|
|
|
night before the first frost
Saturday, October 17 2015
A group of heavy machines showed up early this morning and proceeded to resurface the length of the Farm Road for its entire length. This required many dump trucks of coarse gravel, which was packed down tightly to produce as smooth of a surface as gravel can make. There were also a number of drainage cuts made into the surrounding terrain to keep it all from washing away in the next big rain (that prolonged storm several weeks ago had eroded much of the northern-third of the Farm Road down to bedrock).
Normally when we take the dogs for their morning walk, we start on the Farm Road, mostly because otherwise Eleanor usually refuses to go. But I didn't want to have them running among moving heavy machinery, so I set off down the Stick Trail and then the Gullies Trail, made a moderate-sized loop, and returned home via the Stick Trail, grabbing a single 15 pound stick of wood and carrying it home for the last quarter mile. I hadn't brought any of my firewood salvaging equipment. I took all that with me for a pure (and dogless) firewood gathering mission some time later, collecting 90 pounds mostly from the last of that tree 80 feet east of the north end of the Gullies Trail.
The forecast was that tomorrow morning we'd have our first frost of the cold-weather season, so I went around getting all the plants that can't handle freezing and moving them into either the house or the greenhouse downstairs (where it never freezes). These included a flowering ornamental mint (which went into the greenhouse) and a Spider Plant (which went into the house). There were also a couple of those Thai Ornamental Peppers that got a late start this year and are only just flowering. They were in pots, so I could move them to the greenhouse, though the one with peppers on it is in the ground. So I covered it with a padded tarp and hoped for the best. I did the same with a tomato plant, though the tarp in that case wasn't even padded. Not much is at stake even if the frost kills everything.
At times today, I made gradual progress watching Back to the Future Part II, a movie I had never seen. (Even in the golden age of sequels back in the 1980s, I tended to assume that sequels trade branding for quality). Initially, Back to the Future Part II seemed like a mess, overstuffed with unfunny 80s humor. But once the time travel became complicated enough for characters to observe themselves doing things at different places in their lives, the movie turned into something much more clever and fresh. I should mention that I enjoyed first being exposed to the predictions of what 2015 would be like in 2015. Not surprisingly, most of the predictions were for things like cars that fly (nobody was predicting tiny gadgets allowing continuous rich communication). Some of the cars (the ones that drive, not the ones seen flying) actually have an uncanny resemblance to Priuses (Prii?). I wonder to what extent this is less a case of predicting the future than of influencing it.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?151017 feedback
previous | next |
