Spaghetti Soup

Here it is, just like I promised, the recipe for Spaghetti Soup:

Spaghetti Soup

1 lb. hamburger
1 small onion
1 green pepper
1 stalk celery
1 carrot
2 cloves garlic, minced

Chop vegetables and saute them with hamburger and a little olive oil. Drain the grease, place them in a pot and add:
2 1/2 cups water
2 15oz cans diced tomatoes
1 15oz jar spaghetti sauce
1 Tbsp sugar
1/2 tsp Italian seasoning (or oregano)
dash salt
1/4 teas. pepper
dash crushed red pepper

Let it simmer for about 30 minutes. Add about 2oz spaghetti noodles and simmer until pasta is tender. Serve with parmesan cheese.

Kate and I always always use Prego Ricotta Parmesan spaghetti sauce, because it's the best there is. We typically double (or triple!) the recipe, which is convenient since the spaghetti sauce comes in 32oz jars, and it is very convenient to reheat at school or work. I typically add more crushed red peppers because I like the heat, and we both smother it in parmesan cheese.

I don’t know what this recipe was originally called, but my mom got it out of a magazine forever ago, and we just call it spaghetti soup. The nice thing about soups, and this one in particular, is that they’re inexpensive, easy to make, and easy to store and reheat. This is probably Kate’s and my favorite meal to make, and even a triple recipe doesn’t last us long. I even made this last week in the trailer I’m working in on site where they’re drilling the oil well.

If you make it, be sure to leave feedback!

Happy Birthday Abraham Lincoln!

So a friend of mine just pointed out to me that today is Honest Abe's birthday, too, his 200th, in fact! So two of my heroes turn 200 today, and I forgot one of them. How rude of me! Happy Birthday, Mr. Lincoln! Man, what a shame it is what's happened to Illinois politics since you've been gone....

Happy Birthday Charles Darwin!

Charles Darwin, the father of modern evolutionary theory, would be 200 years old today, if natural selection hadn't had its way with him 126 years ago. Happy birthday, man!

Internship Update

So, I had no idea that having so much free time would make it so hard to blog! Part of the problem is working 24 hour shifts with 24 hours off in between is pretty exhausting; it also doesn't help to have such inconsistent internet access here. I'm still in McAlester, Oklahoma, still training, but in about a week or so I should be "breaking out" as they say, done with training. I was getting really worried that the guys training me were lazy and had really no idea what they were doing despite being hyped as awesome well loggers by the guys in the office, and I've recently found out that I'm exactly right.

One of the guys I was working with left for a vacation, after arranging for me to cover his shifts for the rest of this well. The first day I was supposed to work on my own, another guy, Pat, shows up unannounced saying that the office had sent him to finish training me and help cover the shifts. I was kind of annoyed at first, since I hadn't been kept informed, and since I was looking forward to just working on my own, but it's basically the best thing that's happened so far. I'd had a lot of questions about things I didn't understand regarding well logging, and no helpful answers. Also, the other guy I was training under expected me to know things about logging I that seemed way over my head, until I started suspecting he didn't know what he was talking about.

As it turns out, he and I were making a fairly useless well log, and within one day working with Pat all my confusion has been straightened out, the log finally makes sense, and I finally feel like I've learned something and can handle this job. Even better, at the next well they're sending me to (for British Petroleum), I'll be working opposite shifts with Pat, which makes me feel much less nervous about being solely responsible for the data I collect knowing I've got a good senior logger to set me straight.

There's still a lot of downtime, though, and now that I've gotten into the routine I can get to some non-leisure reading I'm supposed to do for one of my geology professors, which requires more concentration than the light reading I've been doing (I've gone through books seven and eight of the Wheel of Time series since coming out here). Also, I've been rewatching The Office from the beginning, and also watched several new movies. If I feel like it I'll post my thoughts on them (in detail for some) in future posts. For now, super brief reviews:

Iron Man: Awesome! I didn't expect to like it as much as I did, and it is a must-see.

Evan Almighty: Didn't want to watch it until Orson Scott Card said it was worth seeing despite Bruce Almighty. It was surprisingly good, and thought-provoking.

The Pursuit of Happyness: Another must-see. Will Smith is amazing, and so is Jaden.

City of Ember: Very good family movie. Not perfect, but highly recommendable.

The Mummy - Tomb of the Dragon Emperor: Don't waste your time. To sum it up: Yetis. And the Chinese chick can talk to them.

I've also been getting sick of fast food, so I bought a burner and a pot and some utensils, and I made soup. It's one of Kate's and my favorite recipes, called Spaghetti Soup, and it's fairly inexpensive and extremely easy to make and makes awesome leftovers, which is why I made it. You may have noticed I put a little spot with links to posts where I include recipes, and there's only my salsa recipe there so far. I mean to expand that section to include many different good recipes that Kate and I like, and I'll post Spaghetti Soup there soon.

I've also been looking for more photo opportunities. There are apparently some good scenic drives within an hour of here, and if I can manage it I might take my camera to some new places, especially since my photos have been getting positive responses on this blog. We had a big thunder storm here tonight (the first I've seen in forever!), so I tried to get a good lightning shot, but no luck. I guess I need to practice and experiment, but a good lightning photo is one of my big goals. I also might try to take some photos on the drilling rig itself, since this one is particularly dirty and has to be seen to be believed if you've never worked oil before. A drilling rig like the one I work at was featured once on Dirty Jobs on the Discovery channel. I did get a cool shot of the rig the other day as the sun poked through the clouds, and I'll use it to close this incoherent post:

My Oklahoma Experience So Far

I'm back in the Bible Belt, and the land of humidity and country music. This past week the temperature stayed in the low 30s for the first time in the almost month I've been here. 50-60°F is too warm for January!

What am I doing in Oklahoma? This semester I am working as an intern with Geosearch Logging, headquartered in Edmond, OK, just north of Oklahoma City. So far I've just been attending classes on well logging and training with experienced loggers, but soon I'll be logging a well on my own. What do I mean by logging? Basically I spend a long day in a trailer at a drilling rig, and as they drill an oil well I sit at a computer watching as equipment monitors the gas coming up from underground, and every once in awhile one of the rig hands brings me a bag full of crushed rock and I file it and tell them what it is. In between, there's not much to do, so I get to read books and watch movies... and get paid for it. Paid quite a bit, actually.

I feel like I've already been all over Oklahoma, and at some point I might be transferred to New York/Pennsylvania area. So far the towns I've done more than just drive through in Oklahoma are Oklahoma City, Edmond, Cushing, Yale, Woweka, Seminole and McAlester, all in just one month. Cushing, OK is known as the pipeline crossroads of the world, because practically all the oil pipelines from the Gulf of Mexico area pass through Cushing. I never got around to taking picture of the sign for Cushing, but I found a good one online:

When I left Idaho, it was anywhere from -10 to 10°F the whole drive until I got south of Colorado. I took a route through Wyoming through some familiar territory from a previous field trip, including Pinedale (and I saw the Camp Davis Formation outcrop all covered in snow). I took a few pictures as I travelled:

One last shot of the Menan Buttes covered in snow before leaving Rexburg.

Snow-covered mountains near the Palisades Reservoir in Idaho.

The Palisades Reservoir covered in ice. Where there wasn't ice, there was steam.

Aspen trees at the Palisades Reservoir.

The icy highway near Pinedale, Wyoming. There was so much ice I had to slow down to 35mph and put my Jeep into four-wheel-drive just to stay on the road.

Snow-covered rocks in Wyoming. This is just east of the Camp Davis Formation outcrop my geology friends will know very well. I saw that outcrop as I was driving, but didn't feel like turning around and stopping to take a photo. This was a better photo, anyway. I didn't notice the Moon was in the photo until I looked at it on my MacBook.

Once in Edmond, I spent some time in the Geosearch office being trained by the office geologist, Bill Graham. The company owner, Joe Struckel, is a major technophobe, and was having trouble using PowerPoint, and since I'd met him before he asked me to help him out, so I earned major bonus points by helping him put together a presentation he was going to give later that day. I also helped Bill Graham do some copy-editing on some of his training materials, and he insisted I put my name on the cover of the sample description manual so there would be more geologist names on it. So if anyone in the future goes to work for Geosearch as a mud logger, one of your training manuals will have my name on it.

After that I got some in-the-field training from a cool guy named Marshal Etter, and between working on rock samples we discussed Jimi Hendrix and Pink Floyd. He was sure to point out that Jimi Hendrix's middle name was Marshal. I got a bit of training from another guy named David Mardis, and then spent one morning on a well with a guy named Dave Schmidt. Dave Schmidt and I talked a lot of politics, and he kept making jokes about having tickets to Obama's "coronation" (sarcastically, of course, we agreed on pretty much everything). It was a fun morning even though I got so much second-hand smoke in four hours that it probably would have been healthier if I had simply smoked a pack (seriously).

At the moment I'm working along side two guys on a well in McAlester, OK, as a last bit of training. One of the guys, Steve, despite being just a few years younger than my parents, is into a lot of the same music as me, and has even heard of Apocalyptica, Emilíana Torrini and Sneaker Pimps, which really surprised me and gives me hope that when I get older I won't be a crusty old man who only likes the music I grew up with. He has a lot of LDS family, which made for some pretty interesting discussion. The other guy I'm logging with goes by Hoover, and he's cool, too. He gave me the coolest keychain ever, a miniature drill bit like the ones used on the drilling rig:

I've taken a few pictures down here in Oklahoma, too:

On I-40 between Edmond and McAlester I saw three trucks parked on an offramp carrying blades for windmills. You can't appreciate the scale of the windmills until you've stood next to one of these.

It was early morning, and the Sun made for cool effects.

We just had a big ice storm, something I haven't seen since I lived in Missouri. Naturally, I went nuts on the photos, and took about a million:

There was even ice on the drilling rig:

This is a good shot of the rig I'm working at right now. They're drilling a well for XTO:

Last night I looked out and saw the Moon and Venus right behind the rig. I'm still trying to get the hang of night shots, but I'm definitely getting better, and it was a chance to try some cool shots that I couldn't pass up. Here's the best one:

I wish I had a tele-photo lens, so I could take this shot from farther back and make the Moon look bigger next to the rig. Another time, maybe.

Meanwhile, this has been a nice break from blogging about politics, and this gets the personal info aspect of my blog caught up to the present. I hope you enjoyed the photos.

Barack Hussein Obama Inauguration Part 4: "Please, Lord, save us from the white people!"

This is the last post I'm going to do on the inauguration ceremonies; I'm pushing overkill here, and I wasn't going to post anything at all until the inauguration happened and there was just too much BS to leave it alone. This last bit is about the "prayer" offered by Dr. Joseph Lowery, former president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. I don't make a habit of criticizing how others pray, since I believe God hears all sincere prayers by those of any faith, and it is not my place to judge the sincerity of someone's personal prayer. This, however, was not a prayer, it was a speech, and a particularly offensive, divisive one. Listen to this speech (or not), and tell me which side of the political aisle is still obsessed with race and categorizes people based on the color of their skin:



I'm going to ignore most of the prayer, and focus on one statement at the end:

"Lord, in the memory of all the saints who from their labors rest, and in the joy of a new beginning, we ask you to help us work for that day when black will not be asked to get back, when brown can stick around, when yellow will be mellow, when the red man can get ahead, man, and when white will embrace what is right."

The first thing wrong with this is that it is a list of absurd catch-phrases partially intended to get a laugh (which they did), that have no place in a prayer worded as they are. What stupid statements. "When black will not asked to get back"? How long has it been since we make black people sit at the back of the bus? "When brown can stick around"? This is a statement promoting illegal immigration, which is an admittedly difficult topic to debate since we're talking about many people who are honestly trying to make a future for themselves in this country, and it's hard on them to feel lumped together with those who cross our borders illegally, often bringing drugs and crime. "When yellow can be mellow"? He pronounces it yellah and mellah. I have no idea what he means by this at all; I think it's in there to include another race, and to rhyme, that's it. "When the red man can get ahead, man"? I know of nothing at all standing in the way of any American Indian being successful. Many of them are very successful, owners of lucrative casino businesses. It's another stupid rhyme, too.

The other, far more offensive thing is the last statement: "When white will embrace what is right." My white heritage, immigrants and minorities, is the only heritage that is maligned here. The implicit message is "step aside, evil white people, it's the black man's turn now, you can't make us drink at a separate drinking fountain any more, 'cause you totally still do that!" After that hilarious poem, this had to be said, ruining the funny tone of the whole thing with this racist statement. I have been discriminated against by the man appointed by our new President to pray at his inauguration. Who is colorblind? Not Democrats.

If we truly want to move forward in a post-racial America, we need to see Barack Hussein Obama not as the first Black President, but as the 44th American President. I can't say it any better than Juan Williams wrote in the Wall Street Journal on the day of the inauguration:

"It is neither overweening emotion nor partisanship to see King's moral universe bending toward justice in the act of the first non-white man taking the oath of the presidency. But now that this moment has arrived, there is a question: How shall we judge our new leader?
If his presidency is to represent the full power of the idea that black Americans are just like everyone else -- fully human and fully capable of intellect, courage and patriotism -- then Barack Obama has to be subject to the same rough and tumble of political criticism experienced by his predecessors. To treat the first black president as if he is a fragile flower is certain to hobble him. It is also to waste a tremendous opportunity for improving race relations by doing away with stereotypes and seeing the potential in all Americans.

Yet there is fear, especially among black people, that criticism of him or any of his failures might be twisted into evidence that people of color cannot effectively lead. That amounts to wasting time and energy reacting to hateful stereotypes. It also leads to treating all criticism of Mr. Obama, whether legitimate, wrong-headed or even mean-spirited, as racist.

This is patronizing. Worse, it carries an implicit presumption of inferiority. Every American president must be held to the highest standard. No president of any color should be given a free pass for screw-ups, lies or failure to keep a promise."

The full article is called Judge Obama on Performance Alone, and can be found here.

Already Obama has given a gold mine of material to blog about, but I'm Obama'd out for the moment and I'm sure any of you who actually read all four of these inauguration posts all the way through are as well. Time for a break; I'll post about something else soon before returning to the topic of America's transition to socialism.

Barack Hussein Obama Inauguration Part 3: Amateur Poetry Recital

By far my favorite part of the whole deal was the "poem." I laughed so hard through the whole thing that milk came out of my nose, and I wasn't drinking milk. I don't have words to describe this, but in-between laughing harder than I have in a very long time and catching my breath from laughing so hard I barely had time to not believe my ears. Someone actually wrote a poem this bad, and no one involved in the event thought it would be a bad idea to read it? I still have a hard time believing it actually happened. Here it is, listen to as much as you can manage:

Hahahaha!

Hahahahahahahah!

Haha! Hahahahahahahahahahah!

Okay, I've caught my breath now. This is a double-fail: bad poem, badly read. I found the transcript of the poem, and I read a few lines aloud and it didn't sound nearly so bad. It still was crap, but at least I know I can read crap better than someone qualified enough to read crap at a Presidential Inauguration.

Rush Limbaugh's comment was 

Limbaugh asked on his show why poets always hide their message in symbolism instead of just coming out and saying what they have to say. Well, crappy poets get caught up in the symbolism, thinking that by being indecipherable people will think they're smart; good poets find striking, memorable images to convey a message. Sure, there's a simpler way to say it, but even if it takes more words, if you can associate a message with an image, it will have greater impact. You should understand this, Limbaugh, having spent so much of your early career as a DJ, and being such a fan of music. Music is poetry! Elizabeth Alexander's poem is garbage, though. Hilarious, insipid garbage. Limbaugh also said "If I can do it, it isn't art." Nonsense! Limbaugh has political discussion down to an art; no one can do what he does as effectively as he does it. Plus, even if quite a lot of people can, for example, doodle simple sketches, it's still art. This poem was definitely art, it just sucked beyond all measure of sucking. I could write a poem no one wants to hear, too, and it would still be art, just really crappy art.

Alexander was interviewed by Stephen Colbert the other night about her poem, but it was a disappointing interview. He didn't poke fun at the poem at all (of course, that was probably a condition of her appearing on the show, he could have been funnier about it had she not actually been on his show). Colbert jokingly asked "what is the difference between a metaphor, and a lie?", and instead of being eloquent, as you'd expect a poet to be, she didn't really say anything. This is a persistent trait of liberalism: symbolism is more important than substance. Colbert had to make her point for her, by saying "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day.... why not just say 'you're hot, let's do it!'?" In the right hands imagery and symbolism are effective tools. Shakespeare was those hands, Elizabeth Alexander is not those hands.

My favorite line from the poem: "Someone is trying to make music somewhere with a pair of wooden spoons on an oil drum, with cello, boom box, harmonica, voice." Hahaha!

The other highlight was when the poem ended, and the audience only knew because she left the podium, because there was no other cue, no obviously concluding statement, no change in inflection from the reader, Ms. Alexander. I really still don't believe I heard what I heard.