Hot as Hello by Morning

I visited beautiful Amarillo this week for a work project. I took a few snaps with my camera phone; Amarillo smells about like these pictures look. Most of my time was spent in a wide open pasture with no shade and a hot wind that made it feel like I was standing in a blowdryer. The flights were extremely crowded but thankfully short; airlines are just getting shittier and shittier with no sign of stopping. Blegh. Still, it was a fun trip, much better than sitting in the office all week.

This was actually the second day out in the field. Here we are using a large trailer-mounted air compressor to purge and sample a monitoring well. This specific type had a pump submerged at the bottom that only needed high pressure compressed air to pump water - Bennett Sample Pumps are themselves made in Amarillo. Most wells with dedicated pumps require a source of electricity to run. Some wells necessitate a separate pump that is lowered into the well only when it is time to withdraw water.

This was Day 3, gauging and GPSing a monitoring well that has its own dedicated electric pump. We didn't actually sample this well, but gauging the depth to water at this well and at least two others allowed us to establish the groundwater gradient in the area.

This was a nice little note left by one of the landowners. Scavenger hunt, indeed.

This was a colorful, mucho interior mexican mural on the side of a work semi parked at one of the places we sampled. I did find a few things about a town called Huejúcar, in Jalisco. Looks like a nice enough place.

All in all it was an enjoyable trip, plenty of challenges, but we did get to stay in a fairly nice hotel. We didn't eat anywhere that spectacular, mostly because by the end of the day we were usually too wiped out from the heat to get too ambitious.