Thursday, July 23, 2009 - Red Rock, East Chatham NY
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LD's kitchen and a peek aft into my study, July 19, 2009
Today I started a project to reduce the weight and intrusiveness of the bed in my study
Today I shed quite a few pounds from this Lazy Daze' load and opened up my study area considerably. I didn't get good picture of the study but I think you can get a sense of how the bed intrudes into the study. A year or so back I replaced the old collapsing convertible sofa cushion with a twin mattress. This is a comfortable arrangement but is a bit large for the space and heavy to boot. Today I tossed it out along with the underlying sofa pullout mechanism that is designed to convert the sofa to a double bed. I salvaged the 4 inch foam from the overcab bed and added 4 inches of memory foam topper. I now have a comfortable 30 inch wide bed and a much larger study. Nice.
Night camp
On my property off Less Traveled Road - The Home Place, Red Rock, East Chatham NY
- I used to camp in a few locations on what little I had left of the family farm
- In the driveway by the house
- Across the road where the barn once stood
- On the 20 acre piece off Less Traveled Road
- Now, with the kind support of the friends who now own the place, I camp across the road where the barn once stood.
- Verizon cell phone service - Terrible, barely usable with an amplifier
- Verizon EVDO service - Terrible, barely usable with an amplifier
- Find other references to Home Place
- List the nights I've camped here
- Check the weather here
Five Trillion Spiders
Spiders begin their hunting with a few handicaps. They're often smaller and weaker than their prey, and they have no wings to give chase in the air. Some species extend their legs by hydraulic pressure, using the same liquid that carries oxygen from their lungs, so they have a hard time running and breathing at the same time. Even their poison may be no match for their victim's: a crab spider's bite is to a honeybee's sting as "an air-gun compared with an elephant rifle," John Crompton wrote. Yet spiders kill at an astonishing pace. One Dutch researcher estimates that there are some five trillion spiders in the Netherlands alone, each of which consumes about a tenth of a gram of meat a day. Were their victims people instead of insects, they would need only three days to eat all sixteen and a half million Dutchmen.
From Spider Woman by Burkhard Bilger, The New Yorker magazine, March 5, 2007, page 69