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my brotheer turns sixty
Saturday, November 9 2024
This morning I got up before Gretchen, made coffee and a bagel (one of those Balsam bagels from Rochester) and then dicked around on my Chromebook. Since I am on a news fast for mental health reasons, I went down a Wikipedia rabbit hole instead. It started with a the entry for "sesame," the seeds on my bagel, because it occurred to me that I knew nothing about that plant. It turns out that it is largely grown in semi-arid tropical areas in places like Sudan, India, and Myanmar. So why was it such a big part of Middle Eastern and Japanese cuisine? I never got the answer to that question; instead I followed links to Laminales, the order that sesame is in, along with plants such as mint, olive, jasmine, and ash. This led me back to the ash Wikipedia entry, where I learned that not only is white ash threatened by the emerald ash borer, but European ash is threatened by a fungus, meaning there is much less ash in the world than there was a decade or two ago. And not only is this bad for the makers of electric guitars, axes, and baseball bats, it's also bad for frogs. It turns out that American tadpoles depend on ash leaves in their ponds. They reportedly like to eat fallen leaves, but they can't handle most of them because they usually contain lots of tanins. White ash does not, which is partly why it's susceptible to the emerald ash borer. Later after Gretchen joined me, I told her the things I'd just learned, and she wondered about peanuts. As with sesame, I knew almost nothing about them. So I read the Wikipedia entry and learned that peanuts started out in South America and only recently became a big part of American cuisine, partly due to the evangelism of George Washington Carver (something I actually did know). Peanut butter, for example, was invented as recently as 1890.
Today was Don's (my brother's) 60th birthday, so when he called this morning I picked up the phone and sang him the last few lines of "Happy Birthday To You©." He thanked me and noted that it didn't seem like I was mad at him any more for having voted for Jill Stein. I told him that I wasn't, but only because he vote didn't decide the election. We only talked a little about the election, with Don predicting that he will soon be assassinated. Don isn't exactly Nostradamus, so I mumbled something meaningless in response. I asked Don what he would be doing on his birthday, and he said he would maybe walk around the neighborhood and get some exercise, which isn't different from what he does every other day. I asked why he wasn't spending money on plastic toys or something. "I don't have any money," he replied. I then probed to see if there were any books he wanted, and he mentioned that there was a $50 book entitled The Biology of Tyrannosaurs. I searched for it on eBay and found a "very good" copy (the full title is The Tyrannosaur Chronicles: The Biology of the Tyrant Dinosaurs) for less than $17, so I immediately bought it and had it shipped to him as a birthday present.
Late this morning, after we'd drunk coffee in the living room with the dogs, Gretchen needed to go to the Brewster Street property to show it to a prospective tenant. After that, the plan was to go for a 24 mile(!) bike ride with her ex Barbara. She'd be riding one of our ebikes, so I went to put the thrift-store bike rack on the back of our Forester. I wasn't really happy with the hooks it attached with, so I added some additional redundant straps up to the roof rack. But then when we tried to put the bike on the rack, we found that its simple frame (with only one low, sloping down tube connecting the head tube to the back of the bike) made it impossible to put on our bike rack. So we ended up having to shove it into the back of the Bolt, where it had to stick out of the back somewhat.
Meanwhile I took Charlotte on two separate walks, both of them involving at least part of the Chamomile Headwaters Trail and the Farm Road.
This afternoon, I went down to the bottom of the mountain goat path behind our woodshed to both work on the stone causeway I've been building across a dip in the terrain and to gather nice pieces of flat rock from the jumbled talus below the escarpment. I took those flat pieces to the front yard to serve as a flagstone "library" for a paving project I've been procrastinating now for over a year: repaving parts of the concrete slab in front of our front door. That slab was installed by the people who built the house and originally was bare concrete that sloped (believe it or not) towards the house. In 2003, I used mortar and concrete to tile it over with a layer of bluestone such that its top surface then sloped away from the house. I hadn't tiled much of anything with bluestone at that point, so the results were rather crude, and there were big triangular spaces between some of the rocks. In recent years, some of those pieces of stone had delaminated, and the project I began today was to jackhammer up some of the mortar and concrete where those loose stone had been and then use portland cement to tile in a new arrangement of stones. The jackhammer I used was a small handheld unit, the same one I'd used for removing the tile just inside the front door back when I retiled that. I did that for awhile until I didn't really have it in me to do any more, though my jackhammering was still far from done.
Just before taking Charlotte on her second walk of the day, she ran over to the south end of the house and stood at attention, wagging her tail. She clearly saw something, but why wasn't she giving chase or barking? Then I saw what she saw: a couple pre-teen boys, probably our downhill neighbors, coming up over the lip of the escarpment to the terrace where the Stick Trail resides and then continuing up the next escarpment (choosing one of the steepest parts of the slope) to get to the Farm Road. This behavior suggests a couple things: 1: Charlotte is no good as a watchdog against maurauding children. And 2: the neighbor childrten have gotten so used to us being away on the weekends that they think nothing of hiking within a hundred feet of our house on an ordinary Saturday. I didn't react in any way, as I consider the forest to be communal property, especially for hikers.
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