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boulders in the swale
Sunday, March 20 2016
It was cold enough for me to wear gloves this morning when I took the dogs for a walk. We went to the end of the Farm Road and then along the western edge of the abandoned go-cart track and then into the forest at the bottom of a slight dip in the topography. There was no trail to follow, but there was much of interest to see. I've been aware for many years of a series of massive (van-sized) boulders in this part of the forest, and today I realized that they were concentrated at the bottom of a broad swale running north-south (41.929311N, 74.112185W). It would make sense for large boulders to be preferentially dropped by the continental ice sheet in areas of lower elevation, though it's odd that there are no such boulders dotting the Esopus Valley. Perhaps the forces hustling them along were greater there due to the fact that the Esopus flows through a valley with well-defined walls.
As I neared home, I used my small battery-powered chainsaw to cut up some scraps of wood piled up in a staging area only a couple hundred feet west of the woodshed. The load only came to 62.4 pounds, and, since it didn't require splitting, I carried it directly inside. (Normally when weighing my wood, I arrange it in a careful Jenga-style pile on the scale, but in this case I just weighed myself with the load, unloaded it, weighed myself and my pack, and subtracted the second weight from the first.)
My mentee came over for another two hour session again, and again I did all the work in front of him while he watched, occasionally typed on his keyboard in what seemed like unrelated activities, and contributed almost nothing. The whole exercise is feeling increasingly fraudulent. I get the sense that I'm enabling his lazy, indifferent behavior, but I'm kind of stuck with him and I don't feel like I have any way to change his essential nature. I should have been suspicious from the start when I learned his interest was to "make games." "Making games" is what computer dilettantes want to do. Hopefully I can at least get him to cut me out some critter images in Photoshop so we'll have proper sprites for this "game" I'm building for him.
Late this evening, Gretchen returned from her training session in Atlanta, the one where she learned to give animal-rights-positive lectures to high school students. Originally, the weather forecast had predicted a nor'easter and twelve inches of snow for Newark when she landed there, but the forecast gradually changed and the worst she encountered on the drive home was a few scattered flurries. As for the training session, she'd had a great time and evidently shown herself to be a natural at the job. By contrast, she discovered from watching her fellow students that being a natural at giving an animal-rights-positive presentation is not a common trait. Gretchen also had several opportunities to read from Kind, her collection of animal-rights poetry. She says several there were already familiar with it.
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