They managed to finally pry me off the ridge. I’m back after spending some time in Colorado. A good time, but I sure missed the woods.

That’s shot at Mud Lake outside of Boulder.

When I flew in to Denver the plane banked and looking across the aisle out the window I realized, those aren’t clouds, those are mountains.

The realization can be pleasant. Just mountains in the distance.

We have a friend we have known since she was a child. Her grandfather used to bring her out to our place so she could see the tadpoles in spring. She had already crashed, metaphorically, into one mountain when she was a teenager and then another fell out of the sky and hit her. She found she has a medical condition where tumors grow in the fluid surrounding her brain and spinal cord. She had two successful surgeries, the first at 15 and the next about 5 years later. Because of Obamacare she could be carried on her mother’s insurance and wouldn’t be penalized because of her prior condition.

But she has reasons to worry. She lives in Seattle and it’s tough going it alone. Living almost from one MRI to the next. Trying to save enough to finish college. Not sure at what point in her life she won’t be able to walk or worse. Worried about medical expenses. And how to deal with this.

The most recent surgery this year was not successful. So she’s going again under the knife next week not knowing what will happen.

If we lived in a country that was civilized, had universal health care, the mountain would still be there, but maybe not quite so large.

Well, I was getting ready to post something else instead, but I see that Photobucket is no longer allowing me to hot link photos to Badrabbit. I could, but the subscription would be $400 a year, which is ridiculous. I’m in the process of setting up an alternative host for images, but until then I guess I’ll just have to use text.

One of the things the new post was going to talk about was how I’m revamping my personal website for optimal viewing on a cellphone. Sections are already this way but it’s a large site, thousands of files, well over 500 html pages, and revamping includes rescaling almost all of the many, many images on the site. Since the site goes back to 2000 finding the originals can be a challenge. The section I’m working on is about 200 pages and that’s being entirely rewritten and reorganized.

I’ll be a little slow on displaying images on existing pages, but actually the alternative host will be a lot easier for me to use so maybe more pictures in the future.

A couple of days later — I’ve started changing the image urls but it’s going to take a while. The most recent posts with images have been done.

This is a photo I took about a month ago from a road in our woods toward the garden, looking west. This is a different road than that in last October’s post.

I never thought, until today, that our home which enjoys the many benefits of electricity from the sun was a political statement. For us solar power just made sense.

We live in a third world enclave in a first world country. Infrastructure is challenged to say it nicely, not like neighboring states like Ohio or Virginia. Our state road in the hollow to our home is slowly reverting back to dirt. Phone and electrical service come with periodic outages. Everyone remembers when a leaking chemical tank contaminated the river which was the source of drinking water for 300,000. We’ve had two major natural gas pipeline explosions within miles of our home since 2000.

Of course living in a third world enclave lets us see politics at its crudest. Now everyone in this first world country gets to see what we see all the time, only this is national politics. A president who can’t use the words climate change has taken our country out of the Paris Climate Accord for reasons, because he can’t say climate change, that don’t make much sense. Of course when politics becomes crude, leaves the realm of compromise, then finding anything that makes sense is nearly impossible. In this country we now have the party which is always right, and the opposition, the always wrong. Our president, the impresario of gilt schlock, is incapable of telling the truth about anything. And that’s being kind.

Are we happy with solar power? Yes. When our unfortunate neighbors’ power is out for one reason or another, our refrigerator still runs and we have lights. And now we get to make a political statement, too.

I’ve been going through hundreds of old drilling documents, well records and plugging affidavits for oil and gas wells, and I stumbled upon some records with neat handwriting. These are on Lincoln county, West Virginia, well records from the early 1940s, though the writing strikes me as older, say around 1910. Actually there are some 1909 and later records in the same handwriting but I think these are copies made in the 1940s. The script on the earlier records is fancier. By the 1940s many records were typewritten and are actually harder to read, at least the copies of copies that I’m seeing.

What I’m am doing with selected records is attempting to determine if wells drilled in the early part of the 20th century are a hazard to drinking water in certain situations. In West Virginia the legislature didn’t require fully cemented surface casing to protect fresh water until the late 1960s. Operators did this as a matter of course earlier, but the practice didn’t become usual until the 1960s. I’ve seen a completion report for a well drilled in Kanawha county the 1940s where there is no cement at all behind any casing to protect the producing formation, the original purpose of cement, or groundwater.

Drillers didn’t begin to use cement until the early twentieth century. A well drilled in West Virginia around 1910 most likely has no cement. West Virginia was one of the first states to required plugging of wells, but this was to conserve mineral resources, not to protect groundwater. In the early twentieth century drillers here were using just a wood plug, or plugs, in casing and red clay. Cement plugs, usually on top of wood plugs, start to appear affidavits in the 1930s, again with lots of red clay to fill the hole. The open annulus behind uncemented casing remains a pathway for contaminants to groundwater. It wasn’t until the mid-1950s that plugging started to begin to meet modern standards with removal of uncemented casing and thicker cement plugs separated by gel.

When these early wells were drilled a final step in the completion process was setting off an explosion deep underground. These are variously called nitro or glycerin(e) treatments where quarts of the explosive, plus a little dynamite, were used. In the 1960s several wells were fractured using atom bombs, not in this state, thank goodness. This maybe gives an idea of the forces unleashed underground today with hydraulic fracturing. The well report from which the bit of handwriting is shown here has 90 quarts used.