New Things

 
"Some days the Gales are howling"
   Today I did some trenching in my
yard so that water would drain in the
proper direction.  This involved
three changes of shoes.  I'm wearing
a very old pair of New Ballance sneakers
that don't have insoles.

Oh, well.  When the rain stops I can figure
out what to do with my new channels.
It is kind of an extrodinary day.  I don't 
suspect that I will need to have these
channels for ordinary rain-storms.
It rained all night and into the day.
It didn't stop.  This is what you call
a Nor'Easter.  Only thing is that
it is the second one in three weeks.



You don't get storms like this very often,
so when you do you tend to remember it.
And, once again, it was the North Shore, 
Cape Ann, New Hampshire and Maine that got
the brunt of the storm here in New England.
The National Weather Map showed some very high
winds centered around the area southwest of 
Bar Harbour and Northeast of Cape Ann.
Big Wind it was.

After a big storm like this is a good time
for beach combing.  After floods is
the best time to look for sapphires in
the sandy banks of a river (where
they are known to occur, like in Montana)

Weird thing was that I told a friend about
how I was into looking for stones in river
sand, or on a beach, and he told me that his
grandparents were prospectors out in
Montana.  My buddy is from Portland, Or.
He told me that his grandparents used to
have a jewelry business.  And my buddy knows
all about looking for precious stones.  He
says someone in his family has a giant ruby that
his grand mother found in Montana (or his grand dad).

Small world. 

I recently discovered (some months ago) with
my constant web-searching for things interesting
that the town of Alstead NH has a very large
number of working tourmaline mines.  I am 
inclined to seek these out and pay the folks
for the privledge of sifting through their
muds.  There was a picture of such a place and
it just looked like an old fallow farm area, or
pasture, where there was a dirt road, rutted and 
ruddy, and you can poke around in this and find
crystals of tourmaline.  I don't know what
I'd be looking for, what the rough might look like.
I know that if you find crystals of quartz on a hillside
you can find a very lot of it.  If you are up
on a hillside near where the pegmatite is . . . 
the mud in that place might be filled with
various types of crystals.  I've found clear
things that seem to be quartz.  But they might
also be topaz.  It is most likely quartz because I
ahve some crystal that I know is quartz and . . .
all quartz has the same specific gravity.  So it 
would be equal weight for equal volume.  I have 
a carrot scale.  The piece of crystal that  I has a
weight comparable to a piece of stone
that I know is quartz (actually amythist, the
purple quartz).  So I am pretty sure that the 
stones that I found are quartz.

I also found some crytals of a different sort
on Green Mountain in Clairmont.  These were  embedded
into the bedrock with chunks of bedrock loose.  So
I broke a piece and got a part with one of these
crystals in  it.  This crystal is black.  It
has a shape like a tourmaliine (I am no
expert on crystal shapes).  If one were wanting this
kind of crystal (it is unknown what it is now)
then one can find it at this location in New Hampshire.
I think that where I found this is in conservation
land.  You can't hauling out stones without considering
that someone might have a claim to the stuff already.

I look for stones in rivers where there is no title to them.
I have foudn stones out on mountaainsides too, and
on beaches.  And I just claim title to them.  There might
be issues with this to some people.  How could I ever
prove where I got the hundreds of stones that I have?
I can't remember where I get them any more.  I have taken
to fishing for crystal in river beds and in streams, collecting
a small back-packs worth of stones (about an 1/8 of a 
paper shopping bag) and then I put them in my yard.  So
all the stones from one place are on one flag stone.  Stones
from another place are on a different flagstone, etc.

The best that I find  like this are orange stones that glow when
a flashlight is put on them.  These could probably be marketed
as jasper or agate, in some cases.  Or orange crystal quartz.
Most of this is translucent without no transparancy at all.
Often  I will find a very orange stone that might just
be garnet, or some kind of jasper or orange marble.  Probably
some kind of quartz, though.  But also, possibly, a form of
garnet.
When you find garnets you find hundreds (thousands) of them 
in bolders along the flow of a river.  The ones on the surface of 
bolder might be oxidized and just little orange 
holes in the larger stone.  If you
chip away at this kind of a stone you can find tiny garnets,
perfectly shaped,  down in the stone, preserved for the many
millions of years since they were formed and then
magma came up around them and cooled with these
thousands of garnets on the inside.  It is obvious that
this is a very large scale happening.  The garnet laden 
stones can be pat of the bedrock or possibly giant 7  feet
by 6 feet bolders sculpted in the bed of a river 
(the Black River is what I think it was to be 
precise, somewhere near 
Windsor, Vt right along a state highway, and easy to get to.
I didn't see any gem quality garnets when I went to this
place.  But there were certainly enough garnets there that
if  someone were needing commercial grade garnets for
sand-papper or for making grinding wheels, one
would be able to get them at this river in Vermont.
You could get a lot of it too without having
much of an effect on the landscape.  The place I 
am talking about is a beautiful strech of river.




Also some new graphics of other types too, but  
they are still 'in the vault'.
OK, here is something removed from the vault:

animated entity: an svg entity with inserted JavaScript 
      including extremely simple minded animation
It is possible that the JavaScript enabled entity doesn't
work on your system.  You might not have a browswer that
does svg or JavaScript embedded in svg.

I don't like doing this in one sense because it gives away
all of the secrets.  In any casse there really isn't all
that much too my little graphic, as complex as it might seem
as it animates.
It is possible, with div and div positioning, to put these
kinds of entities wereever we want to put them.  We can
even program, through the DOM and JavaScript, to animate
the locations of these various graphical entities.  
This has been the source of much amusement the past few weeks.

I've got some concepts which I am not sharing.
The implementation of new things is better put in the vault
until a more perfect presentation provides something
useful and extrordinary.  

I am doing work with SVG, which can result in large files.
I don't want to post huge files that will tax my bandwidth.
I can make a bitmap of them . . . 

This all gives me ideas.  

Look for new things. 



 
Many Many black birds of the same type,
on the wires, on the trees, on any place
where they can perch.
The birds in the giant flocks in our neighborhood are not always crows.
In the photo above they were a smaller, black, bird.

Not a day for kayaking
Riverside Park, The Charles River Reservation.
A good day for skiing.  
Leo J. Martin Golf Course, 
The Charles River Reservation.
You don't have to pay if you go to Riverside Park.  But people
must like the groomed trials at Leo J. Martin golf course.
Oh, endless worlds of ice.  
Somewhere on 128 
  on the road 
to Cape Ann.
The blizzard only adds to the 
finely crafted decorative holiday wreath.  
Merry Christmas to all!
The sea rages.  
Bears Neck, 
Rockport, 
Cape Ann, 
Massachusetts.
Where's Bill?
Here I am!
Crashing waves
To those who go down to the sea
in ships.  
May they all return home safely.
Glochester, Jan 3, 2009.  At dusk
The Fisherman's Memorial is not just a statu.  It also includes
a group of plagues with a chornologicaal list of the names of
folks well remembered.  The list of names is long and detailed.  
Does the snow add to the poignency of this memorial?  Surely this memorial is 
fit for a quarter or maybe even a commemorative dollar?
Many names 
even covered in ice,
never forgotten
Names covered in ice
always remembered.
Anchored in our Hearts  
   

Feb 11, 2010


Feb 11, 2010