LEAVE ME ALONE!

I was nice and asleep (I think I sleep better here than in my own bed) and all of a sudden I was jolted awake!  Frogs keep jumping around and two ran into my tent last night.  Normally I get a frog or two over the night for the last few nights, but two at once is a first.  They seem to not realize you need to go around the tent and instead they try to climb up and over it.

From the guy with his eye on the sky, Travis...the camping lifeguard

Seagull Hunting

Back between my junior and senior year, I spent about 10 days at a camp called Lead America. I took the engineering camp, and we had a lead instructor who is a physics professor who went to MIT. One day he told us about an underground group he was in at MIT, which performed pranks on campus. Multiple pranks involved disassembling cars and reassembling them in offices and on top of buildings (even running, and in the case of the police car, warm donuts).

One prank that he and his friends did was to go out every morning to a football field. They all would wear referee shirts and take with them a bag of popcorn. The would feed the seagulls, and the birds would flock to eat the popcorn. Over the corse of a few weeks, the seagulls learned. They knew that whenever someone in a referee’s shirt appears, food is on the way. During some home games, there would be so many birds in the stadium and field they had to stop the game for a while.

Here at the beach, we have seagull problems already. People feed them and they get to a point where they attack kids for food. Their poop, when washed from the ground and pilings they sit on, can raise the e-coli levels to a level where it is unsafe and we have to close the beach (also when the nearby creek that runs thru the city gets a lot of water and makes things worse at the beach). This happened already this summer after a heavy rain; we had to close shore, but apparently it was fine to go off the diving board. Made for a very boring lifeguarding day.

Normally we have to tell people to stop feeding the seagulls. Today I got to work and saw someone feeding seagulls. I asked her to stop feeding them, then I went hunting! I don’t know why, I just did.

I am not a gun person besides nerf guns, but I came to work on my bike, and being a lifeguard, I had my whistle. So I hopped on my bike, whistle in mouth, and tried to run them down on my bike, blowing my whistle the entire time. After a few passes, about a dozen, most of the seagulls left the area. On my break I did it again as another group of people were feeding the seagulls.

I am hoping over time the seagulls will learn to stay away for good. I doubt that will happen, but at minimum they will learn that crazy people on a bike wearing red with a whistle is something to avoid. What would really be great is instead being any time a biker goes by OR wearing red OR blows a whistle, then they will flee instead of bike AND red AND whistle.

If my cousins are reading this, they know what is coming because of OR and AND, but for the rest of you, well I just can’t leave enough alone. Yes, I am already brainstorming a program to write where each seagull and person is an object. Have hundreds of seagulls and hundreds of people, and on a given day most of the seagull objects and dozens of people objects with come into play on the “beach”. Each person is either walking, biking, or driving by, some people with group with other people to make “families” with different bonding levels. Each person might pass thru, stop, eat, swim. Those who stop and eat are most likly to feed the seagulls. Kids each have random excitment level, and the more excitable, the more likly to chase of seagulls. Each person also will have described color of shirt, pants, hat, glasses, whistle, and transportation (bike, skateboard, or car (which can’t leave the parking lot)). There will be special people (lifeguards) which stop any and all feeding of seagulls then scare them.

The seagull objects will keep track of when they are scared off people and what they are wearing or on. When scared, they will remember that they have been scared by those properties of the people. They won’t have the best memory, maybe three or four scares, depending on the health of the bird, and if they don’t get scared by say someone with a red shirt for 4 scares, they forget that they were scared by a red shirt. Every time they get scared by a red shirt after the first one, the memory countdown is reset, and they keep track of how many time they have been scared by a red shirt since they first started keeping track. The more often a seagull is scared by people, no matter what they are wearing, the more distance they keep from people. On the other hand, you can domesticate seagulls by feeding them, resulting them in being less likely to be scared. Where seagulls go, home to perch or to the beach to eat, or even elsewhere, depends how hungry the seagull is, and also other seagulls feel about that gull. Over time all seagulls like each other but if a seagull takes food from other another seagull or gets something good (fish from the lake) and other gulls are not able to get the food from them.

Where, what, and how much seagulls eat depends on the number of people in other areas (eat on beach or at Pamida), water temperature (fish), wind (strong wind makes it harder to hunt). Number of people and what they are doing is based on air temperature (amount of swimmers), wind speed and direction (water temperature), day of week (weekends have more travelers), and if there is a special event.

Oviously there is a lot there, and I plan to take it in small parts, and I have higher priorities, but this here is enough for me to remember what I want to do.

From the guy with his eye on the sky, Travis...the camping lifeguard

Day Off

I would like to thank one of my co-workers for letting me have yesterday off. My having it off I was able to go on a 4 mile swim along the shore. That 4 mile swim wore me out enough that I took a nap. The nap ment it was harder to go to bed that night, and had I been asleep at midnight like I should have, I would have not gone to the bathroom at 1 am. 1 am was when the aurora was out. Thank you for taking my shift!

From the guy with his eye on the sky, Travis...the camping lifeguard

The Aurora

Last night I had to go to the bathroom before going to sleep and it was bright out. Didn't take long to look up and see the Aurora was out and dancing. A frantic rush to my camera and I got some of the pictures you see here on the right.

Unforchently digital cameras suck at this. There were three lines of lights, the line directly overhead would pulse like a rave. Below that (more north) was a small layer of green glow, then the main system. Again, my camera doesn't do justice. The aurora was bright enough that I could see my shadow on the ground. When you look at the pictures I took, most of them used a 60 second shutter and then were digitally lightened.

Click on the image to see a larger version!

From the guy with his eye on the sky, Travis...the camping lifeguard

Oh, and while I was watching I played with the fire too!

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Rose is Rose

I have a favorite comic called "Rose is Rose". It always has some nice, happy, family friendly comics. I was reading the comics today and saw this one, http://www.gocomics.com/roseisrose/2011/07/24, which reminded me of the awesomeness of the other night.

I wasn't carrying garbage, but I, like Jimbo, enjoy a good starry night.

From the guy with eye on the sky, Travis...The camping lifeguard

This Preview is Rated PG for ickiness

Every 17 years comes a beast from below. Their sounds fill the air, drowning out everything thing else. They are everywhere yet many do not see them. Soon they will disappear for another 17 years. There are 2,500 types of these five eyed creatures. This year they are back!

They are THE CICADAS!

They are up here in Wisconsin. I remember them from growing up in Iowa. I think they are really cool but its funny to watch other people freak out at them.

From they guy with his eye on the sky, Travis....The Camping Lifeguard

Spirit Rocks

I can’t remember if I mentioned them before, but out here on the beach there is a type of special rocks called Grandfather Rocks or Spirit Rocks. Take a look! (Click on the image for larger view)

And here are some others I found:

From the guy with his eye on the sky, Travis...the camping lifeguard

Then and Now

I mentioned a while ago Jeniqua was the one who brought me to nature. Had it not been for her, I would not be doing this right now...she got the ball rolling. Let me tell you who I was before her. I remember it like it was yesterday... *Fill screen with white wavy lines indicating flashback sequence*

I grew up mainly with three sets of toys, K’nex, Legos, and a farm set. Oh, and there was the train track but that was almost always with the farm set. Pretty much every weekend I would play McDonalds in the upstairs hallway with my younger sister. When not playing that I would build with K’nex and Legos. K’nex almost always became a steerable car or amusement park rides. Legos were guaranteed to become a weather station. I remember that usually the most pride out of the weather station was not that it was two stories, but that the motor that ran the satellite dish actually had a passive heat duct built into housing. All three toy sets would then merge on the top bunk of the futon I had in my room, while I slept on the couch due to a fear of heights and rolling off something so high.

This pretty much summed up every weekend in elementary, middle and high school, at least until we got the family computer at which computer games also got included. I still think the Christmas gift of Flight Simulator 2002 was a ploy by my parents to get over my fear of flying, which did work and is still an awesome game. My first laptop resulted in lots of cities being made in Sim City, lots of flights in FS2002, empires concored with Civilization 2, and trying to see if Intelligent Qube and Crash Bandicoot from the PlayStation would work on my laptop. My time on my laptop and the family computer is why I know so much about them now...I liked to experiment and break things, then hopefully fix them before the parents got home.

When it rainned outside I would go outside after it was done and use sticks to change the flow of water going down the driveway behind the house, or move puddles in the pasture using the rubber boots I had on and squishing the ground. Sometimes we would build bonfires or I would ride my bike into a cement wall (pre-teen and teen years...also how I learned how to ride and use the rear brake not the front). Sometimes we would head to the ravine behind our house, a forth mile away (I love Iowa, everything is so grid like), and go on a walk or sledding.

One of my favorite places of “where the dead cars are” ravine was the large hole in the ground where the water in the ravine would drain into the neighbors land. It was a six foot diameter L shaped metal tube that went down then under the fence. There was always the worry when sledding we would get swallowed up in it like my closet once did (thanks mom for getting us out) and be trapped forever. Yet, other than the spring pit out there, I didn’t really care about the natural parts of the ravine. Heck I cared so little I spell it revene, which spellcheck says its wrong so I go to reveane. Time to look up words similar to vally (which adds another step since its really valley) in order to get ravine, which odd since I say it revenue.

Anyways, dad would sometimes ask me if I wanted to go to “where the dead cars are” or somewhere else for a walk. I could tell he was disappointed but I didn’t really care about going on some boring walk exploring nature...Train Simulator is more interesting...each tree is six flat services rotated 45° from each other so no mater which angle you look at it looks full. Great way to be pseudo 3-D and use less processing power. No, figuring out how they programmed this game is way more intresting.

Then I met Jeniqua. We met part way through our fall freshman year. She was an outdoor nerd, I was a computer nerd. A perfect contradiction. We became friends and she got me to enjoy the outdoors. In the mornings we would go on a walk either in the ravine or ravine or ravine. When your college is surrounded on three sides by a ravine, its where you go to explore. I just now released that gives a little more meaning to the Jurassic Park gates the college installed. I remember the end of my freshman year, mom was driving me home and looking in the ditch at purple flowers would remind me of her. Nature had become not just intresting, but with meaning to other parts of my life.

In our junior year of college we went camping twice. The first time was just to Washburn and was a trial for an epic adventure to Canada! I believe the socially correct phase for describing the trip is “OMG so AWSOME!” On one night, we hiked to the top of a mountain to watch the sun set, went back down to have dinner and stare at the stars (must be what staring is all about, they both start with star) then slept until 4 am before hiking back up the mountain for pancakes and watch the sunrise.

Before this I didn’t go camping at all but these two adventures started it for me. In fact, both that summer, and the summer after I went back to Washburn to camp, and hopefully see loons. Oddly enough to get there its 16 miles. Sound familiar? Yes, I biked out there and back too. And, unlike what I am doing now, everything I had to camp with was attached onto my bike. Fairly minimalistic, just sleeping bag, pad, tent and JUST enough food to last, and off course my camera. If it had not been for those spring and summer trips, I would be currently living on campus, spending 300$ per month and having my pots and pans stolen like last year.

Thank you Jeniqua!

From the guy with his eye on the sky, Travis...The Camping Lifeguard