Saint Patty's Day, etc.

Compared to working all week, St. Patrick's Day was quite exciting. It began with me receiving my first paycheck. As a result, I took Ashley out to dinner at the Med. Immediately following this, I went with Ashley to a campus performance titled "Dance Works". I'm not even sure where to begin on this topic. At times, the performance was almost epileptic. Other times I thought that Jake's river dance would have been more impressive. Just to be fair, there were some brief episodes of contemporary dancing that I would classify as artistic and skillful, making the performance entertaining as far as dance goes. I think it lasted about 2.5 hours. I think I broke into a slight jog on my way out of the theater, straight to the local pub for some green beer. Some might be an understatement, but we'll just say I had green beer. The rest of the evening just went downhill from there.

On Sunday Ashley and I went skiing up at Eldora. This was Ashley's third day on tele gear, and she's pregressing at the rate that I remember doing myself a little over a year ago. It's kind of funny because I can totally relate to most of the problems she is having. Since it was a powder day, I had to do my own thing early in the day. There was about 4 to 6 inches over hardpack, making the day pretty darn good on a scale of 1 to 10.

Good news and bad news -
Good news: the mountains are expecing 2 feet of snow today and tomorrow!
Bad news: I'll be at work. The only thing that gets me through is knowing that I'm leaving for Telluride on Saturday for a week of skiing with my buddy Adam.

As for work, I'm now involved with three mining projects. In addition to the central Idaho one, I'm working on a gold mine in Venezuela, and a tailings impoundment in Moab, Utah, across the highway from Arches N.P. - reasonably fun and entertaining projects.

Work

Many of my frequent blog readers have been asking how work is going, and I tell all of them that I'll write something in my blog when I have something worth saying. However, I feel that my standards for what is worth saying have risin during my month of playing to a level that work just can't compete with. At risk of this post falling into that catagory of "Unworthy" news in my life, I proceed with caution.

For those who know little to nothing of what I'm doing, I'm working for Golder Associates, Inc. in Lakewood, Colorado. The company performs a variety of geotechnical work around the globe. It's the largest privately owned company in our industry, so don't go trying to buy a bunch of Golder stock - it won't happen. . . unless, of course, you happen to be an employee. On my second day of work I was handed a brand new Dell Laptop. Until now, I've been busy working on a molybdenum mining project located in Central Idaho. Apparently someone has been putting rocks behind a dam there for the last 20 years and they want to continue doing so for the next 10 years. They problem is that they don't know if the embankment dam is large enough to hold all the rock. That's where I come in. As if 200 million tons of rock wasn't enough - the capacity the 600' high dam was designed for - they want to put 210 million tons behind it. So why not just make the dam higher to retain the extra rock? Because the environmental permitting is only for a 600' high dam. (scratch head . . . hmmmm). We'll see how it goes.

Ashley and I went downhill and skate skiing last Sunday. Since that time, she had finished setting herself up with a telemark setup. I think this weekend we'll be back at Eldora (The Dora we like to call it now) crashing up a storm. Actaully, the storm is arriving Wednesday, so we'll just be crashing.