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cracking on a brachiopod
Saturday, November 2 2013
I did my best to avoid doing much work in the greenhouse today, though I went down there on a few occasions to blow off steam accumulated from puzzling through the gnarly internet handshaking of my latest version of my Lightroom plugin. This new version is just a hollow shell that offloads everything to a LAMP-based website. To do what it does, it has to communicate in two directions with a web server. Communication is easy when it's the plugin talking to the web, but in the other direction I've had to set up a messaging queue with messages that eventually get to the plugin as it polls a web page every second. Meanwhile, down in the greenhouse, things were much more simple. Occasionally "elephant ears" of bluestone could be pounded loose with cold chisels, and then I'd lift them out and remove them from the greenhouse. I've been looking at every fracture for fossils, but I hadn't found any until today when I banged on a large elephant ear until it cracked in half. There was a single small brachiopod fossil in the place where the crack decided to form. 350 million years is the age of this rock. It formed in a time when the seas were full of life and plants were first colonizing the land, but bacteria had yet to figure out how to break down plant matter and no non-insect herbivores roamed the land.
We'd be having a houseguest tomorrow, so this evening while Gretchen was off working a shift at the bookstore, I went on a fairly substantial cleaning jihad that included vaccuuming both sets of stairs, the living room, and much of the basement. I also cleaned both basement bathrooms and used bleach to destroy splotches of mold in various places, particularly the ceiling of the basement hallway and the Gunther bedroom.
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