Oh man, uh, i'm a little behind

Holy shit holy shit holy shirt... so, i guess i got a little lazy with the blog. A few updates since i left Roswell:

I have a job! I work 40 hours a week at a home-brewing, wine-making and gardening supply store in Spring Lake Park. Makin bank, learning about brewing, wine-making, and possibly hydroponics?

I make beer! It's easy. You should too. and wine. and... tomatoes.

I have friends, who i see, like, all the time now! woo! I cook meals and share dear warmth with Nicole, drink beer with Mike, make beer with Dave, eat stuff with Sam, smoke cigars/discuss theology with Alan... i am happy.

My fantasy team continues to be awesome. So, back when i put the Seahawks in the Super Bowl and predicted Matt Hasselbeck to be the second coming of Christ. I meant Matt Cassel, and was talking about the Patriots. sorry for the confusion.

Oh, and I get to watch the Vikings now. su-wheet.

And i might finish bartending school, and i might not.

CHANGE.

Ah... that's better. I live in Minneapolis now and have great and loving friends around. ahhh.....

Hmm. I'm a little undecided about this whole continuing-to-blog thing. Now that so, so many of my talented and lovely friends are around to share in my experiences, i'm not sure if i'll feel like committing them to internet anymore. hmm...? Anyway if i'm being a lameass and not blogging, you know, and you care to know how my life's going, call me. (gives 'Call Me' sign. winks. oh yeah: ;-). there.)

So, changes. I decided to change the name of my blog, to something less pretentious (uh, literally). First off, I don't work in land management anymore, so that whole land-as-God-given-covenanty thing doesn't really work so much. Plus, it was a tad pretentious in the first-place. God didn't give me land, the government did, and i pretty much just drove my truck over it and pissed all over His sacred yucca plants.

And, I live in Minnesota now, so i lost the desert theme. I changed the background to roughly the color of BEER, which i shall soon start making and (possibly) serving. I'm unemployed, and a bit hobbyless at the moment (fantasy football does not count as a hobby), and strangely all my plans for the short-term revolve around alcohol. Since deciding happiness is my main priority right now, and that alcohol usually makes people somewhat happy or else really sad, I guess that's probably an okay thing.

Interesting note: people drink more during economic recession. It's true. So, plenty of market for tenders of the bar.

4 days and counting...

...and I am counting. I'm going to be a busy boy this week, packing shiz up and making the apartment spotless before I leave. Yeah, they're kind of hardasses around here as far as checkouts go. It'd probably be best to have a few days of cleaning before Friday, so I don't get hung up or anything.

So, I wrap up my job this week. The reason I traveled here, it was an okay job, it really was! However now my head is spinning, as far as career aspirations go. Professionally, I've been troubled lately. I realized today that my career goals haven't changed since I was six. If you'd have told me in the 1st grade, that when I graduated college, I'd get to drive around a big truck catching lizards and collecting acorns, I'd have been pretty stoked. As recently as this past March (when i took this job), I kept the same attitude. Kind of innocent, in a way. Or maybe i'm some kind of dumbass. oh, i don't know. i'm struggling here.

Also I have no idea what I'll do when I get up to the cities. Lab job at the U, or bartender probably. Part of me is screaming "Firefighter!", but that's probably my inner child, who incidentally is six years old. Little bastard, always seems to get his way.

So, the Vikings lost, but my fantasy team won! I named them Sunday Afternoon Ballaz, which is a flippin sweet carryover of our pickup basketball posse, the Friday Afternoon Ballaz (check out our website, er, facebook group!) Anyways, game ball -> Willie Parker. 3 TDs, sweet.

Watching the Vikes' game, I'm afraid to say, it looks like the Packers are going to be just fine with Aaron Rodgers. He's quality. Last summer, which I spent in Wisconsin, I had more than one person tell me I looked just like Aaron Rodgers. Still not quite sure about that.

By the way, I just figured out the hyperlinks feature, so I'm abusing it. Check this out.

I'm chipping away at my Roswell bucket list. It mostly consists of places to eat that I won't get to, because I bought way too much food here at the apartment. Damn. My crush on the girl at the Natural Foods Store is costing me a fortune. So much organic soup i don't need. I'm also contemplating one last alien-related exhibit, and buying something, anything, with an alien on it. I really shouldn't. It'll cost twice as much as if there were no alien on it, but who can resist the chincyness? I think I saw some alien beer, maybe i'll start there.

Ah, I'm about to escape Roswell, New Mexico. I feel special. One last note: Sixty years ago, 4 to 7 members of an advanced alien race crash-landed here after mastering intergalactic travel. They didn't get to go home. I do! Boy, do I feel special.

Cooler Ranch

Well, I'm back to naming my posts after flavors. SEX! was really a poor way to go in retrospect. I think using SEX! as a title qualifies as pandering to the audience, no? Geez, I thought I had more integrity than that. And then I remembered, I didn't.

Cooler Ranch, by the way, is because I went back up to my roommate's family's ranch over Labor Day weekend, and it was even cooler! Cooler Ranch totally is a flavor, by the way:

See.

Anyway, I got to help out at their family reunion, which is nice. I totally didn't fit into the family atmosphere, seeing as how over half of his family is Hispanic... but what are you going to do. It was like that movie, Wedding Crashers. No, not really. It was actually really fun.

I found out a cool new way to cook meat! Light a fire underground, then bury it! It was pretty sweet. i AM trying this on my own, once I get home and a hunting license. Details to follow.

So, I haven't really disclosed my awesome travel plans yet. Seeing as how I'll be leaving Roswell on September 12th, and not moving into our Dinkytown Happyhouse until October 1st, I'm going to use those 2 1/2 weeks to travel! I'm out west anyway... so eh. Yeah! I'll be in Denver [visiting a friend :-)] from 9/12-9/15, in Layton, Utah from 9/16-9/19 visiting my sister and soon-to-be brother [:-)], then to Oregon! Destiny has propelled me there. All you friends of mine (i.e. Laina, I know you're reading this), saying I'd fit in so well on the West Coast... I'll be there a week, to test it out. Woot. Oregon better put up or shut up.

I tried moving somewhere random, for sole purposes of having a job there. It didn't work. Time to go scouting, places where I could be happy...

Ah, what else. It's time for football! Even though I wasn't present for my fantast draft, my pre-determined rankings did me well.

Why doesn't Matt Hasselbeck get any love? Top 5 QB in the league, and has been for the past 5 years. Geez. My fantasy team is so solid. I'm stoked.

Bold, fearless predictions on the upcoming NFL season:

As predicted earlier, Randy Moss breaks his leg in October. Pats go 13-3, look great, lose in AFC Championship to the Steelers.

Biggest disappointments: New York Giants (7-9), Cincinnati Bengals (Cinco-Oncé, 5-11) and Indianapolis Colts (9-7, edged out of playoffs).

Biggest surprises: Oakland Raiders (9-7, make playoffs, beat Jacksonville in Wildcard round, lose to New England). Seattle, at 13-3. Matt Hasselback looks like the second coming of Christ. Loses at home to Minnesota in NFC Championship Game...

AFC Championship: Steelers 22, New England 20
NFC Championship: Vikings 24, Seahawks 20.

Super Bowl...
I haven't decided yet.

SEX!

Ha, fooled you. this post isn't about sex at all. I just really wanted you to read it, because it's got all kinds of important stuff like how I'm moving back up to Minnesota very very soon(!!!). And hey, studies show... as far as eye-catchers go, SEX! is pretty much the title you go with.

So to begin... don't really know how much of this I've let on via blog, but moving out to Roswell pretty much turned out to be a huge disappointment. When I write, I like to throw up stupid stories and stuff that enters my head, and the negative stuff (rightly) doesn't make it to the surface. Hey, I didn't start a blog just so I could bitch about things all the time.

So, seeing as how a great majority of my very best friends are still in Minnesota, as well as my parents, why not move back?? I'll be living right around Dinkytown, with the lovely Alan Stout, David Moon and Nicole Peterson! YYEAH!

I'm leaving Roswell on September 12th, then, well, doing a whole lot of traveling out west before I get back. Colorado, Utah, and Oregon. Why? Mostly awesome peeps I happen to know in those three locations, and pretty much, i see those as places out west where I could actually thrive
and flourish (unlike rural New Mexico). So... a scouting trip, between obligations in New Mexico & moving back to my glorious home state.

I didn't actually "quit" my internship, i just cut it about 2 months short (from 5 months to 3). Lizard-catching season is pretty much winding down anyway, and it seemed like without lizards, the bosses here would just scramble something together for me to do. For another two months. Nah, I decided, my future's not here, and I'd rather go home.

So what don't I like about Roswell? Well, first allow me a graphic that illustrates everything Roswell isn't:




Roswell, a teen sci-fi-ish series (think Smallville) that lasted from 2000 to 2003 on the WB, does an outright horrible job accurately portraying life here. The clean, attractive young people shown above don't seem to be gang members at all. I bet half of them haven't even tried meth, let alone made and sold it. They're probably tolerant, upstanding people who don't own attack dogs, drive around drunk, and say incredibly racist things. And, of course, they're aliens. I haven't met one stinking alien here.

wow, this is turning into the post where ben vents. calm...

Okay. I'm coming home very soon (probably move into the Cities around October 1st), so if you're around and reading this you should stop by and hug me. And then we can hang out!

What's Ben going to do for a job once he's moved back?, you may be thinking. If you are, cool! I'm thinking that too.

Brains make you dumber.

Hey all,
Well, during in my time in Roswell, I've been trying to pick up on subtle differences between academic, biological science and biology for practical purposes (such as occur at the BLM). I found something interesting in talking to my boss Steve. They're doing interviews for a new Wildlife Biologist position opening up in Roswell (a spot i declined interest in), and Steve has interviewed a handful of guys. He refers to the by their GPA's in college: "Two 4.0's, a 3.6, a 3.2, and a 3.0" And he's showing preference for them in inverse order. Yep, favor based on low GPAs, so far.

To those of you who've just graduated college (most of you, i'd imagine), this must offend the hell out of your scholastic sensibilities. The reasoning for it is this: the higher the GPA, especially with anyone insane enough to have a 4.0, the higher the ability to use high-end, complex reasoning skills and brown-nose your ass off. Big frickin whoop. This is the real world, Commie. The worse you did in college, the more time you presumably (pending interview) spent gaining valuable social skills, doing things you weren't instructed to do, or things you were instructed not to do, and gaining real world skills. And the more likely you are to operate a truck without needing "instructions."

And you know what, he's right. Me and my education get the damn truck stuck in the sand far too often, and for the other guys I work with, pulling a truck out of the sand is just called Saturday. Hey, any idiot can catch a lizard. To do so without suffering a critical existential crisis WHAT AM I DOING HERE takes at most a 2.6 GPA.

I went to Carlsbad Caverns & the Guadalupe Mountains of Texas today! The caverns are HUGE, sweet, and limestone-y. The mountains were good, a nice little hike and a jaunt into neighboring Texas. The Caverns are about 2 hours south of here... pretty much something i had to do during my time in New Mexico, and I'm glad I did it. As time might be winding down, hey, time to exhaust any cool things around here to do.

Aw, Now I'm All Warm On The Inside

Hey Friends,
Man do I feel great after some time home! Big thanks to everyone who played a part in that awesomeness, and, for those whom I haven't seen in a while, here's hoping our day will come soon.

To clarify, I got to spend a day or two in the Twin Cities, bus over to Milwaukee for a week to attend an ecology conference courtesy of St. Olaf, and then a couple days split between the Twin Cities and home before flying into Roswell tonight. MAAAN that felt good. Felt nice and warm on the inside, as opposed to here where i only feel warm on the outside.

Ecology conferences are great. More generally, I'm a fan of any gathering that reeks of science. I loved the symposium each spring at Olaf, and this ESA meeting was pretty much that, but more intense and lasting a week, the content of which covered pretty much all research contemporary in ecology. sweet! I'm finally feeling very, very motivated... like, grad school motivated. Seriously.

My rationale for taking a job in monitoring (as opposed to research) was to see another side of what people do with biology degrees. College is great for getting a thorough look in how people are using their degrees, at college. And in regards to biology, that's going to be research and teaching for the most part. Yet there's a slew of other stuff, the non-ivory tower stuff like catching lizards with sticks and getting your truck stuck, that just doesn't get represented. perhaps rightly so. and you know what? I really haven't cared to advance in monitoring, at least based upon what I've experienced so far. But now i know. So... grad school?

I told myself I'd have to have a real passion for something before pursuing it at the graduate level. And, I think ESA might have opened my eyes to something. Firstly, how confusing and convoluted the field of ecology is! Many if not most of the research presented at a place like ESA goes something like this.

So, I draw inferences about (hypothetical construct) and support the current model of Dr. So&so et al. (year), based upon the past (3 - 6) years of my life spent bent over a patch of soil observing (latin name of organism, probably 30+ letters and uninteresting) as a case study.

Not to diminish research in ecology (heavens no!), or to suggest it should be done any differently. That's just how a great deal of it runs. Doing something not terribly interesting to people at large (i.e. sampling soil, counting maggots, measuring carapaces, etc.) to support or refute some construct developed by someone else twenty years ago. As a result, a lot of biologists I've met have an organism that they've pretty much banked their careers on (at Olaf for example, Freedberg = turtles, Crisp = leeches, Porterfield = fish esp. long-eared sunfish, etc). I'm not sure I'll ever have a passion for any particular case study like that, but you never know. I see myself more as a theory guy.

And, I love evolution. yep, at a personal level too. Feel it pretty much explains everything, and when I think of academic biology in my time beyond St. Olaf, its pretty much always geared toward applying evolutionary theory somehow. It's a definite grad school possibility for me, though yeah, vague at this point. I found myself gravitating towards the evolution-related talks at ESA, and was interested to hear that the evolution guys have their own conferences as well (according to one ecologist I talked to, evolutionary biologists are seen as more competitive, and less collaborative, than ecologists. That natural selection, i tell ya. gets into your brain.)

So for now.. yeah, more stuff to figure out. Viva la evolution!