The Sierra Anchas are made up of the Precambrian sequence we saw previously at Kearny in our spring Field Geology class. The Jug and Salome Creek expose basal granite, diabase, and cliffs of Pioneer Shale. Above that are cliffs of Dripping Springs Quartzite. The entire sequence is exposed in the actual Sierra Ancha mountains, including Mescal Limestone and Troy Quartzite. Apparently, there are outctrops of Cambrian Tapeats Sandstone (or equivalent) at the tops of some of the peaks in the range.

Kelly and I went camping in the Sierra Anchas this weekend. On saturday we went to "The Jug", which is a totally awesome creek hike. There are some pretty deep pools, and we had a lot of fun swimming around and exploring. We almost got stuck down in the canyon! 

Had a bit of a scare today. When I turned my laptop on this morning, it wouldn't start up all the way. It just sat there with a blank screen and the hard drive light was lit up, like it was just spinning the drive but not doing anything. After a while I remembered that yesterday I told my computer to run disk check next time it starts up. But it's still scary to look at a blank laptop like that. I find that as I'm writing my dissertation, I'm becoming more paranoid about the little fits and spurts that my laptop throws. It already takes about 5-10 minutes every day before the backlight turns on and illuminates the LCD screen. I just don't have another $1000 to throw at new laptop, as nice as that may be.

I finished chapter 2 now. It's the methods chapter, so it will change alot while I'm writing the rest of the dissertation as I remember additional things. But at least it's down and I can move on to chapter 3, which is basically my American Mineralogist paper.

I watched Crash tonight. Kelly could only stand about 40 minutes of it. It was all about how shitty life is with prejudice, so it was depressing and boring. I say boring because it was the same old stuff I heard in my freshman diversity seminar in college. But I did learn some things...

Top 5 lessons I learned from Crash:

1. Never pick up hitchhikers
2. Don't be an asshole if you're asking someone for a favor.
3. If your lock is broken, fix the damn thing yourself.
4. Never, ever live in L.A.
5. If I wanted to see a bunch of famous actors playing people with fucked up lives connecting through a series of coincidences, I'll watch Magnolia, thank you very much.

Then Ed sunned himself on the rocks to warm up. 

Ed had a blast swimming around. 

Kelly and I went to West Pinto Creek today with the dog. 

Working on chapter 2 now, which is the methods chapter. I'm also doing my last bit of sample prep this week, which helps refresh my memory for writing.

So I wanted to test all this mp3 store shit, and I bought a song off the Yahoo music store. If you must know, the song is "The Commander Thinks Aloud" by the Long Winters, which is a totally awesome song. Of course it is a protected WMA file, but that should play on even my crappy mp3 player. Unfortunately it doesn't. So I bought a song and all I can do with it is play it on my laptop or burn it to a CD. It's not even transferrable to another one of my computers, even though I have the Yahoo software there too. What a gyp! But there is a silver lining. I can burn it to a CD, and then rip it from the CD to make an unprotected MP3. But that reduces the sound quality. I'm gonna play with that a little more to see if I can increase the quality a bit, but it's pretty ridiculous to jump through all these hoops just to listen to a song that I own on my mp3 player.

Edit: ripping the CD to a WMA file works much better, because the file was originally a WMA.

I finished chapter 1, finally. I was working until 6:30 on Friday, but I was starting to zone out by then. This morning I just had to add a short summary paragraph to close the chapter, and then I was done. Then I sent it off to my committee for them to shred apart.

This weekend was pretty relaxing for me. Kelly and I exchanged anniversary gifts yesterday. I gave her a blue apatite ring and she gave me the new Godfather PS2 game (which is awesome!).