Week #2 - September 6 - 10, 2021

 

Google Classroom - join if you haven't yet!

Students - we will be using Google Classroom this year. Please make sure you join the appropriate classroom so that you can receive assignments and work for each day!

8 - 31: nmhfoo2

8 - 39: zh3rziq

9 - 21: k35zeup

9 - 23: zbhlwaz

9 - 24: dpw4py6

9 - 26: lwmji7h

Grade 8 Weekly Schedule

Monday - holiday, no school

Tuesday - lab safety overview and safety contract

Wednesday - lab equipment scavenger hunt

Thursday - lab equipment scavenger hunt

Friday - wrap up lab equipment scavenger hunt

Grade 9 Weekly Schedule

Monday - holiday, no school

Tuesday - lab safety overview and safety contract

Wednesday - lab equipment scavenger hunt

Thursday - lab equipment scavenger hunt

Friday - wrap up lab equipment scavenger hunt

I'm moving

not just houses but blogs as well. From now on I will be posting at my new address: goingeverywhere.wordpress.com

If you are tired of reading what I write, just "forget" to update your links But if you'd like to find out how taking out the walls in the new house goes; if it snows on our annual canoe trip again this year; and if Zama City is really a city you should check out goingeverywhere.wordpress.com .

Proof

that spring is actually here! While out biking and geocaching, I found this little beauty, and then many many more. This is a little earlier than my first crocus last year which may be due to the unseasonably warm weather this weekend or the fact I was out in the prairie grasses earlier this time.

If you're like us

you've probably just been sitting around in someone else's house watching season 2 of Dark Angel and counting the hours until 12pm on April 30. But don't worry, if Max and Logan's forbidden love isn't keeping you wide awake at night with excitement, this will: the Terex Titan Cam, live from "the South Eastern corner of the Province of British Columbia, Canada, on Highway No. 3, in the small town of Sparwood". That's right, you can watch your favorite non-operational heavy hauler 24 hours a day as it sits parked in front of that mall. Since its night time right now, you get a lovely view of the headlamps updated every few minutes. I'm assuming that the day time view is equally exciting but I haven't got to experience it yet, I can probably check in while I watch Canada AM tomorrow.

For a different cam experience, visit the Monterey Bay Aquarium Cams. Between 7am and 7pm Pacific Time you can watch live video of penguins, sea otters, fish, birds and sea turtles. I'll be tuning in on the weekend at feeding time to see how crazy the new blackfooted penguins are!

End of the Line

Summer?

Can't wait for icecream, sunshine and heat!

Not the Mac

Since we returned to Calgary, my travels have been restricted to one place - Fort McMurray. Given that Fort McMurray is what it is, I was pretty excited to find out that my next field trip would not be to the "Big Mac" (as my father says). So, now here I am in Cranbrook doing geotechnical geophysics, enjoying my giant hotel room (it may be bigger than my house) and loving not being in the frozen north. There are no seismic workers wanted to tell me about their gambling problems at the dinner table, I don't have to share a bathroom and dinner tonight was not porkchops and mushroom gravy. Not that the frozen north is all bad but change is certainly good!

Troubles with the Time Change

I've never had trouble with "springing forward" or "falling back" before, but this year has just been a disaster.

• Sunday we completely forget that the time had even changed until we stop by A&As. A mad rush ensues to make it to our hair appointments on time.
• I then forget to move my alarm clock ahead - mad rush ensues to make it to work Monday morning.
• Alarm clock gets reset - for pm instead of am. Mad rush ensues to make it to work Tuesday morning.

I can't think of anything else we've missed but if we're late for work tomorrow again...

If you haven't had the pleasure of the MacDonalds as house guests over the past 6 months you are quickly running out of time. We have made a very adult move and purchased a home in Calgary to go along with our new grown up jobs. As of April 30 we will no longer be homless vagabonds and instead will be (respectable) land owners.

Not only will you, our wonderful friends and family, no longer have us in your spare rooms for long periods of time, but we will finally be able to move things out of our storage unit. And stop forwarding our mail. And put our clothes into the closet instead of a laundry basket. So many things to look forward to!

At Work

A summary of my last month at work. ERT is pretty basic (when it runs well) - lay out cable, pound in long steel rods, collected data, pull steel rods, roll up cable. Repeat forever...

My first day on the job. I look all shiny and new! The metal contraption on the front of my quad is a pounder, used to hammer electrodes into the ground. At this point in my ERT career I can barely lift the pounder off the quad. I spend the first day on the job pounding electrodes and the next two weeks feeling the pain.
Later on I get promoted to running the equipment. One of my duties is to place pin flags at certain electrodes for the surveyor. I learn to dread the pin flags and spend much of my time trying to come up with a method that doesn't require walking 1 km every time. I also learn that I cannot carry a car battery more than 10 m.
A slow day on the line. The rubbermaid tub on the quad contains our resistivity measuring equipment. I basically drive the quad up and down the line plugging into cables. When I am not collecting data I am usually pushing my quad out of a snow bank. Or doing jumping jacks to stay warm.

Just another -40 day. Bundled up in every piece of clothing I brought, walking becomes a challenge. I look at least 30lbs heavier. My once large nomex becomes tight as I try and fit two fleeces, a puffy vest, long underwear and fleece pants underneath. Everything must be carried around inside my clothes including two radios, a mini pizza, 4 sharpies and a headlamp making things even more crowded.

During our week long cold spell, my two neck warmers freeze up under my helmet making it impossible to remove until I thaw it out in the truck at the end of the day. I also have to spend time deicing my eyes so I can see. I stop carrying a mini pizza with me since I cannot get it to my mouth anyways.

Safety first. Dion, Brendan and Chris discuss the hazards associated with ERT as outlined on our oversized safety form. The discovery of the oversized form causes much giggeling and tells us that we have all been in the bush far too long if we find it funny.

After the wolf incident we get sent to a different program involving skidoos; a lot of swearing and cursing; and rock solid ground at a mine site. The weather warms up, our new camp only serves cookies for lunch and my room is smaller than the pickup truck. Still, despite all that it is, ERT is fun in the same way that treeplant was fun...

We also have to shovel out snowbanks and pour salt water over our electrodes. Luckily we have no more animal incidents and other than spending a day pushing out skidoos through the forest things go well. We finish and I get sent home earlier than expected! I rejoyce, Jon rejoyces, those left in Fort Mc carry on...

Tall Tales

ERT requires 4 cables to run. Late yesterday afternoon, putting an end to our survey, a wolf ate our 4th cable. Seriously, he came by and ate it. How do you prepare for that? There were no witnessess to the attack, but the wolf howls, the large wolf prints and the wolf pee on the cable suggest that this was no rabbit attack.

Back to the Mac

In a few short hours I will be flying back to Fort McMurray for another 3 weeks of ERT fun. Hopefully the weather is warm and the rabbits leave us alone! I have learned from my last trip that one needs serious moisturizer (hand, body and hair) and gummy candies to survive comfortably. I will have my own laptop with me, so communication should be easier. Trying to jam the giant yellow pelican case into the overhead plane bins will not be easy. I also have brought my camera and ipod - spare time in the field will now be filled with photo shoots and tunes when the weather allows.

I have given Jon a list of tasks to accomplish while I am gone and he will again have to deal with moving us around. Luckily, he is an amazing husband and I know he'll do it all!

In other news, I have won a free video rental from the movie store in Hinton. Wow...

Baby its cold out here!

I realize that my last post was a little scattered - satallite internet is unreliable and I just wanted to get something up! Plus, I may have been a little crazy after a few days of work.

For those of you who don't see me on a regular basis, I finally started a "real" job at the begining of January as a future geophysicist. For the first two weeks I mostly did safety training and perfected my office wardrobe. Then for the past 9 days or so I've been in Fort MacMurray collecting data for an exploration project. Its a far cry from office work, but I'm enjoying it (mostly).

My work involves all things that make field work good and bad - quads (good), cold weather (bad), equipment troubles (normal) and lots of work hours (good and bad). Lately things have been more on the cold side with a string of -40 days. Quads won't start, equipment has been breaking and my quad helmet frosts up into a giant snowball. I refuse to take it off when its this cold, so I just wear it everywhere in the field. Several pictures have been taken of me by our co-op student so when I return to the south you'll all get to see what my crew has to stare at all day. Production has been low (I shot the same 2000m for the past 3 days) but my co-workers are a blast and its not all bad.

I'm living in a camp slightly north of town - its wonderful to have someone cooking my breakfast, making freshly baked goodies for lunch and serving me a hot dinner when I return from 12 hours in the cold. My room is actually quite nice with its closet, desk and single bed. Its a lot like res, if res had been filled with male rig workers. After the cookies, the highlight is the home made soups and fancy herbal teas!

The downside of remote work is that I do miss my "home" (husband and dog) and wish the weather would just warm up (-20 please). But, I'll be home in less than a week for a break (yay) and will be ready to deal with it all over again!

Today I wanted to be fat. Not just chubby bunny fat but arctic polar bear fat. Its got to be warmer than winter nomex and would have been greatly appreciated today. It was cold, not just -20 cold but in the mid -30s with a wind chill.

My job lately has been to stand near the measuring equipment and keep it going. A typical hour is: drive to new location, do jumping jacks to restore feeling to fingers, try to connect box to cable, do more jumping jackes, get box connected and press start, run up and down line planting blue distance flags, do a few more jumping jacks, un-hook system. Repeat for 10 hours a day. Not that it takes much running or jumping to warm up once you put on full winter nomex, winter boots and a quad helmet. But man, its exhausting!

The Snowman

Using the lake as a source, I rolled 3 very misshapen snow balls. Jon did the heavy lifting, but my back still ached. Clearly I'm out of practice...
My wonky rolling required a lot of reshaping with snow. I also had to fight off three dogs from peeing on Mr. Snowman.
Brinkley got over his fear of snow people enough to "help" me with the decorations (he is a service breed).
He then decided that the pinecone buttons weren't really needed on the snow man and he ate the ones he could reach.

First Activity of 2008!

After a relativly un-eventful return to Calgary we decided that we had to do something before I started work and the looong vacation came to end. The snow is not great but there is enough in K-country to make it feel like winter and allow for snowshoeing. We repeated the loop we'd done a couple years ago but it was still quite beautiful and the exercise did us good.

The terraine was rough. Ok, its Andrew just messing around...

The gang enjoying the outdoors.

"I've got too many balls and not enough tree"

Pictures!

I figured I should get these sorted before the crazyness of being back in Calgary catches up to me. My favorite ~180 photos of Argentina and Chile are now up on facebook (silly place, but easy):

Argentina Part 1 - Iguazu, Salta, Mendoza and Bariloche
Chile - Puerto Montt, Torres del Paine
Argentina Part 2 - El Calafate, El Chalten, Puerto Madryn and Buenos Aires

Eating Our Way Through Argentina

One of the best parts of our trip through Argentina was food. It’s evident by the snug fit of our pants that we enjoyed the coffee, pastries, steak, wine and chocolates a little too much. For those of you who just went back to re-read the steak part of that - yes, we do eat steak now. Along with lamb, chicken and in some cases seafood (although I don’t think I’ll keep that up).

For the first time ever in our travels, food became something of an attraction. Part of how much we enjoyed a town was due to how good the food was. Barlioche and Buenos Aires moved to the top of our lists as places to visit for food while Puerto Montt and Mendoza were less favorable.

Our favorite meal was our first steak dinner in Iguazu – great steaks and our first taste of salsa criolla, a spicy tomato onion sauce for steaks. We got a taste of the good steak and from then on we found anything but the top cut of meat to be “too chewy”. The worst meal was Jon’s foray into the world of Mr. Dog panchos (hot dogs) where he ordered the “pancho Mr. Dog” and was served a bun with lettuce, cheese and two “dogs” in it. Hard to choke down!

In between we dined on spicy chorizo sausages on crusty buns, liberally dosed in chimichurri (herbs and olive oil mix), fries in paper cones with mayo and ketchup and ice cream in more flavors than imaginable. Almost every morning started with a café con leche or submarino, and most afternoons included one as well.

I actually miss the eating, although my waist line is in better shape now that I'm not munching away. The food is one of the reasons you should be going to Argentina (if you haven’t been yet). The scenery is spectacular, but some of my best memories are of us eating!

Jonny enjoying cafe con leche in Puerto Madryn while watching whales in the ocean.
Rice with seafood - I didn't eat the guy on top but my dining companions did!
Typical bus breakfast.
A much better breakfast in El Calafate. Submarino, media lunas and cafe corado. The best part about this subarmino was that the chocolate bar came in a submarine shape.
My lamb dinner after finishing Torres del Paine. Simple presentation, but a huge amount of amazing lamb. The man who runs this little restaurant has a good thing going.

Is this available in black?

I don't dislike shopping, in fact I enjoy it, but shopping for clothes is another matter. Especially dress clothes, I avoid it like the plague. But today I needed to buy a blazer/jacket/whatever you call it. So after driving 6 hours from Hinton to Calgary with only a gas stop in Edson, I hit the mall. I immediately regretted it, 4 pm on a Sunday before Christmas and the mall was packed. I whacked people out of the way with my purse as I scanned the stores for the perfect jacket (and shoes for that matter). Nearling the end of my shopping stamina (and shopping hours) I finally found what I was looking for - thank goodness for shopping associates! The wonderful woman quickly picked out the perfect outfit and had me on my way with no awkward size fussing or huge padded shoulders.