And once again the summer trend begins of me abandoning Paideia to whatever cybernetic fate the network chooses to bestow upon it. Doesn't seem to have undergone any great damage in my absence.

Nominally I'm working for the government now, in a far less glamorous or fascinating role than I perhaps could have wished. I suppose it's important nonetheless, but one might conceivably prefer something other than seemingly endless literature searches on a computer in a cubicle, inside. My number one gripe at the moment is that I am without music, save for a tantalizing echo through the air conditioning vent from the room upstairs. My room, a hundred by forty foot maze of cubicles and partitions, remains as silent as the grave, despite the fifteen of us that are currently housed here.

This A/C vent is the bane of my existence. Not only does it taunt me with the knowledge that somewhere ten feet above my head people are actually enjoying some auditory escape from the onus of the computer screen, but it also disgorges refrigerated air with a glee entirely unbecoming an inanimate piece of machinery. The temperature change can be felt as one walks from the populated end of the room to this isolated Arctic outpost that I call home for eight hours of the day.

My mentor is a quietly intelligent middle-aged man with thick dark hair and an unfortunate dandruff problem. I have not seen him since the first day of work.

During the last five days or so I have become more intimately acquainted with the methanol synthesis process than I ever wanted to be. Hydrogen may well be the "Freedom Fuel," as our avidly antiterrorist president so originally termed it, but the scientific fact remains that it is a bitch to transport. Or do anything with, really. Methanol, on the other hand, is pleasantly liquid and as easy to work with as standard gasoline, and produces hydrogen as a fuel and no greenhouse emissions. Common sense, really. My job is to figure out how to produce hydrogen and carbon dioxide in order to produce methanol in an energy efficient, economical, and environmentally friendly manner. The problem is I have to be able to explain it, too.

Definitely a change of scenery here. Jagged peaks, their tops dusted with snow, loom on the distant horizon, surrounding the flat expanse of desert that extends for miles around us on all sides; an endless sea of scrub and rabbitbrush. A few random mountains erupt from the plain like boils; completely isolated from one another, rearing without warning from the table-flat acreage. Their sides look blackened; rounded piles of charred rock and the greenish fuzz of low vegetation. I wonder if perhaps a few are extinct volcanoes. It is a harsh country, where water is more precious than gold, but starkly beautiful in its sheer wild barrenness. In the fields close to town the huge irrigation lines pivot on wheels, great concentric circles worn in the dirt. It takes a whole day for a single rotation. Smaller sprinklers keep up a constant spray in straight lines down the fields. The crops grow green right up until the edge of the water's range, then like a wall bare brown earth begins.

The storms move quickly in this country. The clouds hang gray and low and menacing over the horizon, trailing dark fringes of rain beneath them. Thunder rolls and growls, a spatter of rain beats on the window, and just as quickly ceases. The sun shines through breaks in the cloud cover, sending bright, delineated rays down to illuminate the ground in spots, which flame green beside their shadowed neighbors. I think of sociology and theories on uniqueness in the crowd.

An artist once placed a single dot of black paint on a clean canvas. Or a white dot on black - it doesn't matter which.