|
|
|
a tale of two cursors
Thursday, July 30 2026
Evidently I'd drunk a little too much last night, because this morning I had a mild hangover, one whose main symptom was mild intestinal discomfort.
Gretchen is still pretty much bedridden with a problem that seems like it might be sciatica, so I drove the dogs to the abandoned bluestone mine for another walk. Taking both dogs greatly simplified the process of getting Charlotte into the car at both ends. This walk was similar to the one I'd done two days ago with Charlotte, but first we explored a little more at the south end of the quarry, finding a rectangular pit in the bluestone that was now full of water (perhaps temporarily). There were some good pieces of bluestone there, and I put one aside for later. We eventually ventured further south than we'd gone two days ago into a region where the trees were widely spaced (apparently from a history of continuous logging) and there was a thick covering of sedge on the forest floor. We continued southward downslope until we encountered a large bluestone boulder that was close to orthogonal on all sides and the size of an automobile. From a distance it was so simple in appearance that it looked like a human-made sturcture. We continued a little further downslope beyond it, but by then I was worried about Neville getting too much exercise, so I turned around. On the way back to the car, I had carried that beautiful piece of bluestone I'd found earlier. It was just light enough for me to carry it the several hundred feet it needed to be moved.
This afternoon, I set out along the Farm Road carrying a hatchet looking for some tree I could make into a crutch for Gretchen, since putting weight on her right leg made walking extremely painful. I soon realized that no young tree, the kind with a small enough diameter, would have the kind of Y-branching I would need for my crutch. So I ended up going down the Chamomile to the Stick Trail and then down to the beginning of the Gulleys Trail, where a large live red oak had recently fallen. There I hacked away a branch that was about the right shape. Using a hatchet meant doing a lot more work than I would've done with a saw, since cutting through a thick branch with a hatchet is not a fun job (in the process I managed to open up a blister at the base of my right thumb). Back at the house, I used a chainsaw to clean up the branch and then ran some heavy cordage between the prongs of the Y (into which I'd cut notches to secure that rope) to form the surface upon which an armpit would go. After several passes with the cordage back and forth, I wrapped it around the collection of cordage neatly to thicken it even further. After some height adjustments to crutch, Gretchen said that it was too heavy, so then I used a chainsaw and a rasp to remove material, working in a similar manner to how I'd worked when making that black cherry stool last weekend. By the end of the evening, the main problem with the crutch was that it didn't have an anti-slip rubber cap on the bottom. But by then it was clear that a crutch wasn't really the right mobility aid because the jarring motion of using one itself caused pain to the affected leg.
Today was the day that I finally completed all the writing of the journal entries for the Mediterranean trip, meaning I finally have the mental space to properly focus on something else for the first time since returning. That's a pattern I've experienced multiple times. When I first get home, I'm overwhelmed by the writing I need to do. But then I focus on it systematically, opening up two cursors in history: the first being the one traversing the events of the trip I just got back from from oldest to newest, and the second being the events since I got back, from oldest to newest. When the first cursor reaches the start of where the second cursor had been, I am done.
That homemade crutch. Click to enlarge.
Here you can see more of my right foot. Click to enlarge.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?260730 feedback
previous | next |
