Why I Oughta...

Last Fall, I was moving around a few pieces of flagstone in our yard when I - for some reason - looked closer at one of the stones and I realized I was staring at a fossil.  Weird.  Or at least it seemed weird to me.  I examined the piece of flagstone and realized there were a few fossils imprinted in the stone, so I went looking on the Web to figure out what we had.  Turns out, we're the owner of some Trilobites that are hundreds of millions of years old (yes...read that again... hundreds of millions of years old ).  Kinda neat, right?  Finding it and researching the fossil was a fun little exercise to do with the kids.   Imagine my delight when I was out in the yard this past week and noticed that a few of our pieces of flagstone and split open due to the winter and freezing.  I picked the pieces up to see if any of the freshly-revealed surfaces showed off any new (to us) fossils.  And, sure enough....along the edge of one of them looks like this: Below is another, more zoom'

We were out walking around Elizabeth Lake in Twin Lakes, Wisconsin a couple of weekends back and we came across this setup near Sunset Park.  It is out near the waterline and is kind of set back from the park.  But, because it is shiny, metallic and has that big solar panel and the antenna, it sticks out.  We walked up to it and the sticker on the front told us what it is.  See below: It is a Crest-Stage Gaging Station operated by the US Geological Survey (USGS).  The sticker goes on to read: This station is part of a national network for obtaining water-resources information.  The high-water mark recorded by this gage and the discharge of the stream related to it are use for flood forecasting, reservoir operations, design of bridges and culverts, interstate and intrastate water-rights claims and many other projects. It ends with:  for information contact: (nobody). So, I went digging.  And turns out, the USGS runs a nice little dashboard for each of these USGS Crest-Stage