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Jordanian chert as a stone tool
Sunday, March 1 2015
The weather forecast predicted snow for this afternoon and evening, so Gretchen decided to take the Subaru to her job at the bookstore in Woodstock. That car had only just become drivable again after I installed a new battery the other day, though it has sat unused through several snowstorms and had a substantial buildup not just of snow but of ice as well. Getting that ice off the windshield wipers quickly destroyed a dollar store ice scraper, and Gretchen came in to ask if I could help. So I grabbed a rock from our bowl of artifacts gathered on out various travels around the world (it sits conveniently near the front door). In this case, the rock I grabbed was a piece of chert from Jordan somewhere south of Petra. I lifted up the windshield wiper from the Subaru and used the rock as a primitive hammer to break into bits the baseball-sized lump of ice attached to it, precisely as my ancient ancestors did with similar rocks in Jordan 125 thousand years ago. But instead of the ice breaking into bits, the lump of Jordan did. So I went back inside and fetched a piece of quartz-veined sandstone (from the Esopus?) and this time it did to the ice what Jordanian chert could not.
Later, as Gretchen passed the east end of the Ashokan Reservoir on Dike Road, a State Trooper pulled her over due to his purported concern about all the snow on the Subaru's roof. At first he quibbled with her idea of driving to the Reservoir Inn and removing the snow there, worried for some reason that it was too much snow to dump in a parking lot. But in the end he relented, since there were no other good options.
I worked fairly doggedly all day on the ecommerce part of the Lightroom/Webapp. As I worked, I drank black tea instead of the green tea I'd been drinking for the past several weeks. Green tea is great when I'm coming out of caffeine abstinence, but it's a bit insipid for every day drinking, particularly when I have work to do. I actually made the transition to black tea a few days ago, and I've now completely returned to the caffeine habits I developed in the autumn of 2011, when I ceased my daily morning ritual of drinking a french press of coffee.
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