Some more views of Thatcher, Utah.
Nov 192018
Oct 042018
So there I was at somewhere around 5AM, wondering if sleep was ever going to be an option, when a distant but authoritative “WHAM” echoed through the house. “Huh,” I says, and go back to scribbling. A little while later the sound of approaching sirens, so, being male, I went to the front door to watch the emergency vehicles zip by in the dark. I noticed that they stopped not far up the road. So I wandered up that way to see what was doing.
D’oh.
What we got here: a 90-degree bend in the road (north-south to east-west) with an agricultural ditch running north-south, just east of the N-S leg of the road, passing underneath the E-W leg. Concrete barrier blocks *used* to wall off the ditch on the northern side of the road. Some of those barrier blocks are now at the bottom of the sea, along with a quarter of the truck.
This corner has been trouble before. But a new wrinkle was added this time. It has not rained in months; this is not exaggeration: September has seen *no* measurable precipitation. It was probably sometime in early June that the rain last fell and actually made it to the ground. As a consequence, the road has been covered with dust, dirt, tire rubber and leaked oil for months without any way to wash it off. And Tuesday the remnants of hurricane Rosa started to hit the area, dumping rain down with some seriousness. Wednesday was clear, but by evening it started raining again… not powerfully, but non-stop. So all that lubricant that had been deposited on the road all summer was *finally* getting slowly lifted off. But it’s a gradual process, and while it’s going on it’s almost like the road is covered in soap. So, here comes a truck. I don’t know the course of the event, but it can be guessed fairly clearly. So once again, exciting doin’s in downtown Thatcher, Utah.
I suspect the state environmental people are going to be thrilled that a truck went for a swim in a fast-flowing ag ditch, bringing all its oil and gasoline and radiator coolant with it…
Apparently the truck had one occupant, not seriously hurt.
Sep 242018
After a summer sky filled with smoke, dust and ash, in the last month or so the air has started to clear. Not all at once, and not completely, but at least the sky is usually *blue,* which for much of the summer it was not. below are some camera phone photos that aren’t half bad…
Sep 092018
Driving home from the grocery store in Brigham City, what should pull in front of me but the Batmobile.
Huh.
Well, alrighty.
Sep 082018
Photos from a week or so ago. It has not meaningfully rained in months; the consequence is lots of dust and smoke in the air. On most levels that… well, it sucks. But within a certain subset of photography, it can result in some interesting shots.
Sep 022018
So I recently came back from traveling. For the first time in some years I flew, and while the security theater certainly seemed to be better and more smoothly run than i remember from times past, the seating has only gotten worse. On the modern 737 I took on a few legs, they’d even gone to the bother of cutting the drink & food tray in half because there was simply no chance in hell of opening up the full size tray. Feh.
Anyway, as might be expected I took a number of photos throughout the exercise. Since they were taken with my cel phone, as might be expected they’re not the greatest. But they might be of interest.
The photos below are from shortly after liftoff from Salt Lake International. The flight path took us over the Great Salt Lake… which seems to have become little more than a meandering stream through the desert. Behold:
In the photos below, the slightly redder area to the left is Antelope Island. The lighter tan region *should* be a lake.
Sep 012018
Sep 012018
Aug 192018
Sunrise over the Wasatch mountains, taken from the window of a moving car. Not the best photos, certainly didn’t capture the colors involved, but still potentially of interest. All the smoke from California has really meddled with things.
Aug 122018
This giant beast resides up the hill from me. Clearly a fearsome killing machine, a nightmare creature from the age of legendary monsters such as Cerberus and the Minotaur.
