cc: file, Tony Hafen, Pauline Nelson via mail, Sara and Des Penny, Claude and Katherine Warner, Lloyd and Luana Warner, Diane Cluff, Maxine Shirts via mail.
"My Dad, like many of my friend's Dads, worked harder than anyone else I know. When I would go home he would always have a job for me to do, and it was almost always all I could do to keep up with him when we had the chance to work together. One of the characteristics I was reflecting on this morning at about 2:30 AM, before turning the clock back to 1:30 AM, was Dad's sleeping habits. He was always up early. Seldom do I remember getting up before Dad. And as a farmer in Southern Utah, when it was his turn to take the water, he went and changed the flow in the irrigation ditch, and then distributed it through the ditches, head ditches, and into individual furrows. Since water runs out of Coal Creek 24-7 (for the oldsters on this list, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week), it simply works out that half of the time he took the water it was dark outside. There were innumerable all nighters I didn't even know happened, at least not consciously.
For the most part the all nighter irrigation work was transparent to me. After all, especially during the summer, I was tired from working all day (trying to keep up with Dad and the hired hands), and so when I got home at night I went to sleep. I wrote in my Thoughtlet titled Curfew (../9832.html) about the night there was an electrical fire in the Lower Plant, and when Steve Lovell's (one of the long-time hired hand`s) wife tried and tried and tried to wake me up to get me to ride with the fire truck and show them where to go (she finally did, and it was my only ride on a fire truck).
Then there was the process of turning alfalfa fields into hay bales. Since I was sickly, i.e. allergies kept me out of the hay fields for the most part, Dad did most of the harvesting. Three, and, if we were lucky with the weather, four times a year the alfalfa fields would be cut, then the cut hay would be raked into rows about 3 feet across and 12 feet apart, then the rows would be crunched into 70-120 pound hay bales, these hay bales would be stacked in the feedlot, and then we would feed them one at a time to the cattle every morning and every night. If it rained on the cut hay, it would have too much moisture and would mold in the hay stack. If there was not enough dew on the cut hay when it was raked, it would be too dry, and would not nourish the cattle. It was a learned science, and a lot of luck, as to when to cut, when to windrow, and when to bale the hay. Time and time and time and time again, I would wake up, look out my window, and see Dad out there on the tractor cutting, raking, or baling hay. All nighters were common.
Similar all nighters happened when harvesting corn and putting it in the silage pit, or wheat fields and putting the dechaffed wheat in the grainery, which the meatpacking biproducts plant was appended to. The point is, I grew up in an environment where an all nighter was a common part of life.
The result was, that when I got to college or my summers in Denver or on my mission or into the working world, I have regularly pulled an all nighter in order to complete some project. I remember before my mission turning in a major paper on the philosophy of Henry James and being told it was incomplete because I had not put my thoughts into the paper, rather I had just regurgitated facts. I was leaving the next day, either to go home for the summer of 1969 or to go to Denver for the summer of 1970, and did not like the grade. So I talked to the teacher, and the next morning I handed him an extensive paper, based around a made up acronym, which described my reaction to the philosophy of Henry James.
One of the reasons I was so bored my first summer in Denver was that the people at Amoco didn't go to work until 7:30, and they left work at 4:30. The result was the second job at The Red Barn, meeting Marti, and expanding the gene pool to create Roice, Ben, Paul, Melanie, Sara, and Rob. Most Friday's (and sometimes during the week) I would work at Pan American (later Amoco and now BP-Amoco) then go to The Red Barn and work until closing and clean-up (usually about 1:30 AM). Then there was the all nighter when Quentin Reed, the hippie from Houston, Texas, showed up at my appartment in Denver, woke me up because he had started a song, and during Quentin's all nighter we wrote:
Later that summer there was another Quentin and Roice all nighter, which resulted in:
I remember on my mission, when I was a District Leader and had to move a car alone from Colchester to Harlow after helping with some late night teaching appointments. I woke up with the car safely parked outside the apartment in Harlow. I had no recollection of the 40 mile late night drive through the long and winding back roads of East Anglia. As I look back, I recognize there must have been angels helping and guiding through some of these all nighters.
I recall the all nighter when I wrote a `Gelogic Report on the Rocky Range' (and Marti stayed up and typed it for me) for my Field Camp Report in May of 1974. It is on my shelf. I got an A+, along with the note: watch your spelling Moenkopi spelled "wrong" three ways. This was the same month spent an all nighter (or two) writing `A Reflection Seismic Study of the Quaternary Sediments of Yellowstone Lake' for GGSC-397.
In Dallas there were all nighters tied to Computer Genealogical Services. Then when I did the work with Evans & Sutherland in 1979 (../9837.html and ../9841.html), there were several weeks where it was all weekenders. I would fly from Dallas to Salt Lake late on Friday night, and work straight through until the last plane out Sunday evening, and then fly back to Dallas. It took Landmark until about 1995 to productize the ideas Dave Nebeker and I prototyped in the fall of 1979. And frankly, there still is not a turn-key solution which displays data as nicely as we did using the Evans & Sutherland flight simulator tools. Continuum Resources' CoReExplorer(TM) is the closest to a commercial tool (0034.html).
When we lived in Missouri City, I sat up a phone line connection to the Digital Equipment Corporation VAX at the University of Houston's Seismic Acoustic's Laboratory. This was so I could do some work from home. However, I continued to do the same amount of work at the office, and then just did more work at home. Specifically I wrote `New Technologies in Exploration Geophysics' one chapter a month for a year as a series published in World Oil. There were publication deadlines, and I would end up doing an all nighter at the computer terminal at the house once a month. Laura Pankonien fixed all of my spelling and grammer errors. now Andrea does, since I still do not have a spell checker on the Sun Spark-10 which is the Walden 3-D mail server.
Then there were all of the overseas trips with Landmark. I recall how I would work all night getting ready for a trip, sleep on the plane, then when arriving in Europe or Asia go for a run to reset my physical clock, and work as if I had been on that time schedule for a month. Some years there were a dozen trips to Europe and half a dozen to Asia. So there were a lot of all nighters. But not as many as my Dad did, over his years as a farmer in Cedar Valley.
So as I started out this week, I had no idea it would be a week which would get me remininscing about all nighters. Most of the week has been spent working on the Dynamic Oil & Gas Prospectus for the `Offshore Eastern Louisiana AMI'. This is currently at http://www.walden3d.com/TransferDynamic if some of you are interested in looking over it to get a better feel for what I am up to these days. It is an exciting project, which is why I worked late on it every night this week. I also had a physical exam with my new Doctor, Dr. Solis. Dr. Levin is retiring. Made it to the last of Matt's football game on Tuesday (after a meeting with Sam LeRoy on Dynamic), and to the last of Rachel's choir performance on Wednesday (after picking up Matt). It was my first Taylor High School Concert. They are good! Wednesday night I missed Matt's Court of Honor and his receiving his First Class Scout Badge because I took Adam Salt to the Church School's Open House at Bering Drive as our Venturing Activity. It was my first time to one of these, and there were strong emotions about never having the opportunity to take one of you to one of these open houses. Oh well!
Wednesday night was the night I ended up working until 4:30 AM, getting up at 5:30 AM, and leaving at 6:00 AM for the GCAGS at the Galleria. It wasn't quite an all nighter, yet at almost 51, it was noticable. I was reworking the Dynamic Prospectus, was requested to contact a group of people about the OTC Special Section we are doing next May, had to reload some software to create pdf files because of the computer problems a few days ago, and had not prepared my GCAGS version of the presentation on `The Impending Obsolesence of Maps.' Computer work is not the same kind of hard work my Dad did, and yet I kept very busy Wednesday night. And Thursday was a bear. I do not have a portable PC, and so I had to be at the speaker's breakfast to find someone who would let me download my CD presentation on Obsolesence to their computer and rework it to tie to the GCAGS. Roger Tyler, formerly at the BEG (Bureau of Economic Geology) let me use his computer. The only problem was that after putting together a great presentation, the computer locked up, and when I rebooted it, it had saved a crash recovery file and I mistakenly saved it over the presentation I had spent 3 hours that morning building. Oh well! So I rebuilt it during two talks after eating lunch with Richard Uden. The presention was one of the best I have given, and there were no questions. I did receive a nice Cretaceous rock plaque in the shape of Texas.
I was quite tired from the all nighter when I got home Thursday, and went right to sleep, after calling Melanie. Friday was a frantic effort to complete the Prospectus. About 6:00 I took an hour and wrote an e-mail to Nate, even though, Nate, I was probably too tired to properly express the concern I have for you and where you appear to be. I worked late on a model of Rice University I had promised Tony Elham (0042.html). Saturday morning I left at 8:30 to go to the Rice Alliance. It was good. Tony wasn't there, and so I didn't give him Friday night's work. Oh well! I did meet Thierry Pilenko, President of GeoQuest, and laid groundwork for talking to him about the Knowledge Backbone(SM). I got home at 12:45, and we left at 1:05 to see `Les Miserables' at Jones Theater. It was the first time Rachel and Matt had gone to a major production in Houston. We had a great time, and enjoyed a meal together at Burraporetti's in back of The Alley Theater afterwards. When we got home, while Matt and I watched Maverick, I spliced some pages for the six copies of the Prospectus to deliver to lawyers, accountants, and participants on Monday, and Matt did a school project on Utah. Then I started to work on a W3D Journal Edition on `Advanced Pattern Finding,' which I had promised Peter Duncan (0042.html). I discovered I need some notes from Bill Bavinger out of my journals, and so I ended up watching a movie about Napoleon, followed by a movie about the earthquake in San Francisco, while I was thumbing through and noting relevant pages with a small yellow Post-It on the 30+ journals I went through.
It wasn't an all nighter when I changed my watch and the alarm clock from 2:30 AM to 1:30 AM. However, I was tired, and it had been an emotional day. I cry when I go to Les Miserables. Maybe because I have felt unfairly put into an emotional prison. Maybe because I am attempting to raise someone elses' kids, not unlike Jean Valjean. Maybe because I spend my life fighting what appear to be unwinable revolutions. Or maybe because I feel the pain Heather and Nate are going through. I cried in and after the earthquake movie. It was based around a man trapped under a collapsed section of the I-80 in San Francisco. His wife had `kicked him out of the house' and they were legally separated. He loved his kids, and this love is what kept him going during 4 days of being trapped under tons of cement. At his hospital bedside his wife told him, when he got better they would get back together and start over, and `how unfair it was what lengths he was willing to do to get his way.' He died.
Andrea, Heather, Audrey, Rachel, and Matt, I love each of you and am so glad you came into my life. And because I love each member of my family of 23 years it will always hurt to see the negative impact of divorce. Just as my Dad did not put in his all nighters as for reasons which are selfish, as far as I can determine, my motivation for all nighters has been to provide a good life for my family. Today in sacrament meeting and for the combined Young Men / Young Women Meeting, David Grua and his family spoke about his mission in the South Los Angeles Spanish speaking mission. It is wonderful to see the glow around someone who has been doing good. During sacrament meeting Bill Hagen was carried out, looking like he had gone through several all nighters in a row. He had a heart valve replacement a few weeks ago, and this is the second time he has not been getting enough blood and has had to be taken to the hospital. Mortality is uncertain. I hope you each come to understand the importance of getting a job done, and, if it proves necessary, you are willing to pull an ocassional all nighter."