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too solid to break, too heavy to lift
Monday, November 4 2013
Susan the Artist had slept on the couch in the living room, and at some point in the night I'd left the bedroom door upstairs open, and Ramona had escaped, forced herself beneath the blankets with Susan, and snuggled. When I came down early this morning to stoke the fire, Susan exclaimed, "She's the best snuggler ever!"
When she got out of bed, Gretchen sported the kind of black eye that usually (on women at least) is a prime indicator of spousal abuse, and saying "my dog gave it to me," though true, had a "my dog ate my homework" ring to it. Later when she and Susan went off to the Garden Café in Woodstock, she applied some concealer over it so it wouldn't spark unnecessary conversations.
Despite another looming sub-deadline for my Lightroom plugin project, I found time in my day to go down to the greenhouse to continue excavating the remains of that hard but amorphously-layered bluestone of the western half of the floor (which I've excavated about 30 inches from where I began a couple weeks ago). Some of the pieces I've been able to break loose have been too big to life out of the hole, though I've usually been able to break them into smaller pieces by lifting them up and letting them fall black down. Occasionally when they break, the line of weakness they break along includes a fossil, such as this one (click to enlarge):
Since the only fossils I ever see in this mid-Devonian rock are brachiopods and worm artifacts, I'm assuming this is just a large (inch-wide) brachiopod viewed from the side. But it could be something more interesting such as a nautiloid.
One elephant ear of bluestone that I broke loose today proved too heavy to lift out of the hole and also resisted all attempts to break off more than token amounts. I'll either have to devise some structure allowing me to tip it up onto something higher up and then tip it out onto the deck over the east half of the floor, or I'll have to bring "the fuct saw" (a Black & Decker with bad bearings and a masonry blade) down so I can weaken it enough to break it in half.
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