Not so normal blog

I am going to be using this blog for a organized space to spew my personal opinions about a variety of topics but I will attempt to keep them focused on current issues that are relevant to me and my daily life as a scientist, outdoorsmen and Madisonian soaking up the American Spirit as fast as it can flow through my blue veins.  So if you are interested in those topics and how they are all being effected by current events around them than by all means enjoy the post freely and don't hesitate to constructively comment on my ideals and bat shit crazy ideas that are plastered all over this page.  

My ideas may in some respects may seen very normal to the experienced blogger but since this is my first blog, I do not think that it is all that bad to start with what you know or what sparks my interests.  Normally I can be quite opinionated and a open criticizer of new ideas, but  for good reasons.  It is so normal for most people to contribute the critical view point to others when talking about new ideas and or news.  So that is what I will do most of the time, but on occasion I will be not so normal and take an idea and run with it in an attempt to make the situation or concepts better or worse.  Perhaps I will even attempt to magnify things that seem normal to me but very well be not so normal to others.  

Lets start with the train that just woke me up way to early this morning on its trip through the Isthmus of Madison Wisconsin today.  I here that train every day, and when I was unemployed this past winter I heard it multiple time a day.  Most of the time the train reminds me of about what time it is currently, but at other times it reminds me of my grand father that I barely met Melvin Norman who spent the majority of his working life either on a train or around trains, starting as a car connector in Pontiac Michigan in the early 1950's in the height of the auto industry boom, and later working his way up the food chain in perhaps a normal way to the Flint Yard Master.  Or it reminds me of another family member my closest cousin in age Nick Norman who is also working for the railroad as a civil engineer all over the southern United States.  The early morning train also seems normal to me in the manner that it is a daily reminder that Wisconsin's current leader Scott Walker brutally murdered the idea of a proposed high speed rail connector to Milwaukee, Chicago, the Twin Cities, and the rest of the Amtrak world with one swift decision before he was even officially governor.  My most pleasant memory of a train rolling through my life can be seen in this picture posted here that I took while on a float trip down the Big Hole River in south-central Montana a few years.

  as you can see this train loves America as much as I do, and it came rollin in at just the right time.  But photograph like this are normal, to me this makes being normal so much better.