June 13th, 2004,

One hour and a half pinned between the stratosphere and a drowsy business professional. Another ninety minutes consumed in the chaos of one "terminally" confused Salt Lake City International Airport and its ill-docile tones of boarding announcements. And yet another hour and a half in suspension over the skies of Utah and New Mexico. Finally, the swift walk of anticipation to the security gate of Albuquerque International to meet the "team". The beings before me had no resemblance to the contorted monstrosities I viewed of the team prior to my departure (Myself representing a fine mixture between Richard Simmons and Delta Burke). Everyone seems bearable with their own idiosyncrasies: Christina is quiet, Juanama is extroverted, Ned is humorous, Elizabeth is idealistic, Derek is philosophical, and Frank is humorous yet seemingly supercilious. But one soul is defined as true evil! This is none other than the lobster-obsessed, crazed California invalit (a rough bastardization of the word "invalid"), Hannah. She strikes shear terror into the hearts of man and woman alike. It is evident that she and I will be in grueling battle to the death through the duration of this project (Just kidding!). We ate lunch in some random tourist trap in the midst of Albuquerque where I presented the idea of fusing Idaho and Montana into one ideal "Montando" and lamented with Juanama about the redneck status of our states of Idaho and Georgia. From there we traveled to Fenton Hill and Los Alamos via the Jemez Mountains on a road with no God-given right to be within the craggy peaks, having more curves than the connections of my twisted brain (courtesy of Hannah Hindley). We soon arrived at the Best Western Hilltop House where we received our infamous General Employee Training manuals and Ned and I instantaneously locked our keys in our room. After a series of faulty room keys, Ned and I finally opened our room door and returned to the lobby in order to reunite with our impatient, hungry team members. Dinner set place at the local Pizza Hut where we consumed grease soaked masses of cheese and tomato sauce over conversations of the most random nature. We retuned to the hotel and quickly passed out on our neatly made double beds, ushering the commencement of thirteen more days of odd human interaction with a dash of astrophysics.

June 14, 2004

(The following two days were previously written, but ruthlessly deleted by the demonically possessed Macintosh computer upon which I am writing this journal, so please read with appreciation, and if you are Stephen Jobs or Stephen Wazniac, you are a sick, heartless shell of man who opened an unnecessary Pandora's box upon the computer world!)

Ned and I arose around eight o'clock and flowed like molasses out to the lobby. From there we traveled to the Los Alamos National Laboratory Badge Office where we were dignified with a rectangular piece of plastic indicating that we were official temporaries of the United States Department of Energy and we also derived a new connotation for the word "convert". With our badges of honor worn smugly around our necks, we took a sojourn to the Bradbury Science Museum (in no way affiliated with science fiction author Ray Bradbury) where we uncovered the joyful history of weapons of mass destruction, used some chicanery on the plutonium test, and befriended a plaster cast of J. Robert Oppenheimer. We left the museum for Los Alamos' most happening place to be, Quizno's, but with over a quarter of the town mewling and growling and whatnot within the confines of the restaurant in order to sink a bite into their famous toasted subs, we escaped to a neighboring pool hall where we attained our sustenance and shot a few horribly, horribly miserable games of pool. While eating my grease and meat sandwich, I began to debate with Elizabeth over the functionality of dissolving Agri-business and placing the nation's breadbasket in the hands of privately owned farms. Elizabeth took the stance of debunking Agri-business for moral purposes while I described the economically detrimental effects of stratifying American agriculture by placing it in the hands of private farms. We arrived at the Canyon School around two o'clock for Don's lesson on the infamous CCD Camera. he lesson was coherent for the first half an hour until my brain collapsed under its own desire for sleep. During the lesson beak, it was discovered that one of the team member's friends had died, causing a malaise to descend upon the room. I became incredibly depressed by the situation, cornered by the idea that the will to survive in the Grand Method (my personal term "life") is so strong that we feel so ashamed when one is unable to achieve this survival. We returned to the museum for a lecture on cosmology which evoked a sense a wonder and frustration of the universe's seemingly paradoxical disobedience to its own scientific laws. It became too much for one man seated behind me who stormed out of the museum after his question of whether or not the law of the conservation of mass would be implemented with the expansion of the universe was answered with a cogent "no". After a quick tutorial of the twelve inch telescope, Ned and I returned to the hotel for some intense General Employee Training study action. We soon figured that common sense would be the most efficient tool for the G.E.T. test, especially with such study questions as "Which of the following is not to be done with a government vehicle?" and "Which of the following does not aid in preventing fires?"

June 15, 2004

Ned and I awoke primed for the ominous psychometrician's mightmare, the General Employee Training Exam. The exam was open book and allowed enough time to allow a blind, paralytic daschund to complete it with flying colors. I received a perfect score, free from further General Employee Training objectives and admitted into the prestigious one hundred percent club along with Ned (the only other member), truly a moment of pure utter glory! We left the testing center quite earlier than expected, granting us some liesure time at the hotel until lunch. A local sub shop osed the setting of our sandwich gluttony. Frank "accidently" took my sandwich, but I was swiftly reimbersed. I also found frustration in convincing my father over the phone that I was not in Nevada. Running ahead of schedule, we stopped at "Central Park" for a quick frisbee throw. The celestial coordinates discussion with John was an ethereal blur due to my conversation with Hannah via my TI-83 Plus (see Hannah's journal for conversation). Dinner was set at one of a myriad of Mexican themed restaurants in Los Alamos where Elizabeth and I convulsed into the most heated debate so far...the meaning of life. Elizabeth expressed her vwiws of some divine or spiritul purpose present in life while I defined my non-interventionist deist philosophy. After forty-five minutes driving through the Jemez Mountains, we arrived at Fenton Hill for our first observing session. It took a while to perfect my star centering skills, but due to the stunning allure of the New Mexican sky with its thousands of points of light intermingling to form a universe so intriguing and yet so distant.