Mundane

In other news, last Friday I ran two crews out on my project. We staked a thousand feet of road for blast: curbs, storm drain, water and sewer mains and services. We mark the locations to be shot with two foot tall grade stakes laid out on fifty foot stations in tangents, twentyfive in curves. The end result is a multicolored forest of stakes. You can drive down the middle of the road in a truck, or even a grader if you fold the blade as close as you can.

But you can't do anything else with the road until after the blasters do their thing and the grading contractor comes in and cleans up the overburden.

We've got a foot of snow in the valley since last night. The mountains surely got more. I truly don't want to replace those stakes.

I spent a few hours at a rock and mineral show down in Spanish Fork yesterday. I paid a buck to run a pan of gold-bearing sand. I talked with the proprietor of a prospecting shop while I worked the light stuff off the top.

He's working a claim out on the Nevada/Utah line. He brought that up just when as I arrived at the moment when you tap your ring against the rim of the almost-empty pan to "jump" the gold out of the remaining tablespoon of black sand. He's looking for help, on a shares basis.

No real prospector ever forgets the first time he found color in a pan. Not a one. And folks who truly have the bug get a pleasurable echo every time it happens ,too, even if they are standing over a trough in an exhibit hall and not squatting in a stream twenty miles back up the mountain.

More on this later. I've got to go clean my work truck and GPS set and then get our documents together for our tax guy.