Balsam Swamp is a sprawling state forest that stretches almost 5.5 miles east-west across 4 towns. The area is very rural, and the landscape surrounding the State Forest is predominantly forested. Balsam Swamp State Forest is comprised of a mix of native hardwood forests, hemlock swamps, and conifer plantations. There are no designated recreational trails on the forest, but there is ample opportunity for self-guided day hikes to explore the diversity of habitats represented on this State Forest. Additionally, the western section of Balsam Swamp State Forest is adjacent to Five Streams State Forest to the south.
The main attraction of this forest is Balsam Pond. The impoundment is approximately 152 acres and is a popular destination for fishing and paddle boat sports. Balsam Pond is a warm water fishery that contains a mix of largemouth bass, smallmouth bass, chain pickerel, yellow perch, brown bullhead and sunfish. Tiger muskellunge have been stocked in the past with the last stocking occurring in 1995. However, there have been very few reports of anglers catching any of the adult tiger muskies. A shallow gravel boat launch is suitable for launching small fishing boats.
A small rustic camp ground is also located at Balsam Pond. Camping spaces are available at no cost on a first-come, first-serve basis and there is no running water or electricity. A fire ring, outhouse, and picnic table are provided for each camping space. A sign on Balsam-Tyler Road in Pharsalia designates the entrance to the boat launch and camping facility. This is a carry-in carry-out facility. Please do not litter.
It looks like there is a wye to the high leg delta transformer near Delaware Avenue and Orchard Avenue. There is three transformers with smaller than the other one, suggesting a high leg delta. From there, the step down transformers to houses which appear hooked phase to phase as there is no ground line to reference like you would have with a wye, as with along Delaware Avenue. The Environmental Education Center is hooked to all three phases with step down transformers wired as with a delta, so I’m pretty sure its a high leg delta.
I’ve never gotten the War on Marijuana. I think that the old adage that pot smokers are loosers is kind of silly. Most people I know who smoke pot are actually quite successful. They use the drug in moderation, it chills them out and if anything makes them better at dealing with every day stresses in the a calm and collected way. Sure I know stoners who are loosers but also folks who make a ton more money then I do at my job.
To be clear, smoking marijuana is pungent and it lingers. While odor is closely associated with people’s views on the topic, there is no doubt that it’s pungent. It lingers in the air and on your clothes like mucking a hog or dairy barn. Unlike farmers though, pot smokers don’t usually shower and change out of their barn clothes before heading back to town. I guess you can grow to like the smell and associate it with good things – just like farmers like to joke that manure smells like money.
I don’t worry that much about people driving intoxicated because I think people will find ways to be foolish with motoring however they want to be, and while there may be more deadly crashes, that’s more of an issue of motoring then the drug itself. Marijuana also adjusts perception different that alcohol and its impacts are different. So there’s that.
I do think it would be an excellent agricultural crop especially once it becomes federally legal, which is only a matter of time. If the democrats win the White House that could happen in two years. It’s apparently quite easy to grow and process, it could not only help the agriculture industry but also inspire the younger generation to learn more about agriculture and do some gardening and home cultivation.
“Tell me how long you plan to stay here Joe, some people say that this town don’t look good in snow. You don’t care, I know.“
It is a life goal of mine to eventually get out of New York State in search of greener pastures, where the winters aren’t as cold, the taxes are lower, the regulations are less zealous. Certainly it would be nice to have winters that are less harsh, but honestly having a place with a good woodstove and snowmobiles make it a little less harsh, although I still hate driving on icy roads in the winter.
But it’s not going to happen next week. I plan to stay in New York at least as long as I have family around, which is probably another 10-20 years. I can’t leave my elderly parents alone, especially as my sister has my niece to take care of and she lives over an hour away. They sometimes fall or need to be driven to doctor. And in New York, at least in the Capital Region, there are a lot of good jobs that just aren’t available in Rural America, were wages are lower and the work is generally harder. Albany is able to siphon quite a bit of wealth off America’s biggest city and if you can live frugally, you can put it away for a better tomorrow.
The wind is cold and harsh. Your dress shoes and pants gets covered with road salt, the days are short and gray. Road salt covers your car or truck, burns holes in the sheet metal and corrodes everything up. The best roads to backcountry are blocked off by the snow, although you have question whether or not you would want to camp in the cold and dark nights of winter. But it’s good, I stay home, I save and invest for a better tomorrow. Heating bills may be high, but their offset by lower fuel and supply bills from road trips.
Today looking at at blog’s suggested photos, I noticed how brown and gray so many of the photos have gotten.
It happens every year, autumn comes and goes, the leaves fall and the woods becomes that clear, brown color of winter. Snow seems like it’s going to hold off for a while, but the changes of the season won’t last.
R is weird, if you are coming from other programming languages, especially those that come out of the C tradition — which is the most common base for languages — be it Perl, Python, Basic or any of C languages. Some of the operators are weird, the function names non-obvious, the arrays start with 1 rather 0.
Some of the functions are cumbersome to type too — the dpylr pipe as %>% can be annoying to type repeatably — which is why RStudio contains shortcuts to speed programming. Likewise, the same can be said about the <- assignment operator, which also is obnoxious to type compared to what most other languages use.
But what makes great R pretty awesome is it is an actually quite compact language for creating graphs, charts and even maps due to the pipe mechanism and many very powerful, well designed libraries. The libraries are also easy to explore and understand — you can call R functions without parameters and if they aren’t compiled C code, will output the code that makes up the function.
Matplotlib is powerful in Python, but it really isn’t as fast and easy to use ggplot2 and the grammar of geometry. Matplotlib does many things good, but it’s a lot more fiddly and the labeling functions don’t work all that well without writing a bunch of your own code. There is plotnine for Python which attempts to bring the best of ggplot2 to Python, but I find a lot of the best functions in R are missing. So it kind of sucks.
