A new road trip

My urologist (one guy) retired last year so I had to switch to a new bunch. I normally have a cystoscopy every six months to check if my bladder cancer has returned. Three months ago I called to get set up with the new bunch. They couldn't get me in for a preliminary appointment until August 29.... my cystoscopy was due in April.This is a simple procedure that took my old doctor 10 minutes from start to finish. I'm looking for another new doctor, but nothing gets in the way of my road trips, so it will have to wait until I get back home.I am lucky because anything that has to do with my cancer is covered by a special insurance program that pays for everything. The technology with the scopes and detection of bladder cancer have improved a lot since I first was diagnosed in 2008, but the delivery of medical care has lapsed, at least where I live.

Have your doctor monitor it to catch if it starts metastasizing. If it does then you need to fast track.

Welcome to the CRC fan club where stuff is shitty all the time.I just got out of a month and a half long hospital/rehab stay with a new little friend, Frankenbutt the ileostomy.

I'm glad you are still with us!There does come a point when the thought of transferring our consciousness to some sort of android body sounds more and more appealing.

This afternoon I stopped briefly (just before closing) at the visitor center of Fossil Butte National Monument. I am in the Southwestern corner of Wyoming. I plan to spend some time there in the morning. They have a very nice fossil collection of specimens that have been collected from limestone layers that are exposed at the tops of some fairly high buttes. These were formed in a large shallow lake the covered the area between 54 and 52 million years ago and is considered part of the Green River Formation. The dating comes from a volcanic ash layer within the formation.This was a serendipitous discovery on my part. I didn't know it was here until I passed the sign, but I had stopped a couple places just before I got there to shoot photos of the exposed strata. That will teach me teach to plan ahead a bit since I have a good book on Wyoming geology with me.I stopped and photographed the amazing Malad Gorge that cuts through thick flood basalt layers near Pocatello, Idaho earlier today. There were some really impressive class 1,000,000 rapids blasting through some narrow parts of the gorge that I am hoping my shots will capture. Exposure was a bitch here with bright sun on the white water and deep shadows on the black volcanic rock walls.

I'm writing this with my phone so I will be brief. I spent an interesting morning at Fossil Butte and then went on across Wyoming. I spent a night freezing my ass off camped just north of Devils Tower. I shot what I hope will be printable images of the tower silhouetted against the Milky Way.Tomorrow my friend and I will head to Chicago to hook up with another friend and a fourth who is flying in from Oregon. The gang will then head to Virginia for our dragonfly meeting.The last 2 days I spent some nice quiet time in the field stalking elusive dragonflies wi t h my camera. The next couple days will combine some serious Pink Floyd with discussions of scientific projects we have have been working on as a team and individually. Spending time with these three is truly inspiring.

Astronomy pics!!! The main reason why expensive optics exist!I'm going to be pestering you about this to no end after you get back home. Enjoy your trip!!

The part of the trip from Wisconsin to the dragonfly meeting in Virginia and back to Wisconsin is complete. We (4 of us) had some great days in the field and we all shot a lot of species and collected some interesting specimens. A few days we were weather challenged, but collected nymphs anyway.I collected eggs from a female Epiaeschna heros that 3 of us are going use to document embryo development and as interesting photomicrography subjects. The 3 of us are also starting a new longer term research project that will utilize my new imaging system to collect data to test our hypothesis.There is a lightning storm going on tonight but I can't get out to photograph it because of an intermittent fault in my truck headlights that has plagued me on the last half of the trip. It is raining hard and I don't have a good vantage point where I am staying. I am going to be spending a few days visiting relatives in Iowa so should be able to fix the headlight and hopefully we will see some more interesting weatherMy wife is flying in to meet me in Des Moines and then we are going to swing down through the Southwest. I am hoping for dramatic skies and lighting on interesting geological strata, route to be determined en route.I have been occasionally checking here at EvC on my phone. I note there are quite a few discussions with creationists in progress. Just my luck to not to have time to participate. I'm going to have some reading to catch up on when I get home....maybe a little in Des Moines.

I'm in Scotts Bluff in NW Nebraska tonight. Tomorrow I'm headed for Toadstool Geological Park at the end of 18 miles of dusty dirt road. Did I ever mention how much I hate dusty roads? The dust seals on my truck canopy are a distant memory and dust is the bane of all photographers.I am hoping Toadstool will not just be a repeat of the Badlands.Cheers

We reviewed some more info on the web about Toadstool and decided it wouldn't offer much different photographically or geologically from The Badlands.We spent the last couple of days exploring The Rocky Mountains National Park with a lot of other tourists. Our photos are mostly boringly identical to millions of others and I didn't see the exposed strata and uplift views I was hoping to shoot. Still, it is sometimes cathartic to stand in majestic nature writ large and remember just how small and fragile we are.Tomorrow we are visiting Florissant Fossil Beds National Monument

quote:

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The Florissant Fossil Beds National Monument is a national monument located in Teller County, Colorado. The location is famous for the abundant and exceptionally preserved insect and plant fossils that are found in the mudstones and shales of the Florissant Formation. Based on argon radiometric dating, the formation is Eocene (approximately 34 million years old [4]) in age and has been interpreted as a lake environment. The fossils have been preserved because of the interaction of the volcanic ash from the nearby Thirtynine Mile volcanic field with diatoms in the lake, causing an diatom bloom. As the diatoms fell to the bottom of the lake, any plants or animals that had recently died were preserved by the diatom falls. Fine layers of clays and muds interspersed with layers of ash form "paper shales" holding beautifully-preserved[5] fossils.

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The Florissant Fossil Beds National Monument was interesting, but I was disappointed that there were not more fossils on display.We stopped at a dinosaur museum in Woodland Park and I paid the $10.50 admission for myself, while my wife waited to see if it was worth it. They had a couple dozen skeletons, some of which were replicas. They did have a very nice collection of pterosaurs and I was glad for a chance to see them.Closer to Colorado Springs we visited the Garden of the Gods Park which has exposures of Paleozoic and Mesozoic rocks that have been tilted to 90 degrees or more. Tall monoliths of Lyons Sandstone slabs stand above strongly eroded pillars and balancing rocks. All are coastal dune deposits of probable Permian age. Unfortunately, there were also thousands of tourists so spending a lot of time creatively photographing the rocks was difficult and returning early this morning must have been on hundreds of other minds as well. Maybe I will have to return in the off season, if there is one.Today we traveled west along Hwy 50 and carefully drove up the scary single lane Skyline Drive along a part of the Dakota Hogback near Canon City. There are some beautiful steeply tilted strata exposures that I photographed.Further along Hwy 50 I photographed Ordovician Manitou Limestone that lies on top of Precambrian Granite. This granite dates back to the Proterozoic Orogeny 1.7 billion years ago. I picked up a couple pieces of 1.7 billion year old granite!Tomorrow we push on to the Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park.

Have you received your camera mount?
Loading...What do you think of it?Thanks

Yes.I need to mess with it more.It has an allan wrench supplied to tighten bolts at each corner of the hinges. This makes it possible to actually old up a Nikon D810 and a 300 mm f/4 with a 1.4 tc on it. That's just short of 2 kgs.However, it doesn't really work for positioning that much weight not practically at least.with a 105mm macro lens (a little lighter and about half the length so a shorter lever arm) it is fine.It is well constructed and seems to me to be worth the lowest price but not the full "retail".It isn't flexible enough to replace a good ball head I don't think but it is cheaper. Even after buying an acra swiss style clamp.

I (we) made it home last night.Lawns need mowing, computers need to be hauled back over to my photo lab and setup along with the photomicrography imaging system. Photos files need to be transferred to computers and converted to usable formats, GPS location data needs to be added to the metadata of each photo.All this initial processing of digital image files takes a lot of time, even on fast computers, so I figure I can mow while waiting for each operation to complete.That's my plan, I don't know if I can stick to it.I took a lot of images of interesting and beautiful geological strata (and brought home lots of rock samples) that cannot be accounted for by a silly global flood a few thousand years ago.As I work my way through my photos I will post a few here.I also need to prepare for research/photo projects I will be working on with several friends.Life is good when you have too much to do!

Well, I've had some time to look through my photos and I am pleased with some but in general I am quite disappointed. There seems to have been a problem with most of my landscapes shots with my new camera body and one lens. almost all of those shots are severely vignetted (in this case, corners lightened), so completely worthless. This problem was not obvious on the camera viewing screen or the laptop that I uploaded my images to during the trip.My dragonflies and other shots are ok, so I will post a few of those.This is a male Tachopteryx thoreyi, the Gray Petaltail. It is relatively common in a lot of the eastern U.S. It is in the dragonfly family Petaluridae, but unlike most of the other 10 species in the family the nymphs do not construct and live in burrows. Instead they are terrestrial and live under the leaf litter in forested areas. The adults often land on tree trunks where they are incredibly well camouflaged and difficult to see.The blurred, curved features in the shot are spider webs that were stirred by a slight breeze.Shot along Beck Creek, Amherst County, Virginia. Edited by Tanypteryx, : added locality data.