, and when all the gears are covered in ancient oil, even the plastic one looks like it could have been metal until you touch it. I'd explain about the other plastic parts in there, but then I'd have to start using the number system on that diagram I linked to, and, as the manual indicates, playing around in the transmission is not a project for laypeople, but as nerds, we don't care. For the record, I'm well enough to be able to understand complicated stuff if my husband explains it to me, but if I'd had to figure out that transmission by myself, there would have been a problem, only part of which would have been the VOCs coming out of the old gear oil.

But I'm also well enough to find out that you can get denim at WalMart for $2/yard, and the lady there said the reason WalMart is closing its fabric departments is that they're only making about thirteen cents per yard, which, if you think about it, makes sense if you're only charging $2/yard for denim. So WalMart is actually putting a little piece of itself out of business by having low prices.

Other than that, 'tipping point' is like the new black, in that everybody is using it for everything. It appears twice in this article about Don Imus getting fired, and Arnie managed to use it seven times giving some speech we were too tired to read, along with the words tip, tips, tipping, and a tipping factor for good measure.

spanner nut wrenches and mold

Today I learned that if you want to completely dismantle your Whirlpool/Kenmore direct drive washing machine, it helps to have a spanner nut wrench. We're still working with the 'pound on the end of a screwdriver with a hammer' wrench, but we'll see how it goes.

In other news, people in Texas are worrying about mold, so the Houston Chronicle has a pretty good article about it. I'd probably have something to say about it, too, but I'm totally wiped out, so in truly bad form, I'm just going to quote a chunk of it:

Only about 24 of the more than 100,000 species of mold are "really terrible," said Dr. Andrew Campbell, director of the Center for Immune, Environmental and Toxic Disorders at The Woodlands.

"It's like a small city where everybody is nice but there are a couple of dozen dirty, rotten scoundrels," he said.

When mold is bad, it is very, very bad. Some of the worst produce mycotoxins that have been reported to suppress the immune system, cause rashes, nausea, neurological damage and respiratory diseases.

The scope of the problem of toxic mold is unclear because there has been little conclusive medical research. No official standards have been set for how much of any type of mold is too much inside a house, in part because some people are more sensitive to it than others.

And here's the part about just allergies:

Far more common in Houston are mold allergies, where sufferers experience nasal congestion, sneezing and itching after crawling in a musty attic or being outdoors after a rain triggers the release of mold spores into the air.

two things

Today I learned that dieting makes you fat. Also, my washing machine broke. Neither of these things are remotely devastating, but one of them was funny.

two-day round-up

Yesterday I learned that besides the leaky irrigation hose that runs under the walk at the side of our house, there is a perfectly good piece of PVC pipe under there, too. The PVC is attached to the water on one end, but it's capped off right near this spiny miniature palm-tree looking plant on the other end, just beyond the walkway. We're very pleased that there's already some perfectly good pipe there because now we don't have to install any, but we can't imagine why someone would put a perfectly good pipe under a long sidewalk and then not use it.

Today I learned that if you hunt pipe ends instead of eggs on Easter and then go hang out with your friends all evening, you can be not good for much on Monday. I think I learned before that mountain biking stamina doesn't translate to keeping up with my mother-in-law, but it also doesn't translate to digging, so here's my new rule:

Mountain biking stamina is pretty much good for biking, and that's about it.

benzene

Today I learned that benzene is the only thing proven to cause leukemia, and since the late 1990's, it is also the primary ingredient in military jet fuel. I also learned that people in Sierra Vista, AZ, whose kids have been dying of leukemia since the late 1990's, have not failed to notice these two facts.

The biggest hole I can find in that argument is that if you burn up benzene, you shouldn't have any benzene left with which to kill people, but since complete combustion is only possible on paper, the military is totally spewing benzene all over a populace that is far from unsuspecting. But since I'm a nerd, I also had to look up benzene combustion products, and here is what I found:

In addition to benzo[k]fluoranthene, we have identified ten large (5- to 10-ring) PAH never before reported as products of benzene pyrolysis or combustion: dibenz[a,c]anthracene, indeno[1,2,3-cd]fluoranthene, anthanthrene, cyclopenta[cd]benzo[ghi]perylene, coronene, dibenzo[a,i]pyrene, cyclopenta[bc]coronene, benzo[a]coronene, naphtho[8,1,2-abc]coronene, and ovalene. In this sample we have also identified three smaller PAH, benz[f]indene, 2-ethynylanthracene, and benzo[c]phenanthrene, never before reported as products of benzene pyrolysis or combustion.

You can't tell me any of those are good for you. Also, if the government would own up to this kind of thing, the chemtrail theorists could set about finding a definitive answer to who was behind the assassination of President Kennedy.

death, destruction, and discrimination

Today I learned that painkillers will kill you if you have arthritis. Well, only if you're taking a ton of ibuprofen and are also at high risk for heart disease, and maybe taking aspirin. I think. I was going to make a comment about how I occasionally get chemical-induced arthritis in one joint in my left thumb, and if I took more chemicals to try to make it go away, it would make me sicker, but that article sucked all the fun out of announcing things'll kill you.

In a Critical Mass update, given that riders are characterized as hooligans, now I'm surprised they stopped at $5300 in damage to the minivan. Actually, I'm surprised the guy who got hit was able to ride away.

And last but not least, teenage Pastafarians are openly discriminated against in North Carolina.

things that'll kill you

Today I learned that huffing paint gives you a paint goatee and that there's global warming on Mars. Also, if you break a compact fluorescent bulb, it releases mercury because they contain an average of 5 mg of mercury each.

In news I didn't find on the internet, my husband got a haircut today, and when he came home, I didn't shoo him directly into the shower because he didn't seem to smell all that bad. That lack of action appears to have been an error on my part because then I learned that my current reaction to haircut place chemicals rivals what you see on a Nyquil commercial.

I suppose the other thing I learned was that you can get arrested for huffing paint and that people older than 15 do it. I had no idea.

theoretical mathematics and Critical Mass

Today I heard from a friend that there's a theoretical mathematician from England who is making some progress at understanding sensitivities to electromagnetic fields. He apparently understands that thing where people are sensitive to some frequencies but not others, just like my mountain biking buddy described. He also bamboozles rooms full of MD-type doctors, so it would be cool if some sick physicist could just turn up one of his papers on the web and figure it out, but I suppose that would make things too easy. As a side-note, I'm feeling well enough to be a little annoyed that I don't have access to any journal I want on the web. I mean, if I put a little work into it, I'm sure I could disguise myself as a U of A type and sneak into a library there to find one or another of his papers, but it's somewhat optimistic for me to expect to be able to function in a library full of slightly-moldy paper and petroleum-based ink.

In non-academic news, it sounds like last Friday's Critical Mass ride in San Francisco erupted in violence because some lady from Redwood City driving a minivan clipped a rider. Whatever happened, a bunch of riders turned on the minivan, causing $5300 in damage and freaking out the kids in the van. News reporters appear to be as baffled by the whole thing as the minivan driver, but I've seen riders seriously threatened by clueless cars, and there's nothing like it for scaring the living daylights out of a cyclist. Given a fight-or-flight reaction and most cyclists' tendency to chase things, be they hills, other cyclists, or cars, that they turned on the minivan does not surprise me in the least. I am, however, somewhat surprised by the quantity of the damage they caused.

the park, the store, and a crow

Today I learned that Tucson Mountain Park is all covered in creosote flowers, so I didn't get to go for a ride. I went to the grocery store instead, where I learned that some baggers can pack a three-quarters full cart into two carts, and then they have to help you out. The only other time I remember needing help out, ever, was a couple of years ago when I got seriously gassed by some lady's perfume in line, after which pushing a cart outside seemed like it'd be hard.

In other news, a crow with a little animal in its beak flew past me this afternoon, and its wings made that swoosh sound typically associated with little kids flailing around with sticks. Or Xena.

baked goods and smacking the EPA

Today I learned that if you assemble PC boards (PCBs), after you position your surface-mount components over the solder blobs on the board, you could solder all those connections by hand, which would take a long time, or you could put your creation in a proper (expensive) reflow oven. However, it appears based on the work of the guys at Spark Fun Electronics, who cooked a few USB connectors trying out an ordinary toaster oven, that your best bet is likely a $30 griddle from Target, but try not to burn your arms on the sides. Also, they said:

As always, this stuff can kill you, burn your house down, or make your basement smell pretty foul. Don't try any of this at home - wait, you are at home. Well, just take everything we say with a grain of salt.

They sound like fun guys. I miss hanging out with the guys.

In other news, the Supreme Court told the EPA to get off its behind when it comes to tailpipe emissions because it does, too, have the authority and the responsibility to do something about them. Conservatives reportedly replied by screaming, "Oh, nooooo, the economy will collapse," but I think it'll collapse if everybody's kid gets cancer from living near the freeway* and everybody stays home to look after them, never mind that thing where everybody spends all their money on health care instead of Glade and Velveeta and cell phones that take pictures and play Underdog and.... Oh, wait a minute, I have one of those, so we're all going to die.


* Ok, that study didn't talk about cancer, but the one about the Houston shipping channel giving people cancer isn't posted anymore.

trains, coal, and ethanol

Today I learned that it's 3.7 miles from Posta Quemada to Three Bridges and that one of the bridges is a train bridge. As a side-effect, I learned that besides doing the same work as lots and lots of trucks, trains smell like lots and lots of trucks, and I could have used that charcoal mask I left in the car because who the heck worries about traffic on the Arizona Trail? I still got to follow the trail under the train trestle between trains, where instead of regular reddish to whitish rocks, the rocks were coal. So I got a lump of coal, and only three months late.

In newspaper news, ethanol may be good for driving up corn prices and increasing starvation-driven illegal immigration, but it's apparently not good for reducing air pollution, unless you give points for it being a renewable resource. Since I got blown out of town twice this winter, I'm not handing out points until somebody comes up with something that doesn't blow me out of town, except I got to see a Titan missile, which you have to admit is a pretty good consolation prize.