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fast-grown salvaged White Ash
Wednesday, June 18 2014
The lonely cicada continued calling in the forest for a lady cicada that is still sixteen years in the making while the ravens continued whatever it is they've been doing in the canopy several hundred feet southwest of the house. Most of what I did today involved mopping up loose ends on a unspec'd web development job whose goal was to duplicate the functionality of a creaky old Microsoft AJAX web app. Unfortunately for me and my colleague, a lot of highly-technical features were only discovered days ago and we've been struggling to get them done. It hasn't been easy; it's involved doing the proper arithmetic on numeric values without any ability to see what those underlying values actually are. There had also been the problem of granularity. How could fine distinctions be made with an integer value that is never larger than four? Late today, though, we found out that these values were not in fact integers (even though their names began with a lower-case "i," the typical Microsoft way to indicate the value represents an integer). That opened up a whole nasty additional bit of work for me that I didn't expect. Still, though, there's something gratifying about solving programming challenges that keeps me engaged and entertained even when I fucking want to strangle the client.
I managed to take a short break late this afternoon to drive to the bottom of Dug Hill Road and retrieve the other half of that chunk of White Ash trunk I'd sawed in half yesterday. The only car I saw on the way down and back was that of an Ulster County Sheriff's Deputy, which made me nervous given the Subaru's expired inspection sticker. If I'd been pulled over on the side of the road wrestling big pieces of wood into the car when that deputy drove by, you can be sure he would have stopped to ask me what I was doing. That's just the way those guys are.
Later, back at the house, I counted the rings of the trunks I'd salvaged and found them only about 50 years old. Given that their diameter was 19.75 inches, that's a rapid rate of growth, especially considering the overall shadiness of the location there on the edge of a parcel belonging to Catskill State Park.
Just because I've been salvaging green White Ash along the road does not mean I have discontinued my salvaging of old dry oak along the trails in the forest. Today I brought home yet another load weighing about 120 pounds.
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