Studying the rural landscape 🐐

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One of the things I find myself spending a lot of time lately is trying to understand the rural landscape and people’s relationship to land and property. The architecture and barns, the livestock raised, how people piece together a living in the country.

Methods of study vary. One is the simple just traveling to rural areas, riding rural roads on my bike. Climbing mountains and peering down into the valleys. Things I’ve done for years now, but now with a much more careful eye, trying to figure out what I actually want to some day not that far in the future incorporate into my life. Styles of architecture, layout of homesteads and gardens, livestock and even toys like ATVs, tractors and trucks.

But at the same time I’ve been doing a lot of reading and listening to e-books about farming and homesteading, books about the wilderness and how people relate to the land. In many ways it’s taking off my rose colored glasses on the topic. I grew up in the country, I know about barnyards and breaking ice to water ducks and feed dogs in the winter and all the smells and hard work that go along. Still maybe I didn’t think as much about stewardship and how much farmers of all stripes struggle to stay on the land, and the hustle to stay afloat selling what they can. Often it really is a fight for life against markets, pests, disease and weather. Or how 5 acre homesteads chew away at once vibrant farming lands. YouTube videos are good to get a look at every day operations of farms and homesteads but sometimes five hundred page books give you a lot more of the back story.

People will say I’m wasting my time in analysis and study, years of my life are rapidly fading away while rent checks fly out the door padding my landlords pockets. But I want to do it right, build the right homestead in the right location, be thoughtful not rushed. The time is not now but will come and armed with facts on all aspects of rural life, I will make better decisions. I grew up in the country and went to school in a small town, yet there is much more to learn.

Back on Cheese Hill 🧀

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Just sitting here, staring at the Catskill Mountains much like three weeks ago. I’ve been coming up here a lot especially in the autumn. I should bring my shot gun and get my license but I’m fine just sitting here. I don’t eat that much meat anymore.

I know that cabin for sale out here that stole my heart out here was much too far from work,🏚️ but I do love it out here. Years ago when I was young – decades before this was state forest I used to come out here and just sit at the end of the road looking at the mountains. ⛰️ Plus out here was a good place to seek out homesteads with burn barrels to look at even in years after the ban. 🛢️ Mostly all gone fifteen years later. But even if I lived remote, I’d have those shit gun 🔫 laws of New York. My apartment is a mess, it needs a good cleaning but I’ve been away so long. Facing another winter there, I need to get more weather stripping around the door 🚪 that continues to rot away. Still it’s fairly cheap. Been quiet 🤫 the past few weeks as the landlord – dairy man has been busy harvesting not working on the unit next door. Money 💰 has been good this past year, between the high interest rates and the booming stock market. I can make the leap when I want but I don’t want to fall flat on my face, ☺️ and still kind of want to get in twenty years with the state for the higher pension amount.

Smoked some grass and forgot to tighten my kick stand 🏍️ before I went out riding. Bolt 🔩 bounced out and is gone but I found the kickstand and it’s a standard water bottle cage bolt 🍶 so I stole one from there and will replace by stealing another part of my old bike 🚲. Made me cranky for a while this morning but after lunch and some riding I’m feeling better. Plus that whole issue of my eyes 👀 being irritated from the contacts. I’m out of paper towels 🧻 so I didn’t wash my hands 👐 well enough before putting them in it seems.

Been thinking 💭 a lot about my use of the R statistical language. Is R a real programming language? It’s not a general purpose language like C or even Python and I wonder what value I get out of learning and using it every day. I think that’s why I’ve been so interested in learning and getting really good at C and now Rust. I do like a lot about Rust. But I’ve also been study a bit of modern Javascript and Java. Truth is a lot of the concepts can be used from language to language and for a lot of things I do R and the tidyverse are perfect. 🖥️ Still when I tell people I do most of my work in R, I just get snickers. Of course, a lot of scripts in the office are based around good ol Awk which is if anything far less of a language then R.

2016 Land Use in the Finger Lakes

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2016 Land Use in the Finger Lakes

Yesterday, I downloaded the National Land Cover Data for 2016. I had some older data but I hadn't updated it in years, but soon realized I could make some very interesting maps and graphics with this data. The Finger Lakes are kind of interesting to look at in particular as you can see the Northern Finger Lakes have a lot of cultivated lands -- mostly corn and soybeans -- for feeding dairy cattle, while the more upland and rocky lands in the Southern Finger Lakes are either wooded or pasture.