cc: file, Andrea, Tony Hafen, Sara and Des Penny, & Maxine Shirts
"Monday morning the 23rd of June started with a meeting at 8:00 AM at II&T. Jude Amaefule was giving a presentation to Tom Bugg, the Chairman and owner of Beau Energy, Andrew Gittins, the Director and geophysicist, and Barrie Jose, a geophysicist for Sproule. Beau Energy is a new company formed after Marathon purchased Beau Valley and made Tom Bugg wealthy. I knew Beau Valley back in the Landmark days (it is named after the Beau River which goes through the middle of Calgary). Barrie Jose is an outstanding geophysicist whom I have spent time talking to on several different occassions. He was an early Landmark user, and a few years ago went to work for Sproule, which is the largest Canadian company doing engineering studies to confirm the size of oil and gas fields for banks. He now uses Paradigm's interpretation software. They liked the presentation, and I think Jude was pleased with how it went. We spent most of Monday and some of Tuesday working on this, and then Les spent a couple of days copying and e-mailing files to Calgary for Jose.
There was a call from Christopher Prince, whom I met at the AAPG in Salt Lake, and who is a Core Specialist. It is interesting how often I seem to come back to cores these days. Who knows, maybe I will end up running a core library for SUU in Cedar City some day.
Francis Cox from Brisbane sent a nice e-mail concerning the Infinite Grid(SM), which I think is worth sharing:
(The link he references is: http://spatialinfocrc.org/programs.html.)
I responded with:
(The links I refererenced above are at www.walden3d.com/phoenix/ig and http://www.walden3d.com.) There has not been a response yet, and my experience is that
someday in the future, there will be an e-mail, which appears
to be somewhat out of the blue, saying something like:
Of course, for every one of those that happens, there are
ten that do not. And the point is, for you budding
entrepreneurs out there, you seldom know for sure which
seed is going to grow.
On Tuesday the 24th of June Robert Shirts sent Andrea a photo of Martha Stewart's jail cell. It looked very nice to me, I wouldn't mind having a room like this, and I didn't even get the fact it was a joke. Oh well!
Ben and Sarah sent their contact information and notes about their web pages, in case any of you need it and don't have it. I include it here, even though it was listed as temporary, but at least through Ethan's birthday, which happens to be the day I am finally getting around to writing this Thoughtlet:
(Sarah's website is at www.bn-sn.com.) I am very pleased to see this kind of effort to keep
everyone informed and tied together. I think the
Internet can be such a wonderful tool for keeping
families close together. At the same time, I see
and have experienced the total distructive force it
can be in the lives of individuals and families. Like
everything good in life, there can be a bad side.
And when we get a lemmon, we can choose to
make lemonade.
I received the following from Roger Anderson concerning The Leading Edge Article I mentioned (0323.html). I did get copies of the magazine for each of you, which I was going to give you at Christmas. However, since Sara Ellyn will not be here, I decided to pass them out now. I have given Rachel hers, and hope to distribute the rest of them over the next few weeks. Anyway, Roger wrote:
It is nice to have friends. Wish I was as good at passing
on feelings with a few words. (I expect many who make
the effort to struggle through reading all of the words I put
in Thoughtlets feel the same way.)
There was a spam message I got a kick out of:
It was cute the first time, and then I got a dozen copies.
Oh well.
Matt and I finished up his Naval Manual by Wednesday. He would work through all of the answers, I would check them, point out the ones he had wrong, and he would rework these. It was pretty interesting, and it was not what I wanted to do for every spare minute for five or six days. However, he passed, and was set and getting packed for Boot Camp by Thursday. Thursday evening I went on splits with the missionaries. There was a bit of a mix-up afterwards, and Elder Nelson and I were waiting in their apartment for about 45 minutes, while Elder Hock and Greg Branning were waiting downstairs in their car for about 40 minutes. I had an excellent conversation with Elder Nelson. His Dad is an environmental geology professor at BYU. He has a good mind, and it is fun to talk about life goals with youth and others who have not closed their minds.
On Friday there was an e-mail from David Devor announcing the birth of his son Yona Bris. I remember when David's wife died, when he remarried, and now they have a new son. And to think, I've never met him except via e-mail. There was also an e-mail from Andy Liew of IBM China saying he is taking over the PetroChina consulting, and hoping the foreign experts would be available to help him on the next steps. I wrote back I would be glad to, if they pay 50% up front and have penalty clauses for any late payments. It is like the e-mail from Frances Cox. You never know which seeds end up growing.
Saturday morning early we took Matt to the Sam's Club at Highway 6 and I-10 to get on a bus to drive to Austin for Sea Cadet Boot Camp. One of the girls in his group came up to us and said 'Is Matt really a Mormon, or is he pulling my leg?' We confirmed his church membership, and he proceeded to tell her about the church:
I interrupted, found out she is Catholic, and explained we
believe in God, in priesthood, and in modern day prophets
and apostles. It was a neat discussion, and it was exciting
to see Matt's active involvement. It is important for young
people to have structure, and it is a joy to see how well he
is doing. My analogs for Juniors in High School with no
structure in their lives show this is a most important time.
After we dropped him off, we went back to the house, packed and picked up Rachel and headed out for Albany, Texas and Fandangle. I had worked late Friday night (early Saturday morning), Rachel was interested in driving, and so I slept until she had gone a hundred miles past Austin. We stopped and ate a sandwich, and Andrea drove for an hour or so. I read the `The Apology of Socrates' which Todd Staheli had copied for me. I'm sure there will be words from this slip into many Thoughtlets over the coming months and years. Especially the phrase: 'the unexamined life is not worth living'.
So what is Fandangle? And why did Andrea, Rachel and I drive six hours to a Albany, population 1921, which is northeast of Abeline, Texas? The answer is simple. Oil and gas, and exploration opportunities. I have been talking with John Benard for a couple of years. He has oil and gas leases on a 10,000 acre ranch, a 3-D seismic survey, and is interested in me doing the geophysical work on this property. The city where he lives have been doing an outdoor musical theater for 60 years describing the history of their area. The musical is called Fandangle. This was the last weekend of Fandangle, and it was an excuse to get in front of John and find out if this was a real opportunity, or if he was just blowing smoke. So we drove up to Albany on Saturday, spent some time shopping and looking around town, I spent some time with John Benard, we went to Fandangle, stayed at a bed-and-breakfast, and drove back to Houston on Sunday morning.
When we got to Albany I called and got John's answering machine. So we went in some of the stores. The second store we went in turned out to be Holly's store, John's wife. He has three different numbers, and she was able to track him down. He was in Abeline picking up a computer for his son. While we were waiting for him to get back we went over to the old jail house and the court house. What an interesting history. Albany was formed to provide a place for law abiding citizens and to counteract Ft. Griffin, one of the rough and tough saloon towns on the western frontier. Wyatt Eryp met Doc Holiday in Ft. Griffin. The courthouse and the jail house were physical statements of law and order. The courthouse has been expanded as a museum. Several different collectors have donated their collections to the museum. There are all kinds of Aztec, Maya, Olmtec, Inca, and American Indian pots and things. There are guns, and things from the old west. There is a wonderful video summarizing the history of the county. This was where the old west happened. Really interesting.
We then walked back to the store, and then we got a call from John saying their dog had been shot or something and the dog needed to be taken to the vet. John stopped at the store, picked me up, and we drove over to a neighboring town to see the vet. He had a big role in Fandangle, had his horses loaded in the horse trailer, and was in a hurry to leave for Albany. There was about a three inch hole in the right front shoulder of the beautiful golden labrador. Thinking about it, I think the dog hit up against a chain link fence, caught it's hide in the links, pulled back and pulled a chunk of skin off. The skin was separated from the muscle all around the hole. The Doc put about six wire stitches in it, and it was interesting to watch how he worked. Definitely a small town vet, with all of the side conversations about family and ranches. And definitely a professional. And all this time Andrea and Rachel sat on a bench on main street Albany watching all of the folks come by. They bought a nice cowboy hat for Rachel and a golf shirt for Swede, which says "I hit two good balls today, I stepped on a rake."
John and I talked a little bit about his project, and not very much. He was pretty upset about the dog, about not being in town when we arrived, about his son not visiting from UT Austin, and other things going on. Isn't it interesting how each of us is always finding ourselves caught up in all of the things immediately surrounding us? He took the three of us to a bar-b-que dinner on the Court House Square. Then we went to his neighbors, who has a bed-and-breakfast, and we got instructions for where to go after Fandangle. He gave us his Fandangle Patron #91 parking pass, which allowed us to drive to the front of the parking spaces.
The theater is a natural amphitheater, with benches in one side of the hill. The stage is large enough for several dozen longhorn cattle, cowboy and indian fights on horseback, tractors to drive in sets with saloons, and forts, and houses. It looks like the entire 1921 person population of Albany participates in Fandangle. There are little boys and girls running across the stage as the animals that lived here before the indians. There were teenagers doing square dancing. There were bar room brawls, shootings, the bringing of law-and-order, and in general a history of this part of the old west. What a wonderful tradition.
As I told Melanie and Ben, it is now my intention to bring grandchildren to Albany, Texas for the Fandangle, probably when they are between 8 and 12 years old. You can draw your own opinions, ask Rachel what she thinks, and I think the rest of you would enjoy going with me some time to see Fandangle."