White-Noise Time Warp

I was upset for about ten minutes today when my return flight to Salt Lake was delayed until 10:30PM just like it was last week. While last week I didn’t find this out until after I passed through security and was waiting, today I paid better attention to messages and had time to prepare. Instead of sitting inside a white-noise time warp, I had {{sales rep}} drop me off at the airport where I rented a Tacoma and made a beeline for the Yellowstone Art Museum. It is fairly small as far as art museums go, and the large upstairs gallery was closed for an installation going in, but it was very refreshing to exit a day filled with sulfur extraction, HF Acid safety trainings, and absentee coal mine calls into a quiet space where the only sounds are the background hum of the HVAC system and overhead buzz of the fluorescent lights. 

A few things stood out to me. The largest and most striking is a giant three-panel landscape painting by Theodore Waddell from 2000 entitled “Montana”. I didn’t measure it, and the nameplate didn’t list dimensions, but it was probably around fifteen feet tall and thirty feet long. The bottom 20% of the painting is an abstract landscape filled with dark blues. The rest of the piece is an enormous skyscape where the wind and cool air are almost palpable. 

A Ukrainian artist, Janina Myronova, had an exhibit in the other second-floor gallery with a number of colorful drawings and ceramic figures. Just inside the entrance was a drawing and sculpture of a cat that {{daughter}} will love, sitting in the same position she likes to put them in drawings. 

A neat lithograph by Roy de Forest was on display that reminds me of dad’s friend Nick, who recently passed away. 

The museum has a separate facility called the “Visible Vault”. The front area has a neat wind installation with four turbine fans mounted on metal and plexiglass facing inward, where microphones mounted outside bring in the sound of wind. I closed my eyes and felt like I was outside. The fans, about six feet tall, were mounted on large motors, so I can only imagine what it would have felt like if all four of them were spinning. There is a glass-walled balcony overlooking the area, which is where I’m writing this. Behind the glass is where the permanent collection of the museum is stored. It reminds me of when I worked at the art museum for a semester.

10:56 PM

The plane is taking off. The contrast between last Thursday night and tonight is I still don’t know how to account for the time last week, but tonight I saw the museum, hiked out to Sacrifice Cliff, saw the sunset again from the cliffs at Zimmerman Park, perused the local history section at Barnes & Noble, and ate dinner at a new Thai place. 

We did a walkthrough at the refinery today to evaluate {{electrical building renovation}}. As we drove through the plant, we passed the cooling tower and retaining ponds and had to stop to wait for a pair of geese to move. They stood in the middle of the road, spaced out to block passage, and they just stood there staring at us. Our driver honked the pathetic-sounding horn, which did nothing to scare them. They finally flew away when the van was about to run into them. Apparently the water discharge is usually warm, which attracts geese. Something during the past few months was causing them to act strange, and nobody in the refinery could figure it out.