Ceiling Tree

Going through my mother's stuff today I came across this old newspaper clipping.  It is of my uncle.

Yup, that sounds like Rick.

Chicken, birds, footprints

Quiet times here.

The weather is middling.  Not cold.  Not warm.   We have had a few instances of snow the past few days but it appears to have added up to less than a half inch.  The snow is not good for cross country skiing, yet there is enough old snow to prevent hiking or doing much else outside.

So I read.  I have many large stacks of magazines around the living room waiting to be read.

Today I cooked a chicken (plus garden potatoes and carrots) in a crock pot.  My first time ever cooking in a crock pot.  It turned out good.

So I eat and read and get fat.  And dream of Summer.

The other day I had a bird in my garage. The way the garage was built the big garage door doesn't completely close.  The bird was flying around inside banging into walls and the window and crapping on things.  I was afraid it would break the window.  I once had two flickers in my bard and instead of flying through the open door they went through two windows.  The bird then had flown into the attic above the bunk room attached to the garage.  I walked around the outside of the bunk room and banged on the wall to encourage the bird to leave.  Eventually it walked out of the garage and flew away.  A flicker.  *sigh* Those birds get into such trouble.  In addition to breaking my barn windows, I once had a flicker fall down my house chimney.

Other animals about was a large cat I surprised in the pole shed when getting firewood.  And owls hooting in the night.  Get those mice!

A few days ago I visited Bob and Jan.   I bicycled over and in doing so I noticed trampled snow in my hayfield on my southern boundary. Hmmmm.  I followed the foot tracks across my hayfield then south pasture all the way to the river.  It looks as if they crossed the river channel.  I didn't.

Along the way I found a few young tree branches broken.

It appears they followed the power lines that led to the neighbor's irrigation site across the river channels.  From the broken branches they must have felt the branches would grow toward the power lines years from now.

Bob and Jan told me that the day before I got home the electric transformer on the power pole near their property blew with a loud bang and they temporarily lost power.  The electric company had to come fix it.  That would explain the foot tracks across my property following the power lines.  I imagine they had to find out why the transformer blew up. If you remember I had heard last week noise from the neighbor's irrigation site across the river. He must have shorted the electric lines or something to blow the transformer.

First impressions back

My first impression immediately when I got off the train at Whitefish last week was the smokey smell.  The smell was from all the wood stoves in the Valley.  When one is here all the time you don't notice it.  After a few days I can no longer smell it.  The first day back the smokey smell did seem a little strong.

Even with the above freezing weather the Valley had here recently, there was still snow on the ground when I arrived.  My first day back I shoveled snow from the driveway and the yard.  On the sidewalk to the house door the snow had turned to ice and between an ice chipper and the warm temperatures I was able to clear it.

I am not sure my house's furnace was working correctly.  The house was a little colder (mid to upper 40s) than the thermostat's setting in the lows 50s.  I had to take the thermostat cover off before it would trigger the furnace to start.  I cleaned the thermostat's contacts the next morning and that seemed to have fixed the problem.  Ever since then I have used my wood stove for heating the house.

No broken water pipes - which is always good.
No mice moved into the house when I was gone.  That was good.

My first night home I went to bed early and slept 11 hours.

I had to get a new battery for my car as my car wouldn't start without being jumped by another vehicle.  The old Everstart battery from Walmart was purchased back in April of 2002 and the warranty was for 6 years.

I am in a winter holding pattern.  The snow and frozen ground prevents me from doing stuff on my to-do list.  The snow, due to the recent warm temperatures, is crunchy crusty and not good for cross country skiing.  The temperature is not so cold where one is happy to just be inside.  But it is warm enough to make a person to start thinking about Spring without being able to do anything about it.

I am just trying to get my equilibrium/routine back after being away.

Daylight deer and mountain views

Around 9 am Wednesday morning I saw ten or eleven deer in a line come from my pasture, run across my hayfield, jump the fence to the road, and continue eastward.  A mixture of bucks and does.  No fawns.  It was odd to see so many deer at this time of the day.

Later in the day I went to check my pocket gopher traps in the pasture.  No trapped gophers.  Instead that pesky gopher again covered my trap with dirt.  So much for my last ditch effort to catch my 250th gopher for 2009.

While in the pasture I heard human and machine noises from across the river.  Due to the trees I couldn't see the cause for the activity.  It sounded like it was coming from the area where the neighbor formerly had a irrigation pump to pump water from the river.  Perhaps he is again installing an irrigation pump.

Anyway, all that commotion would explain why so many deer were out in the open during daylight.  Usually the deer spend the day in the trees around the river.

Here are photos I took later that afternoon of my view of the Swan Mountain Range.

Back home

I am back home.  I took the train from North Dakota on Saturday.

The train was a half hour late into Minot.  I don't have a watch so I am not sure if we made up time and got to Whitefish on schedule.  I think we did.  While our stop in Havre seemed shorter than normal, our later stop in Shelby was longer than normal.  Besides once I got home, by the time the clock reset itself to the correct time, the time was 10 pm, which leads me to believe the train arrived on time into Whitefish by 9 pm.

The train was fairly empty.   Initially the main train attendant had me go down three cars to board.  After I did so I decided to check the car several cars up closer to the middle of the train.  I had been placed near the end of the train and that meant a longer walk to the depot once the train arrived in Whitefish.  The second car had few people on board and I even saw a woman going to Whitefish who I had seen earlier in the Minot depot.  She said the train attendant told her to board this car.  So I went back to the first car and told the train attendant I would be moving up two cars.  She was fine with it.

My car had an odd smell to it and Amtrak needed to take the car out of service for a bit in order to do a deep cleaning of it.

I pretty much slept or read magazines and seldom looked out the window at the landscape.  I do remember seeing in the night the large number of red lights on top of the windmills west of Shelby.  Later it was pitch black by the time we reached the mountains.

A strange bearded 30-something guy sat at the end of the car.  When he wasn't wandering up and down the aisle with his ipod's earphones in his ears, he was explaining his shirt choices to various people.  I think he wore three or four or five different shirts that day.  Later, as he passed by, he made a snarky comment about the two military men's conversation.

For the entire trip one of the military men saw in the seat behind me.  Then the last two to three hours of my trip another military guy stopped and started up a conversation.

The guy behind me was an ex-marine who had left the service last year after a five year hitch doing mainly aircraft maintenance. He was 23 years old. The second guy was an Army ranger on his way to being stationed at Fort Lewis in Washington state.  The ranger was in year five of an eight year commitment. He was 22 years old. The two had an interesting conversation comparing and contrasting their two branches of the military, the weapons they had a chance to fire and the helicopters their branch of the military used and ones they had flown in.

The Army ranger talked about his tour of duty in Iraq several years ago.  When he was 20 he was in a firefight where the U.S. servicemen were outnumbered.  Because the ranger had injured his foot several days earlier his best friend was the person who kicked in the door instead of the ranger.  The best friend was shot up and killed when he entered the room.  The ranger got his friend (200+ lbs not counting the body armor) and carried him out of the room and back to the Humvee.  Apparently a side effect of carrying his friend was the ranger's Kevlar body armor got twisted around on his body.  Under fire the ranger was shot.  It wasn't until he reached the Humvee and deposited his friend that he noticed blood.  A medic came over to help him and the next the ranger knew he woke up in the hospital.  Apparently, since the Kevlar vest was twisted, a bullet got through and bounce off one of his ribs.  He was sent back to the U.S. to recover and also got a purple heart medal.  He never went back to Iraq as his unit finished their tour of duty and came back to the U.S. before he went back to active duty.

Both men had killed enemy solders and agreed that it annoyed them greatly when people who weren't in the military wanted to know how many people they had killed.  They didn't mind talking about that part of combat with other solders but did not like talking to others about it as they wouldn't understand having never been in battle.

I noticed the marine didn't talk much of his combat experience keeping his comments mainly about military life, his likes and dislikes.  The marine thought many of the people he worked with were lazy and complained and whined, and a number were overweight.  He liked the job but not the people so much and that is why he left the service.  He described himself as a 'by the book' kind of guy.

The marine loved flying and got his pilot's license for small planes before his driver's license as his parents wouldn't let him get a driver's license until he was 18.  Right now he was taking time to enjoy life before deciding what to do next.  He was smart and saved his pay and now has enough money to live on for a while.  This train trip was to go from Seattle to Chicago for one day to wander around Chicago before returning to Seattle.  Four days on the train for one day in Chicago.  Ya, he has time to burn.

Both were six foot five inches tall and looked military.

Other comments:

• neither liked serving in Iraq.  One couldn't tell friend from foe and the locals were not trustworthy.
  

• They didn't care for crowds as the enemy would mingle with crowds and then toss explosive devices from the crowds and the military had no way to fight back as they couldn't shoot into the crowd. The enemy knew the military's rules of engagement and limitations and used them well.
  

• Iraq was too hot
  

• the marine didn't like serving with women in his unit as they would get pregnant so they would be sent back to the U.S. He also had a female military pilot come on to him but she was several levels in rank above him which made a relationship between them a no-no. Being a 'by the book' guy he was the one who turned the relationship down.  The ranger liked serving with women, but I believe that was more due to his being young and horny.
  

• Neither felt it was good to have a girlfriend or wife when in the military both for the reason it was hard on the women when the men were deployed overseas, and because the relationship had a hard time surviving when they were overseas.
  

• it was hard for them to readjust to life in the U.S. after being in Iraq. The ranger talked about how jumpy he was and how he didn't like crowds for some time after returning.  He also declined consoling as he felt he didn't need it.  I think consoling should be mandatory for people returning from a combat tour of duty.
  

• The ranger thought he would be going to Afghanistan soon and didn't really want to go.
  

Mid January thaw

After the very cold temperatures last week, we are now in a mid winter thaw here in North Dakota.  The temperature the past two days has reached 42 degrees.  Above zero!   Wow!   Nice.

With the warmer temperature on Tuesday my brother shoveled snow from part of the house roof.  Once the snow was on the ground I shoveled it away from the house.  It was nice to get outside and get some exercise.

Trivia night

Since I am in Minot for a little longer I decided to attend trivia night tonight.  Also helping was the warm weather as the temperature was around 20 above and not 20 below.

I walked to the bar.  With all the snow Minot has right now most sidewalks are buried under snow.  I had to walk on the street.  This was not a problem as there were hardly any cars out and about.

I thought I was late to the 7 pm start but when I went inside I didn't see any of the regulars at trivia night.  No one.

I hung around outside for a little bit weighing whether to leave.  I asked a guy coming inside whether the bar still had trivia nights and he said yes.

A short time later a few of the regulars arrived and then Ed (the host) and Al came.

Darrel and Mona didn't come so it was just Al, Marvin and I for a team. We called our team the "3 Blind Mice". We did better than expected.  For the first contest we came in second with 14 correct answers out of 20 questions.  In the second contest we tied with several other teams for second place with 12 correct.  Both times the winning team had 15 answers correct.

To be fair, a few of our correct answers were guesses.

Marvin won one of the "quarter in the bucket" trivia questions.  He chose a long ice scraper with brush for his prize.  Pretty handy right now.

His trivia question:  What state has the nickname of 'The Inland Empire'?
Answer: Illinois

The bar clientele were average to ugly looking. Partway through the contests two 20-something women came in and sat at a table next to us.  They were sitting mostly at my back on one side so I couldn't see them.  Marvin could and commented how attractive they looked.  They did look out of place.

Minnesota and Montana have banned smoking in all indoor places including bars.  North Dakota still allows smoking in bars and my clothes now stink of cigarette smoke.  Yuck.

After the trivia contests were over just before 9 pm many of the trivia regulars left and did not stay for karaoke later that evening.  I left also.

A few questions:

1. What color are papaya seeds?
2. In what city was the first All-star baseball game played?
3. Battery Park is located on the south end of which island?
4. What kind of hat did Bat Masterson wear?
5. What island was invaded under the codename 'Operation Urgent Fury'?
6. What is the plural of: basis?
   
7. What 1984 movie about underdogs starred Robert Carradine and had the tag line "Their time has come!"?
   

The answers:

1. Black
2. Chicago
3. Manhattan
4. Derby
5. Grenada
6. bases
   
7. Revenge of the Nerds
   

No train

Guess I'll be staying in North Dakota a little while longer. Even though the temperatures since Saturday have now warmed up to the 20s above zero, Amtrak is being very conservative and are not restarting their trains until Tuesday.  I had a ticket for the train on Monday.  The local Amtrak agent told me I had to rebook my ticket.

Also, today my brother and I went to the grocery store to get a couple items.  Tons of people were there, the checkout lanes were filled, and most people had carts full of food.  Who goes grocery shopping at 5 pm on a Sunday?!

Cold train

The temperature has again risen above zero degrees. Hurray! The past few days the temperature has ranged from a high of minus 10 to a low of minus twenty-five degrees.  I haven't been outside for a few days now.  Not since the day I shoveled part of the driveway wearing wimpy gloves and almost froze my fingers.  You know your fingers got cold when they hurt as the blood starts moving again while the fingers warm back up.

The local news last night had a story about the Amtrak train stranded in Minot due to the cold.  The train seems to have arrived four hours late the previous evening and stopped here as the train's brakes had frozen in the cold weather across eastern Montana and North Dakota.  Eastern Montana had quite a number of towns with temperatures in the minus 30 to 40 below range.  The train passengers interviewed were not happy.  A few even decided to get off the train and fly the rest of the way home even though it was expensive to do so.

Oh yeah!  Global warming baby!

With air temperatures as cold as 33 below in Havre, MT on Thursday and wind chills of up to minus 52 through stretches of North Dakota, problems erupted with both rail equipment and the tracks themselves.

Amtrak did not run westbound trains from Chicago on Monday or Tuesday. The train ran on Wednesday, then was suspended from going any farther west than Minneapolis on Thursday. There was no service Friday or today.

On the eastbound route there was no service beyond Whitefish Thursday through today.

Even though the National Weather Service forecasts warmer weather along much of the Empire Builder route in the coming days, an Amtrak spokesman said he couldn’t predict what will happen.

It appears I made the journey from Minnesota to North Dakota just in time on Sunday before Amtrak stopped running trains.  I know on the train I did take the train attendants had left the doors under the bathroom sinks open in an effort to prevent their pipes from freezing.

Monday I take the train back to Montana.  I hope everything is straightened out by then and the trains are running again.

Cognitive dissonance

Ah... yes.... Evidence to the Contrary.  We've all argued a point, and while we have presented evidence supporting our position and the truth, the other side refuses to see the light.  In your experience, have your arguments ever changed another person's opinion?  Tell the truth now. 

Here are a couple articles that explain why and how people cling to their beliefs even when they are wrong.  For the strategies people use to resist information that conflicts with their beliefs, I have encountered them all.  Now I know the names.

The first link is to a shorter article and the second link is a longer study.

http://correspondents.theatlantic.com/lane_wallace/2009/09/all_evidence_to_the_contrary.php

How is it that people can cling to an opinion or view of a person, event, issue of the world, despite being presented with clear or mounting data that contradicts that position? The easy answer, of course, is simply that people are irrational. But a closer look at some of the particular ways and reasons we're irrational offers some interesting food for thought.

In a recently published study, researchers found that people often employ an approach the researchers called "motivated reasoning" when sorting through new information or arguments, especially on controversial issues. Motivated reasoning is, as UCLA public policy professor Mark Kleiman put it, the equivalent of policy-driven data, instead of data-driven policy.

In other words, if people start with a particular opinion or view on a subject, any counter-evidence can create "cognitive dissonance" - discomfort caused by the presence of two irreconcilable ideas in the mind at once. One way of resolving the dissonance would be to change or alter the originally held opinion. But the researchers found that many people instead choose to change the conflicting evidence - selectively seeking out information or arguments that support their position while arguing around or ignoring any opposing evidence, even if that means using questionable or contorted logic.

Needless to say, these findings do not bode well for anyone with hopes of changing anyone else's mind with facts or rational discussion, especially on "hot button" issues. But why do we cling so fiercely to positions when they don't even involve us directly? Why don't we care more about simply finding out the truth--especially in cases where one "right" answer actually exists?

Part of the reason, according to Kleiman, is "the brute fact that people identify their opinions with themselves; to admit having been wrong is to have lost the argument, and (as Vince Lombardi said), every time you lose, you die a little." And, he adds, "there is no more destructive force in human affairs--not greed, not hatred--than the desire to have been right."

I would define a true intellectual as one who cares terribly about being right, and not at all about having been right.  Easy to say, very hard to achieve.

http://sociology.buffalo.edu/documents/hoffmansocinquiryarticle_000.pdf

Strategies for Resisting Information

Here are the strategies used to resist persuasion that social psychologists have identified:

• counterarguing (directly rebutting the information),
  

this category was a fairly small portion of our interview sample, and was limited to partisans who were coded as either average or above average in their political information. 

• attitude bolstering (The most popular strategy was to quickly switch the topic to other good reasons by bringing facts that support one’s position to mind without directly refuting the contradictory information), and
  

• selective exposure (ignoring the information without rebutting it or supporting other positions). 

In addition, we identified two other strategies of resisting information that have not been previously noted by social psychologists:

• disputing rationality (arguing that opinions do not need to be grounded in facts or reasoning), and
  

• inferred justification (—the most unusual of our findings— a strategy that infers evidence which would support the respondent’s beliefs).  People begin with the situation and then ask themselves what must be true about the world for the situation to hold. People who displayed inferred justification assumed that since someone they trusted said or did it, there must be a good reason for it.

'Shhh!' on a full train in the New Year

I am back in North Dakota after spending the holidays with Tammy in Minnesota.  To all my Minnesota friends who I did not contact when in Minnesota... sorry.  I had good intentions to call or see you, but between spending time with Tammy and the cold Minnesota weather I rarely went outside.

As to the Minnesota weather... the Minnesotans should worry more about global cooling than global warming.  My October visit to Minnesota had cold temperatures and plenty of snow.  This visit had snow (naturally) but also very cold temperatures.  Sub zero temperatures.  Tammy and I went to see the movie, Avatar, (in 3-D) and the temperature outside was -18 degrees.  High temperatures that never got above zero - ya, we had a number of those days.  Well below normal temperatures.

When I left Minnesota the train to Red Wing, MN ended up being 2 hours late and never arrived until almost 11 pm.  It took us almost an hour to drive to Red Wing and in that time the train lost another 25 minutes so I was in Red Wing forty minutes before the train.

The train unloaded five people from two cars.  The conductor made sure first one then the other of the two cars stopped in front of the station so the passengers didn't have to trudge over train tracks and through the snow to get off and on the train.

I left Sunday night so I expected the train to be relatively empty.  Who would be traveling a Sunday night in January?

I think only two people on got on the train in Red Wing.  The conductor assigned us seats as the train was full.  Huh?!   Okay, maybe lots of people were traveling to Minneapolis and I would get a better seat after we arrived there.

Lots of people got off at the Minneapolis station but lots of people then boarded the train. Huh?!   Before the passengers boarded in Minneapolis the train attendant moved people to free up pairs of seats to make it easier for couples to sit together.  I had an aisle seat next to another passenger so I didn't have to move.

Why all the people traveling on a Sunday night?  Everyone would be arriving at their destination Monday morning or later.  I found that many of the passengers were going to Grand Forks.  Why there?  The university started Monday and these people didn't want to get there any sooner than necessary.  The train was scheduled to arrive at 4:52 am.

I used to travel that way when I lived in Minnesota.  Several times I returned from vacation at four or five in the morning before heading to work at eight or nine.  That is the providence of the younger people.  And I preferred to be on vacation than in Minnesota.  For me now, the reverse is true.  I rather be in Montana than on vacation.

Also lots of people were getting off the train in Minot.  Minot usually is a busy stop.  I don't know why Minot was busier than usual.  The people getting off the train in Minot didn't look like college students.

My seat mate got off at Grand Forks.  He was a faculty researcher returning to the medical department at the University after spending the holidays in Chicago.  He was sleeping across the two seats when I boarded the train and the conductor had to wake him to move so I could sit down.  In the hour it took for the train to reach Minneapolis an incoming phone call woke him and he talked until we left Minneapolis.

I just love cell phones. 

My seat mate was oriental and spoke in Chinese or Vietnamese or whatever which was good as it was easier to tune out his conversation not knowing what he was speaking about.  After he ended his phone call he and I ended up talking.  We talked about my life, my past life at IBM, his past job as a researcher in the pharmaceutical industry, and his current job at UND as a medical researcher until 2:45 am when he went to sleep.  I read for another hour or two before sitting back and going to sleep.  The train attendant never turned off the car's lights until some time after the researcher and I ended our conversation.

Sometimes when I get excited I speak in a louder voice.  But this night when we talked we spoke quietly.  So quiet that between his accent and soft voice I had to occasionally ask him to repeat words. Early on in our conversation a young woman sitting in the row behind us with her boyfriend or husband got up and asked us to talk quieter or not at all as she claimed the sound and pitch of our voices was annoying and was keeping her awake.

It must be me she was talking about as other women in the past have complained that the sound and pitch of my voice grated on them.    These other women turned out to be strange and self absorbed people so it wasn't just the sound of my voice they had problems with.  Therefore, as this was a public place and I can't change how my voice sounds, I merely tried to keep my voice low.  He was getting off at Grand Forks so if we didn't talk now, we'd never talk.

Later another flaky young woman, sitting in the two seats in front of us, started "shhhing" occasionally.  Again we weren't talking loud, weren't done with our conversation, so we kept talking quietly.  This woman later moved to the seats in the row ahead of her which were empty.  When the train attendant came by he told her she was sitting in reserved seats.  She told him she moved because we were talking so he let her stay there and changed her old seats to reserved seats.  We had been talking very quietly so he never said anything to us and let us continue talking.  Besides, the train's lights were still on.

Many people can't or have trouble sleeping when traveling.  I may sound harsh, but that is something they have to work on rather than expecting other people to cater to them.  Otherwise instead of ignoring it I would have had the overweight woman snoring loudly in the seat across the aisle from mine change to another position to stop snoring.  People who snore should not lay on their back when sleeping around other people.  But, I tuned her out and went to sleep.

The young woman, and the black guy in the seats across the aisle, were both going to Minot.  She told him she was connected to the military, hated living in Minot and couldn't wait to leave.  Another flaky woman.   He had gotten out of the military but stayed in Minot because there are lots of jobs there.

My brother was there to meet me when the train arrived into Minot well over two hours late. The two plus feet of snow that fell in Minot during the Christmas blizzard still covered lots of things.  Many cars parked in the train station's parking lot were still buried under snow.  I saw many huge and tall piles of snow during the drive to my brother's house.

Happy New Year

I hope you had a great New Years.

Today in Minnesota is it well colder than normal as the high temperature struggled just to get above zero.  Brrrrrrr....!!!  Back in Montana the temperature is in the mid 30s with calm wind.

Hmmm... why am I in Minnesota?  Oh yeah, spending the holidays with Tammy.

Next year we'll spend the holidays in Montana where the weather is nicer than Minnesota.

What did I do today?  After getting up after 2 pm, showering and breakfast, Tammy and I replaced the bad left turn signal bulb on her van.

*stretch*

Now... time to relax.