Weekend Warriors

These next two weekends will be busy for Justin and I. This Labor Day weekend we're going up to Utah and we will be camping and rockhounding. We're headed to Topaz Mt. to collect..well topaz. BLM has set aside some land for public rock/mineral collecting and we're going to try our luck and hopefully find some really cool stuff. We even went out and bought a book on Topaz Mt. and how to find the highly sought after gems. We'll also be doing a little fossil hunting, unfortunately we're going to have to pay for it. For $30 a person we can collect as many trilobites as we can for 4 hours. You can see what a trilobite looks like by clicking on the link above. Basically they are a now extinct creature that lived on ocean beds, some could swim, and probably scavenged for food. They come in amazing array of shapes and sizes, the ones we can find at the site are tiny compared to what can be found in other countries but it will be fun to get dirty!
Now next weekend, on Thursday the 7th we're flying back to ND/MN to see our buddies Britta and Kris get married in Fargo, ND. We'll be back on the 11th so it will be a short trip back home but it will be fun but stressful trying to see as many people as possible.
Other than our busy weekends not too much going on. On the more distant horizon at the end of Sept we've got Justin's bro Jason and his dad Dana coming out to Vegas for the annual FireFighters Convention. Then in October my buddy Jeni and her boyfriend and their friend Serena are all coming out to celebrate Serena's b-day. Serena for her present wants to go see Thunder from Downunder, and so Jeni and I happily agreed. Justin just rolled his eyes.

A brush with Death!

Ok, so I'm exaggerating a bit in the title but yes, today I had what we call at my work "A Near Miss." So for my job, three days a week I'm out at a quarry that is being filled in. So this involves me watching 18-wheel trucks backing up to the edge of the quarry (which is 450 feet deep) and dumping their load of dirt onto the ground. I inspect the load quickly to determine that there is no garbage in the pile or that the dirt is contaminated with gasoline/oil. Eventually a bulldozer comes along and pushes these piles of dirt over the edge and into the pit. So lately the guy that has been operating the bulldozer has been getting really stressed with this job and it has been making him very difficult to work with this last week or two. Today he finally snapped. Yesterday he had a very bad day, he couldn't keep up with all the trucks coming in and got behind. Because of that I heard he got a major lecture this morning about keeping up. So this morning the guy was pissed that he was getting told how to do his job. He was tearing around the site, almost running into trucks, it was getting bad. So I went to a section were he wasn't so I could do my job in relative peace and quite. Sure enough, I wasn't in that spot for a half an hour before he starts hxzzzzzzzzzzz (lol sorry that was Ash trying to help me) heading my way. Ok, so I am standing behind a bunch of backed in18 wheelers with a 450 foot drop about 10 ft behind me. The bulldozer drives past the parked trucks and turns so the dozer is facing me about 20 feet away from me, then without giving me time to move somewhere else safely he just opens up and starts hauling toward me. To help with the size of this dozer, the blade on the front of it that pushes the material, is 10 feet high. If he hit me, he would never know. So I had to very quickly move inbetween the parked trucks to get out of the way of the crazy bulldozer.
So after being nearly flattened I go and tell the guy that in charge of this whole operation who then tells the safety people at the front of the plant. I was brought up to the safety trailer where I had to write out a statement explaining what happened, then I had to tell it to a few different people. They brought the bulldozer driver in later and fired him. He was being extremely reckless with a huge piece of equipment and they just couldn't have that.
Ugh and that was at about 9:30 this morning...if that doesn't ruin a day I don't know what would. So the whole rest of the day I was all stressed out and I just counted the hours, and when you're working a 10 hour day it goes real slow. But in the end, I'm in one piece still and that makes me happy.