The Imperial Valley (Thank you, Google Earth)

Google earth is the coolest new interweb application on the planet right now. I've been using it to look at all sorts of interesting stuff around the world. I've been paying a lot of attention to the desert southwest for the last couple of days. My impending move to the Sacramento area has spurred me to get a better feel for what's about to become my home state for the next four to six years.

First of all, let's start with this amusing bit of naming information. As you may know, there's a city right on the border between Mexico and California known as "Mexicali." The name of the town on the American side of the border is less well known, and that's a real shame.

Here's a larger picture of the local area. As you can see, Mexicali is to the south. North of that is the Imperial Valley. The lowest point of the Imperial Valley is nearly as far below sea level as Death Valley. There are major agricultural regions to the north and the south. They are separated by a large saline lake known as the Salton Sea.

The Salton Sea is an interesting subject. Not only is it the title of a creepy looking movie, it also didn't exist until 1905. Apparently, heavy rains in conjunction with some poorly built levees on western banks of the Colorado river resulted in the diversion of the entire flow of the river into the Imperial Valley basin. This diverted flow continued for over a year and flooded out over 300 square miles of valley floor. The Salton Sea continues to exist to the present day only because run-off from agricultural operations in the Imperial Valley generally equals the rate of evaporation of water from the lake. Over time, the dissolved salts and other compounds present in the run-off, concentrate in the lake water and result in a constantly increasing level of lake salinity and frequent fish-killing algae bloom. There are no easy long term solutions for this problem. The long term prognosis for the Salton Sea if the agricultural run-off continues and the salt content is not somehow decreased is that it will become more and more like the Dead Sea.

Why is this region interesting to me? Well, mainly because it is part of the Sonoran desert. The Sonoran desert is (according to Wikipedia) one of the largest and hottest deserts in North America and home to a lot of really cool and interesting plants and creatures. I would imagine that the Imperial Valley used to be part of the Sonoran desert, but with all the agricultural activity now located there, it probably isn't. Perhaps it will be again someday, if the level of farming present in the desert Southwest becomes impractical for reasons related to water and energy costs.

Ten Years

It's interesting how quickly an entire decade of your life can go by. I've been thinking about this particular post for a few weeks now. What I want to show is how much my life has changed in the last ten years by comparing my life then with my life now. It really makes my head hurt when I start thinking about all of what I've done in the last decade.

Ten years ago, I had just completed my sophmore year of college. I had been initiated into the brotherhood of the Kappa Sigma fraternity earlier that spring and still thought fraternities were pretty cool. I was only about halfway through my active enlistment in the army reserves and graduation from school seemed a long ways off.

I was living at my parent's house in Gresham for the summer and working at the local Payless Drug Store as a cashier. My best friends were Chris and Matt, two guys that I had lived with in the dorms my freshman year. That summer, our idea of a good time was to go see the Laser Floyd show at the Murdoch Sky Theatre and then go drink coffee and smoke cigarettes at one of the many Shari's scattered throught the Portland metro area. I was dating a very pretty, smart and nice girl named Nikki. She was getting her BS in genetic engineering at the University of Puget Sound and was staying for the summer at her parent's place, which happened to be a block down the road from where Tonya Harding lived. I was still closeted and doing that thing gay guys do where they think that if they act and live straight enough, they'll wake up one morning and find out that they really are straight.

Ten years ago, I hadn't lived in an apartment with roommates or by myself. I hadn't had sex of any kind with either gender and had only engaged in some "heavy petting" with what would be my one and only serious girl-friend. I hadn't smoked any pot or experimented with any other drugs. I didn't know Danielle, Ron or Olga at that point yet, though I'd seen Danielle wandering around Gleeson Hall with her boyfriend Hanni. Because of who she was dating and her complexion, I assumed that Danielle was a devout muslim from Lebanon. I don't think Ron or Olga were even in Corvallis at that point. I had started chatting with gay guys on the internet, but it was through an anonymous countrywide chat room called "gaychat" and most of the guys I was talking to were in other states. I had never played dungeons and dragons but had read the players handbook and dungeon masters guide several times.

So I guess that's what my life was like ten years ago. I don't really think the entry does justice to how much things have changed since then. Not only am I a completely different person, but the world is completely different. Ten years ago, there really wasn't much of an internet unless you were a college student and the phrase "information technology" didn't really exist.