Red Crossbill Colorado                                                 click to enlarge

Hey Folks, sorry for the late post. We are really behind here with our regular work and we’re paying for it big time. As I mentioned several posts ago we’re running short-handed since the holidays and our stragglers have been slow returning. You think with the high minimum wage we seldom pay here they’d want to be here for just the bragging rights. But you give them a taste of freedom and away they go. They think the money is greener on the other side of the fence but that isn’t always the case as one of our PhD’s found out the hard way. He signed on with a huge Silicon valley firm and before you knew it he was back begging for his old job. It seems they actually wanted him to show up, work his full schedule and be responsible for his production, the heartless bastards. This place didn’t look so bad then.

Today was snowflake inventory day which happens the first of the month all winter long and it’s a mean dirty job. Every snowflake has to be counted, tagged and replaced close to where it originally landed. Our snow gauge is broken due to the extra heavy snow load, well it isn’t broken it’s just bent way over giving us false readings so the snow in that area has to be counted and verified by three different crews to make sure we’re getting accurate readings.

To complicate things we have to have the count finished by nightfall as you can not see the individual flakes after dark because, well, it’s dark. And you can’t use a flashlight as it melts the individual flakes and totally screws up the count. So as the day wears on we bring out every available hand to help. Our actual total for the day was a Googolplexian of snowflakes, which as you know is the worlds largest number with a name, no it’s not Maurice, it’s Googolplexian and it is a 1 with a googolplex of zeros behind it and a googolplex fills up like 20 pages with zeros typed really small. It’s a lot. Actually it was a Googolplexian and a half but as we round down here at The Institute so as not to inflate our numbers, we’re calling it an even Googolplexian.

What that did however was pull the tech that gets the image ready for the day’s post off his regular job and by the time we were done with our inventory it was this late so we just slammed up a picture of some orange birds we were saving for another story and there you are. Late. But it’s a post. It counts. OK then, a couple of new things today, a Googolplexian, and some orange birds. Could be worse.