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remarkable balanced head
Saturday, April 25 2009
Temperatures exceeded 80 degrees today for the first time this year, and suddenly we're wearing shorts and tee shirts and walking around barefoot (my feet were still a little sore from walking the dogs barefoot the other day down the Stick Trail).
At the greenhouse, my task today was mostly to finish up the corners of the styrofoam tutu at either end of the south wall. On the west (uphill) end, the styrofoam would one day be buried beneath a substantial mound of soil, so it didn't matter much thermally what I did to it, but on the east end it connected up with a pit in the ground where the greenhouse door well lay. (This well is to allow the outward-opening door a place to swing without intercepting soil; I'd dug it during a warm spell in late December.) The heat dynamics are tricky around this well, since it allows the cold winter atmosphere a place to penetrate down near the greenhouse's foundation. So I decided to put a floor of two inch styrofoam at the bottom of this well (eventually to be covered with some sort of hard walkable surface). I also worked styrofoam into the gap between the stone wall defining the sides of this wall and the greenhouse so the stones wouldn't conduct heat out of the concrete blocks of the greenhouse. When it comes to insulating objects, details matter, though not as much as the details of sealing a building against drafts.
Late this afternoon Gretchen and I took the dogs on a three mile hike in the forest stick trail system, though we went off-trail briefly to see a remarkable balanced head-shaped piece of shale bedrock weighing many hundreds of pounds (see for yourself at 41.919236 N, 74.10111 W; it's either on state land or very close to it). By the time we got back to the house, we were both very thirsty. Luckily for the dogs, there had been occasional pools of water seeping out of the hillside for the final quarter mile of the walk home.
This evening Gretchen was watching a movie called The Lucky Ones about three soldiers of the ongoing Iraq War home on leave. At its heart it's a road trip movie, and, like many such movies, has Las Vegas as its prime destination. The thing that most struck me, other than the Job-like suffering of the oldest protagonist (played by Tim Robbins), was the bland Anywhere, USA quality of much of the America depicted in the film. Scenes of Lowes and Best Buy big box stores whiz by on the way to some anonymous exurb of McMansions or some dreary old ranch house (where the parents of a killed-in-Iraq boyfriend live with an crucial secret that the boyfriend never told). The view is of a selfish generic land where people get second mortgages and live beyond their means while slowly and inexorably forgetting about the individual soldiers, the semi-voluntary teeth of our foreign policy, sent repeatedly overseas to fight a war that never actually made any sense (and continues to grind on entirely due to inertia). In addition to the stunning scenery (much of which could take place on a motor mile near you) pay careful attention to the acting, which is exceptional.
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