Trip, Night 2: North Bloomfield

We decided to go for the ghost town. After a long day, during which at least two semis tried to murder us and we got a spectauclar taste of the very worst of San Jose driving, (and Sacramento, and Grass Valley--it was like everyone on Interstate 80 decided to try smoking weed while driving), we arrived at Mallakoff Diggins State Historical Park.

Mallakoff Diggins was one of the largest hydraulic goldmines, before the massive environmental and economic damage the hydraulic mines wreaked led to them being banned. The above picture of the pit doesn't do it justice. In its heyday, the mine and the giant monitors (see below) that attended it would work around the clock. A thriving town grew up alongside it, North Bloomfield.

Originally written off as barren and dubbed 'Humbug' by disappointed miners, North Bloomfield remains today in pristine if uninhabited condition. (Well, mostly uninhabited. A few of the houses up there do have residents, just not permanent ones.

We arrived, made much of the town (look how tiny the saloon is!) and then headed out to the campground, where we were greeted by this sign.

We were now officially screwed. The drive up had been hell; actually getting to the park had required two hours or so to go ten miles over a steep, heavily potholed road. It was also heavily trafficked--there was a very popular little river on the way, and the locals were out in force.

It was looking like we'd have to go back to Grass Valley and get a hotel when we found a ranger. Turned out that they had little cabins for rent, restored versions of what the miners would have lived in. So we paid up and moved in.

 We were only intending to stay for one night.

Even after finding the metric ton of wasp nests in the cabin, we stayed for two.

We did a lot of hiking around. Above, my parents walk around the lake that supplied the water pressure to power the hydraulic monitors. Below, Dad is a great scale object for the tunnel leading into the mine itself. (It's a long tunnel and VERY cold--you could feel the chill from about where he's standing).

There was a little administrative barf with the reservation system, leading to someone else being very surprised to find us in the cabin they'd reserved, (fortunately, the other two were open, so it was settled with the maximum of good feelings and minimum of fuss, helped by the people in question being absolutely lovely) so we left after the second night, and headed up to Taber Mine and the water company of La Porte. 

Better late than never: The Trip, Day One

Without further ado, the trip.

Our first day of driving was easy; very little traffic, and nice temperatures. (The drive home was a totally different matter, but I get ahead of myself). The most interesting things that happened were a giant wasp in Dad's hair at the rest stop, and a large sign somewhere in the middle of nowhere advertising the virtue of cork corks over plastic corks.

We stayed in Coyote Lake campground our first night. It's a county park instead of a state park, and really rather nice--there were even showers. The showers were...interesting...but they were hot so none of us were inclined to complain. Unnervingly, the list of regulations for the camp did not list fine amounts. It listed bail amounts.

Don't mess with Santa Clara County, guys.

Here's the camp. My parents' tent is hiding behind the car, while mine lurks near the bear safe.

As soon as we got everything set up, Mom settled down to paint the view. It was a very quiet evening--we had a stirfry for dinner, cooked over the camp stove, and crawled off to bed at what was (for us) an obscenely early hour. A contributing factor was that we had not the slightest, hairiest clue what the hell we were doing the next day. We had two possibilites: head up to Santa Cruz and see giant trees, or cut across the San Joaquin Valley and head to Malakoff Diggins State Park, a ghost town some distance outside of Grass Valley and Nevada City.

Hello again!

I just got back from a two week camping trip. Expect this to turn into a travel blog for a few weeks--I have lots of pictures and silly experiences to share! Now just to get three memory cards of pictures sorted out...

I beg your forgiveness, good reader...

...for this week has been hell, and the entire tank of urchins I blogged about earlier spawned.

Yeah.

Slings and arrows of outrageous fortune

So I had a fun day in lab.

And by fun, I mean horrifying. And kinda hilarious.

My advisor took off recently to do important professorial things, and so through a series of events, I wound up being the only person in lab today, which made me feel very important indeed. It's the first time I've been put in charge of a whole entire laboratory, even for a day.

We've got two cultures that I'm growing that are rather sensitive; the algae and the baby urchins. The baby urchins need constant temperature, filtered seawater and algae, all of which need to be kept free from contamination. The algal cultures are just as sensitive.

So I come in this morning (after a simply hellish time parking my bike) and open up the lab where three of the algal cultures are and it's sweltering--about 75+ degrees. This may not seem so hot to most people but the lab typically runs about 10 degrees cooler. To my relief, the algal cultures are doing fine, but the bubbler (that aerates them so the pH doesn't go screwy) has managed to unplug itself during the weekend.

I fix this. Then I go into the other room, dump out the acid rinse from the culture plates (note, culture plates are impossible to pour neatly), and then make my way to the tank room. At this rate, I'm expecting that something else has gone terribly wrong--a seawater hose has disconnected and the room is flooding, there has been a mass urchin escape and they're all in the drainpipe, a tank has exploded and both of the above have happened, the bucket with the larval culture has fallen over, the air hose into the larval culture had disintegrated, the temperature has gone flooey and all the inhabitants are dead....

You can imagine my relief when I open the door and everything is normal; the temperature is what it should be, the bucket is upright, there are no visible escapees and no floods of water. I breathe a sigh of  relief and saunter over to check the larval culture.

And there is a starfish.

In the larval culture.

A fat, filthy, actively excreting starfish. In my larval culture. My nice, clean larval culture, with the seawater that needs to be filtered through a 20 micron filter and the air that needs to go through other filters and the algae that need to be grown so they're pure cultures.

I stared at it in mute fury for a few minutes. The starfish crapped more.

Then I started laughing. It was that or break something and all the breakable things were expensive.

In the end I fished out the starfish and filtered the culture (which seems to be dead as a result) and spawned urchins (the female kept flipping over and the male exuded simply VAST quantities of sperm, and filtered water and went home with the sincere hope that the experience wouldn't be repeated on the morrow.

And then I played video games.

Keep a blog, they said...

...it'll be good for you, they said. And then Google keeps highlighting the writing. Anyone knows how to keep random sections of my prose from turning white, I will be so so happy if you'd tell me.

Okay, angstpost coming up. 

I'm getting very vexed with the fetishes in the writing profession. They're presented to every young writer, and usually follow these lines: 

No adverbs (excuse me, I like me some adverbs. Shakespeare used adverbs. As long as they're not everywhere and copulating in the margins, you're good.), no italics (see previous), only use 'said' as an attribution (booooring), no semicolons (you can pry my semicolons out of my cold, dead hands, and even then I might come back as a zombie and bite you) and no cliches/figures of speech.

Yes, sparse prose is pretty. You know what else is pretty? Shakespeare. Les Miserables. The Aubrey/Maturin books. Les Miserables has so many adverbs in it you could probably still wind up with a 500 page book if you took everything but the adverbs out. How about The Three Musketeers? Exclamation points. Adverbs. Figures of speech. The Scarlet Pimpernel? Eh... I may be hurting my argument there. Lord of the Rings. Think about it, people. Just because it's the 'in' thing doesn't mean that anything that doesn't follow the rules is bad. The Canterbury Tales. Seriously, I mean Chaucer. Romance of the Three Kingdoms. Pride and Prejudice, for chrissake! Jane Austen does not give a delicate lady's shit for your extermination of adverbs, sir!

Basically, I'm getting disillusioned. I don't want to write the Next Great American Novel. I'm a scientist. I already have a career and a field with specific rules and vicious editors and puking sea urchins. Really, I don't want to be a master of the art of writing. I just want to write things that people can read on the bus or the train or listen to in traffic, and wonder about what's going to happen next and fret about the characters. I just want to make people's days a little brighter. I want to make stories. Not art. And I don't want to have to do it by a whole batch of arbitrary rules that really are taking the aspect of someone's Hemingway fetish gone way out of control. 

Good writing is not something you do by formula! (Oh, look an exclamation point. You may all proceed to faint now, at my use of that most hideous form of punctuation). If you write like shit, you'll still write like shit even if you excise all these things. If your characters are shallow or your plot absurd or you genrally idiotic, the lack of adverbs will not save you. These rules lead to a woodenness of expression, a general sameness of the written word. You're excising a part of speech, a punctuation, a way to add emphasis to your words, a variety to attribution. You are, to make a culinary comparison, making beef stroganoff without the vinegar or pepper. Sure, they're not strictly necessary, but the dish is going to be damn bland with none of it. 

But, you protest, you needen't excise everything! If you do it tastefully, sparsely...

Then why say never? That's inaccurate. Also, my argument still stands. A tasteful sampling of those most forbidden, dreaded parts of speech, of language, would do most delightful things to our wealth of literature. We needn't all write like Hemingway. 

Thus saying, I have most likely ruined all my chances for respect from my writing teachers forever. But I have been told I need more emotion in my writing. 

We'll see how that balances out.

The Joys of Being Lazy

So this weekend I got to go back to being genrally useless and that's been wonderful. I got a bunch of editing done on my novel, and I'm really happy with where it's going. I got to play one of my favorite video games, Team Fortress 2, a lot. There's something deeply satisfying to an all-out brawl with other people from across the world. (Team Fortress 2, for those who don't know, is a first person shooter multiplayer comedy war game. Yeah, you read that right. Probably going to write a post later on why a raging feminist such as myself loves a game where the entire cast of playable characters (with the possible exception of the Pyro) is male.) Exciting things are due to happen in that fandom, including the release of a video concerning the aforementioned mysterious Pyro, so there was that as well.

And then I went after the parsnips and apricots and am gearing up to make an apricot sorbet tomorrow, and had a lot of long walks and started rereading one of my favorite books, Small Gods by Terry Pratchett, which is pretty much a satire of religion and involves god being turned into a tortoise and learning to be a better god.

So yes. A gloriously lazy weekend. Tomorrow I go in and transfer one load of urchins into the lab and check my cultures and perhaps start algal cultures for the young urchins, and then come home and make sorbet which I shall assuredly post about in more detail than you want to know.