Touchdown, Vancouver

Sushi Combo "B" sitting comfortably in my stomach, I realize there's no way other than Heineken from the hotel minibar to exorcise the taste of soy sauce and wasabi from my mouth.

Getting better by the moment, I reflect on a couple of weeks of drilling at the Company's main property. Like disguising a story involving your wife by calling her an "ex-girlfriend" and then going on to reveal marriage-destroying details that are no one else's business, the company I work for need not be named.

In the eternal game of "Lone Geologist versus the Entire Mine Engineering Department", there can be only one winner. Logically, this means the lone geologist must always triumph. Here are the common mistakes I run into time after time after time after....

1) You design the pit to fit the drilling, not the drilling to fit the pit design! If I had a quarter for every time they got this one wrong...people would be paying to read this in a magazine.

2) Drill core logs consist of more than assay results. There's a good bloody reason my back is permanently hunched from looking through a hand lens at core half an inch from my nose.

3) A few 100 metre holes into an untested area do not constitute "condemnation drilling".

4) In a 3D modeling software package, lining up two mineralized drill holes in an otherwise un- or under-tested area in no way defines a mineralized "trend"! What if they're two parallel trends? Hmmm? Answer me!

5) Post-mineral faults...I'm not even going to start on this one. Hint: By my saying "post-mineral", and you saying "but maybe they're reactivations", you are actually showing me you think "post" is a brand of breakfast cereal. Well, pretty much.

You know the feeling, talking to a self-appreciating wall. And...I got nothing else for the moment.

Cheers, to another night in some hotel room on the road. At least this one has a view of the water from downtown Vancouver, and not a view of a mobile home park and a whole bunch of spruce trees. You know the place, maybe you're even there right now? If life is starting to seem a bit like the source material for a Gordon Lightfoot song, stick with me, brothers and sisters in arms, and I'll drag you up for some fresh air!