Note
"Hello there, ladies and gentlemen,
Hello there, ladies and gentlemen,
Are you ready to rock!,"
Today was calling for quite a bit control work, even though the weather was calling for quite a bit of rain, hail, and overall destruction. We would see who would win.
I began by randomly selecting 4 controls to visit from Day 4 for the O' Festival, using an algorithm I wrote and then coded aimed at: *minimizing* the chances of seeing any golfer or even golf balls, being consumed by a devastating wildfire such as those burning up California, and of being attacked by ravenous wolves (the state, for as long as I have been here, and according to nearly any politician in state running for office, has been plagued and overrun by wolves which are ruining everything that is good about Wyoming); and *optimizing* my chances of seeing moose. The entire process only took about 5 minutes, representing a good investment of my time.
So I visited those 4 controls and it all went well. True, I didn't see any moose, but I also didn't seen any golfers or golf balls, I didn't get burnt up in wildfire, and I wasn't attacked by any ravenous politicians running for office. *And*, when I got home and checked email, I found a note from Neil asking me if I could please check out 4 controls--which just happened to be the very controls I had visited!!!! What are the odds! Well, I did that calculation, and the odds were roughly 1 in 4.4 million.
People underestimate the importance of luck.
But that was just the warmup. The main event was checking and streamering the control locations for Day 3 of the O' Fest.
But first I had to consider the cattle situation. There were a lot of cattle out, with a number of bulls. Normally the bulls are pretty sedate, but the bulls with horns really don't like tents. Several of the bulls had bits of shredded tent draped over their horns. One of the bulls had a pair of tights dangling from its horns. I guess bulls don't like seeing tights in the summertime, and who can blame them? Really, if you're going to wear tights in the summer, you might as well head straight for the ballet or yoga class or whatever. Even golfers don't wear tights--at least I assume that's true, though I don't really know. When I drive by the golf course here, I avert my eyes.
I started running/streamering, which was the cue for raindrops to start dropping. It was so scattered however that it wouldn't even have qualified as Swedish sunshine. About halfway through, I could see the skies off to the SW were darkening rapidly and it wasn't long after that the scattered rain became less scattered and more focused. I picked out several controls I could hit on my way back to my truck, and when I wrote down descriptions I ducked into the cover of the best nearby ponderosa.
About the time I climbed into my truck the rain trailed off and then stopped. Excellent! I drove over to another vantage point and then finished off the last 7 dozen or so controls. It doesn't seem like you really need 184 controls for a simple middle distance event, but I you need what you need.
I was happy with the map. There was one spot coming out of a control where there's a small patch of fallen beetle kill trees. It's only 5-6 trees, but still, it's important to have standards and adhere to them, even if the standards are--as they are here--quite low.
There were some campers about 700-800 meters from where I was parked, and, as I was leaving, I could hear an upswell of excited voices and possible sounds of largish creatures. I couldn't make out any words, but the general tenor was of that hostility, alarm, danger, and confusion. There was no way to be sure at that distance whether the bulls had spotted the campers' tents or if a pack of ravenous politicians had spotted the campers. Either way, the best course of option seemed to be to drive home, and to keep my gaze averted as I drove past the golf course.