Sunday, July 30, 2006
A little piece of Africa
I’m making slow progress on the walk in back of the house. Last weekend, feeling a little like
Fred Flintstone, I bought some more rocks at the T.H. McVey Stone Company, conveniently located a mile or so from us in Watertown, MA.
It is amazing to me that McVey’s still exists where it does, across the street from a Bugaboo Creek Steakhouse, Home Depot, and other signs of the post-industrial, chain driven economy.
McVey’s sells stone. That’s what they do. You want your granite, they got it. You want your tombstone (or someone else’s), they got it. You want your bluestone (tumbled or untumbled), they got it. You want your plastic patio furniture, forget it.
As far as I can tell, they don’t have a website, or I’d link to it. Go there if you're shopping for stone.
Most of the stone in the walk is bluestone from McVey’s, but I’ve incorporated a few other finds, like a few pieces of granite curbstone that I found in the woods behind our office, left over from parking lot construction. And
my personal favorite, the lighter colored stone in this picture, which we found in Nova Scotia last year.
If I’m remembering correctly an educational sign from a provincial park, much of the stone that forms that stretch of Nova Scotia coastline matches stone found in Africa – when the continents split apart, some of this stone went east, some went west. The rock that produced our paving stone went west. It got heaved up, and weathered into sheets along its fracture lines, and eventually calved off a piece small enough to be put in the trunk of our car. (I didn’t declare it at customs, but I bet African-Canadian paving stone has a duty schedule all its own.)
Fred Flintstone, I bought some more rocks at the T.H. McVey Stone Company, conveniently located a mile or so from us in Watertown, MA.It is amazing to me that McVey’s still exists where it does, across the street from a Bugaboo Creek Steakhouse, Home Depot, and other signs of the post-industrial, chain driven economy.
McVey’s sells stone. That’s what they do. You want your granite, they got it. You want your tombstone (or someone else’s), they got it. You want your bluestone (tumbled or untumbled), they got it. You want your plastic patio furniture, forget it.
As far as I can tell, they don’t have a website, or I’d link to it. Go there if you're shopping for stone.
Most of the stone in the walk is bluestone from McVey’s, but I’ve incorporated a few other finds, like a few pieces of granite curbstone that I found in the woods behind our office, left over from parking lot construction. And
my personal favorite, the lighter colored stone in this picture, which we found in Nova Scotia last year.If I’m remembering correctly an educational sign from a provincial park, much of the stone that forms that stretch of Nova Scotia coastline matches stone found in Africa – when the continents split apart, some of this stone went east, some went west. The rock that produced our paving stone went west. It got heaved up, and weathered into sheets along its fracture lines, and eventually calved off a piece small enough to be put in the trunk of our car. (I didn’t declare it at customs, but I bet African-Canadian paving stone has a duty schedule all its own.)
Friday, July 21, 2006
Life Imitates Art
I saw this story in real life yesterday. My drive home goes through an area with reservation land on both sides, and as I crested a hill I saw a car in the opposite direction stopped to let a duck and 6 or 8 ducklings complete crossing the road, in single file, just like the book.
Picture credit: Gareth Owen/Wikipedia
Picture credit: Gareth Owen/Wikipedia
Tuesday, July 18, 2006
Calvinism 2.0
Now here's a sentence that should make the blood run cold: “At Microsoft, researchers are working on the idea of ‘predestination.’ " (New York Times online, July 18, 2006) 
Turns out that by “predestination” the folks in Redmond mean something a little less cosmic than Calvin did – at least in the first release: "They envision a software program that guesses where you are traveling based on previous trips, and then offers information that might be useful based on where the software thinks you are going.”
Still, it suggests a good working definition of hell: all eternity spent with that grinning idiot paperclip guy offering to help you go to the post office.
Turns out that by “predestination” the folks in Redmond mean something a little less cosmic than Calvin did – at least in the first release: "They envision a software program that guesses where you are traveling based on previous trips, and then offers information that might be useful based on where the software thinks you are going.”
Still, it suggests a good working definition of hell: all eternity spent with that grinning idiot paperclip guy offering to help you go to the post office.
Monday, July 17, 2006
Brave New (to me, anyway) Metaphor
'' ‘It's steeper than a cow's face,’ said Tony Duprey, an air tactical group supervisor who has flown helicopter reconnaissance.” (Storms Add to Calif. Firefighters' Worries, The Associated Press, July 17, 2006) He was referring to the terrain in one of the current California wildfires.
Frankly, not having spent much time with cows, I had to find a picture. Yup, that’s steep.
Thursday, July 13, 2006
Tick Tock I
I guess I should write about the grandfather clock before the night blooming cereus eats it.
This clock was in my mother’s family for some undetermined number of years – I did a little bit of research in clock books and found that similarly designed clocks were built in the North of England (the ancestral stomping grounds) in the 18th century. So it’s probably got some years on it.
My great-grandparents emigrated to the US in the early 1900’s, and I like to think that the clock, appropriately crated, came with them in the cargo hold of some Cunard liner, thence onto the railroad until it fetched up in Pittsburgh. It has in it a sticker from a cleaning and repair done in the 1930s, and there are a couple of home-made looking repairs probably from the same vintage.
I remember it lurking dimly in the long hallway of the apartment my grandmother shared with her brother and my aunt for many years; my aunt took it with her to a series of apartments after they died. On her death, my brother and I faced the dilemma that every potential inheritor of a grandfather clock faces, roughly summable as “Good God, what am I going to do with that?” Sure, it has priceless family heritage, but it’s tall, heavy, frankly kind of ugly, and located in Pittsburgh.
We were prepared to do the adult thing: we called in an antique guy when we were cleaning out the house and asked him to make an offer. He looked up one side and down the other, peered into the works, and finally decided to take a pass on it.
I suppose at that point we could have hauled it out to the curb or donated it to the Salvation Army (possibly by leaving it on their doorstep at night and driving away fast) but I kept it. After getting quotes on crating and shipping (more than you might think) I rented a minivan, drove from Boston to Pittsburgh and hauled it home.
We think we own objects, but that’s not always the direction of the relationship.
Tuesday, July 11, 2006
Ferrying
I’ve been off the grid for a while, most recently at my stepson’s wedding in Harpers Ferry, West Virginia. (Or West by God Virginia, as they sometimes say. And there’s no apostrophe in “Harpers.”)
Harpers Ferry, at the confluence of the Potomac and Shenandoah rivers, is probably best known as the site of John Brown’s raid on the Federal armory in 1859. Brown, who doesn’t appear to have thought things through all that carefully, hoped to precipitate a slave revolt, using captured weapons. Instead, he and his two dozen or so raiders were captured or killed within a day and a half by a force under the command of then Colonel Robert E. Lee. Brown was hanged a few months later, and the whole affair exacerbated the sectionalism that led to the Civil War.
But that aside, it’s a geographically fascinating place – and a totally cool place to get married. Here is
the view from the bathroom window at our hotel, with the Potomac on the left. The wedding took place more or less in front of the flag. (BTW, if you’re into hotel rooms, here’s a blog that documents them, among other things.)
A couple of pretty active train lines go through town, passing through a tunnel blasted through the end of the mountain to the left in the picture. (The tunnel cost less than $5,000 to build, but that was in 1839.) There is a barely visible advertising sign about blasting powder on the face of the cliff – at least I think that’s what it’s advertising.
It is a compelling argument about the impact of geography on transportation; prior to airplanes, if you wanted to cross the Alleghenies, you pretty much had to use one of the gaps in the mountains like this one. (George Washington thought the Potomac was the broad highway that would lead to the interior of the continent, and invested a lot of money in ultimately unsuccessful attempts to promote Potomac navigation.)
Harpers Ferry, at the confluence of the Potomac and Shenandoah rivers, is probably best known as the site of John Brown’s raid on the Federal armory in 1859. Brown, who doesn’t appear to have thought things through all that carefully, hoped to precipitate a slave revolt, using captured weapons. Instead, he and his two dozen or so raiders were captured or killed within a day and a half by a force under the command of then Colonel Robert E. Lee. Brown was hanged a few months later, and the whole affair exacerbated the sectionalism that led to the Civil War.
But that aside, it’s a geographically fascinating place – and a totally cool place to get married. Here is
the view from the bathroom window at our hotel, with the Potomac on the left. The wedding took place more or less in front of the flag. (BTW, if you’re into hotel rooms, here’s a blog that documents them, among other things.) A couple of pretty active train lines go through town, passing through a tunnel blasted through the end of the mountain to the left in the picture. (The tunnel cost less than $5,000 to build, but that was in 1839.) There is a barely visible advertising sign about blasting powder on the face of the cliff – at least I think that’s what it’s advertising.
It is a compelling argument about the impact of geography on transportation; prior to airplanes, if you wanted to cross the Alleghenies, you pretty much had to use one of the gaps in the mountains like this one. (George Washington thought the Potomac was the broad highway that would lead to the interior of the continent, and invested a lot of money in ultimately unsuccessful attempts to promote Potomac navigation.)
