hoodoo? j00doo!

Figured I'd post some pictures from my trip mentioned in my first real post and talk a bit about them.

So break out those notebooks and pencils, it's time for class!

The nifty little formations you see to your right there are called hoodoos. I bet whoever thought of that name was a pretty funny guy. OK, maybe not. Just looked it up! Apparently the term comes from American aboriginals that picked up the term from English-speaking peoples who were using it to refer to evil things. The aboriginal peoples viewed the hoodoos as evil old gods that had been turned into stone and applied the term! I found it amusing that one reason they believed they were evil is that they would "wake up and throw boulders", which was actually just the softer rock/sand collapsing and the boulder on top falling. Old culture beliefs are so cool and interesting!

Oh yeah! Guess I should explain what and how they are! As I hinted at earlier and you may be able to tell, they're made up of a very unresistant material that was lucky enough to get a nice protective top. In the case of the micro ones I found, they were covered by small pebbles (in the top picture) or quartz (in that picture ^). In the case of much larger ones*, they're capped by big boulders that when randomly thrown to the ground by the collapsing underlying material are more than enough to frighten your average aboriginal American! Well these nice resistant caps protect the soft material from rain and such while all the surrounding material gets eroded away, leaving the awesome little sand ones we can admire and enjoy (also stomp on) or the huge ones* we can marvel at and dodge falling boulders from! Yay geology!

*These two pictures came from wikipedia, not my camera.



Wanted to throw in this pretty neat panoramic shot I got from the top of the canyon these hoodoos were found in. (Was lots of fun getting to the bottom! And then finding out we weren't supposed to be down there...) Fun fact: All the different colored sands/materials are all mixed up because they were blown out of the area when a meteor hit and then they were mixed and redeposited by the sea that covered the region at the time as it rushed back in to refill the new gaping hole the meteor had left.

Any questions? If not, class dismissed!

how you like these apples?

I feel that this picture represents the greed in humanity. The bright green of the apple reflects the money and economics that are taking over the true colors and reasons for nature.

No. Not really. Way-too-in depth art critiques make me laugh in the out loud fashion. This is just a really awesomely green apple!

Here is the original picture. See! Isn't that quite the green apple!? I pulled it out of my fridge (thanks to chr0no and Tacks for the advice on where to store them!) and was like "Woah! That's a green apple!" Unfortunately, despite the nifty bright green color, it didn't really taste all that special, other ones in the same bag tasted better. (I bet it really was all the money and economics in the soil instead of true nature!)

But as you can see there, the picture ended up kinda blurry. (The lighting wasn't that great and I was messing around with a zoom setting on my camera.) But I showed it who's boss! I quickly slapped it into Paint Shop Pro and smacked it with a super neat filter! Ta-da!

Despite the blur on the original though, I think both turned out decent for just a quick picture that I snapped of a between-class-snack. I really like the little bright green spots that showed up in the original, but the filter ended up looking more like I real painting that I was expecting, so I thought it was nifty too.

So there you go! Hopefully this silly and simple start will inspire me to continue posting and/or taking (better) pictures. And don't worry, future pictures will contain more exciting subjects than fruit on my desk!

so much blog, so little stuff

OK, I have a blog. Now what? Guess my first post can be a rant about how I have nothing to rant or post about! *serves up a delicious plate of irony* BAM!

Like it says in my info over there *point!*, my life currently lacks many situations that I feel are blog-worthy due to lack of time/funds/opportunities/etc. It's actually quite the conundrum! One of the things I enjoy most is just being outside, hiking and climbing around, taking in the awesomeness of nature, and satisfying the overly adventurous monster that lives inside me. And while this activity is mostly free by itself (minus supplies and such), unfortunately any adventure-worthy place is hours away from me. And therein lies my time and money (for gas) problem!

Two weeks ago, I went on a week-long trip for a class over spring break (yes, I signed up for a class that lasted my whole spring break) where I got to climb around on big dirt hills and tromp through the woods for five days straight. I was in an anti-adventure depression for most of last week after returning to normal school and life. That trip did make me realize that I was in the right major for me though. (Geology.) So if I get to do stuff like that at least a few days a month (or week if I'm even luckier) for the rest of my working career, I'll be one happy dood!

But yeah, that trip completely dwarfs anything that's happened in my life in the past few months... if not over a year. That's the kinda stuff I enjoy writing about. Sure, I could write about the random social experiences that I have, but I don't think anyone really wants to read about those since I could probably make a post about me sitting around my apartment sound just as exciting, heh.

So I'm not sure what direction I want to take this blog, but I want to do something with it. I feel like if I don't have a direction or reason for it, I'll never use it. I don't want to just rant about random stuff in it, as that seems old and cliché. I'm sure I'll use it to write about random ideas that come to me every now and then, but maybe I'll also use it as a reason to get out with my camera more and try to post a few interesting pictures every week. We shall see... we shall see...

blog!

blogblogblogblogblog.

more on this exciting story later! stay tuned!