pop! its spring

after seeing the frost kill of the early leaves on our magnolia tree new buds are popping out amongst the dead brown leaves:


i notices jacque whacking the buds on the iris plants the other day with a stick, well this morning some of them went off:



just to give you an idea of who dense they are, there are 25 flower buds in this section of the plants, about 1/3 of the total

*cough*cough*ack*ack*

as i was heading to work in the imperial valley, the wind was blowing about 40 mph, stirring up dust, i stopped for lunch at a subway, and this is the view from their lot, there is a mountain through all that dust if you look carefully

nini

i thought these were pretty, the sun was setting behind me, behind a mountain, casing a shadow on the next mountain over, the shadow line was about half way up.

more oops

thes pics are of a bunch of bridge abutments on sections of the road that move round (see the previous entry)

oops

here is an interesting pic "mass wasting" a geomorphalogical (study of how the surface of the earth changes) term, you can see the old road bed, where the hill side slid down into the sulfer creek valley, the bulldozed a new rout through the slip face, between cloverdale, and aidlin well site, there are four slip zones where they do this, one of them (no pic) they have to come and doze out where the hilside slumps down onto the road, there is just enough room for one car to go by

Frak you, i aint giving up

here is a rather tough, and persistent oak tree, most of these I've seen around here are pretty gnarly, with a lot of hanging moss or something growing from them (parasitic/symbiotic/unknown?), this particular tree is in rough shape, but still chugging along

roommates

here are a couple of my roommates at work, true daddy long legs spiders:) been feeding them moths and other bugs they get in here at night:) some are getting pretty fat. have 8 that i regularly feed, but these two are by far the largest with leg spans about 2-2.5 inches

oops

THAT (white arrow)

wieghs 1200 pounds, and used to be bolted onto the well head 60 feet away, when the well blew out yesterday, that desided it no longer wanted to be bolted onto the well head, of course the 500 foot slug of water comming up the well at nearly 100 miles per hour did assist in its relocation, first of all, when it came loose, it went up through the rotary table, lifting it and seting it back down cockeyed (that part weighs in at about 15k pounds, it knocked two 400 pounds blocks of steel out of the way, went about 20 feet in the air and bounced off the 20k traveling blocks(pully) and bounced out the V-door to the rig, down the v door ramp (about 30 feet down), making a hell of a dent on its way, and down a 40 foot catwalk, the end of which you can see in the pic, and bounced off the end of a truck parked there, all of this took less than two seconds, no body was hurt, and other than replacing the now mobile rotating rubber assymbly, nothing major was broken.
my first well blowout