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the fields of flowing water
Sunday, May 18 2008
This morning I drove with the dogs on an errand to get free things. These included a set of waterproof outdoor electrical boxes from a long-abandoned provisional electrical tap, the kind set up at a construction site to provide electricity for power tools. After I'd picked that up, I drove to Fording Place and dug up 25 gallons of sandy top soil from the west bank of Esopus Creek. As I was coming out of the woods with my shovel on my shoulder, a pickup truck rolled up and the driver joshed with me, "You just bury a body?" That was about the cleverest thing one can expect to hear a local say at Fording Place, though this guy talked and acted like he'd received a college education. He was there with his pregnant wife and non-pregnant kids looking for a place to fish.
Back at the house, I used the 25 gallons of sandy soil to fill in a low spot just west of the garden, an area into which I was expanding it. Being that there is little native soil around our house, the soil in the yard was hauled in from elsewhere. This soil tends to be comprised mostly of clay, so I did some stirring of the subsoil to combine the sand with the clay. Later, I got two wheel barrow loads of mushroom dirt from Andrea's house and mixed this in as well. Gretchen had given me a check to give to Andrea to help pay for the dirt. Andrea wasn't there, but there was an odd car in the driveway and the front door proved to be unlocked. I hollered inside, "Hello? Hello?" and then walked in and put the check on the dining room table, along with a bottle of salad dressing Gretchen had made that had proved too sweet for her palate. As I was turning to go, an unknown blond woman in a pink bathrobe (and speaking with a British accent) materialized, so I quickly explained that I'd left something for Andrea. Cue the bad electronic music. Sadly for this story (and sadder still for the mysterious blond woman; oh yeah, I own it), I beat a hasty retreat.
The other day Gretchen had bought a bunch of plants from a nursery. These had mostly been vegetables: tomatoes, lettuce, and all the variations on the cabbage theme from broccoli to collards. There were also oriental poppies, a coneflower (Echinacea), as well as smaller flowers suitable for ground cover. Concentrating on the vegetables, I hurriedly planted most of these plants as rain threatened.
This afternoon I found myself wondering if flowing water has a detectable magnetic field, one that can perhaps be measured to indirectly determine the rate of flow. If I'd been Aristotle, I would have come up with a theory about this and written it down without ever bothering to test it. The alternative in his time would have been performing an experiment, Galileo-style. In my time, experiments can often be safely avoided just by doing a Google search. Sadly, there are no useful hits for permutations of the search terms "magnetic field" and "flowing water."
Water is comprised of polarized molecules, molecules that can be pulled in various directions by an electrically-charged metal plate (or statically-charged comb). It seemed at least possible that flowing water would generate a tiny magnetic field. So I hooked up an accurate multimeter to a coil of copper wire and ran water through the coil. But this failed to register any fluctuations on the meter, not even in the millivolts setting (which is sensitive to voltages as low as 100 microvolts). This same meter went nuts if I poked an unmagnetized stainless steel fork into the coil, so I knew it was sensitive. Apparently normally-flowing water does not produce a magnetic field. So then I tried testing the flowing water for an magnetic field downstream from a statically-charged piece of plastic, one that was diverting the stream a half an inch from its preferred trajectory (and polarizing it in the process). Evidently, though, the water quickly unpolarizes after such an experience or else even flowing polarized water has no electric field. Clearly, this method for measuring the rate of flowing water was doomed.
At 11:30pm tonight, I picked up Gretchen from the Kingston Greyhound station after she returned from her latest star-studded New York City adventure. She had a bag of vegan schwag and a few stories, though she hadn't managed to sully the holy God-given sanctity of our marriage by rolling in the hay with any celebrities (not even of the B list variety).
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