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headwaters of a fast-running brook
Friday, December 12 2008
Rain fell all night and it was heavy at times, and temperatures were mostly high enough to keep it from freezing. From our windows, though, we could see that at slightly higher elevations on the ridge above Port Ewen (six miles away) a glazing of ice had formed.
The rain brought localized flooding to the places that normally flood in such conditions: the low spot just west of the entrance to the farm road, the ditch on the south side of Dug Hill Road, and everything just uphill from our driveway. Tiny temporary streams cut traces through the flatland around the new greenhouse, though I'd miraculously sited it in a place avoided by surface runoff. I went to the place where my drainage system disgorges its water and saw it was the headwaters of a fast-running brook which had already cut itself a respectable stream bed through the leaves.
We were still without power, so there wasn't much for me to do in the house. So I spent some time at the greenhouse, listening to the local public radio station while I gathered clean rocks and used them to fill the ditch around the greenhouse's foundation. It was a job I'd been putting off. All the temporary rivulets made the gathering of clean rocks much easier. I could just reach into the water and pull out random stones and they'd be perfectly clean. Surprisingly, surface runoff even this late in the season isn't bone-chillingly cold. It still seems to carry a measure of heat stored up in the bedrock and soil from the warm season.
Later, after the power came on, I listened to Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point while installing the bits of wood and metal that will hold the greenhouse's main glass panels in at the bottom. I also installed some flashing that will go out over the styrofoam I'll be putting on the outside of the concrete block wall. By this point in the day the weather had grown much colder, making outdoor work increasingly unpleasant.
This evening Gretchen and I watched a DVD of perhaps the most formulaic movie of all time: Sydney White, a retelling of Snow White in the context of elitist sororities populated exclusively by blondes and a non-frat populated by seven losers (the "dwarfs" in this retelling). It's a testament to the advance of technology that the "magic" of the evil stepmother's mirror is a familiar web application in the form of a local "hot or not" website. As with all such movies, there is an evil blonde villain (playing the role of "evil stepmother") and a final showdown just before the uplifting, happy ending. If there was a moment for me to have said "spoiler alert" it would have been before my use of the word "formulaic," but I hadn't even mentioned the name of the movie yet in the way I'd put together that particular sentence.
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