I’m old enough to remember when cold weather was a windchill advisory, but then the government decided being explicit was too confusing for our simple brains and we needed to be dazzled with more bullshit much like the blown engines the government is requiring on non-HD pickups.
As that Billy Preston song goes, it’s another zero degree morning but this morning with a good steady wind 🌬️ so I’ll be riding the bus to work with all the colored and poor people on the pogey but at least it will be warm when I’m looking at random videos of overly large, fuel drinking pickup trucks ⛽ with the Godzilla engine. 🚍 Hopefully next week will be warm enough I can ride into work. 🚲 It’s going to be bad enough tomorrow when I ride to Wally World or if I’m not brave enough in the cold, down to Hannaford to get my weekly staple of apples 🍏 and random plastic crap for the landfill because I can’t have a fire 🔥 because I don’t own a ginormous F-350 truck with a camper shell yet.
They fixed the bathroom 🚽 at work, so it no longer is gag worthy with sewer gas. 👃 That was good it was pretty awful by Wednesday when it finally got fixed, I think the last time was there to take a crap at eating all that fiber in my pancakes, 💩 I’d rather have been climbing in a silo full of rotten silage. It’s was so gross. But now it’s much fresher. 🥞 🍏 More homemade apple pancakes this morning with carrots. 🥕 Last night for my birthday 🎂 I had some of the kidney beans I cooked up yesterday morning, along with onions and the remaining chicken and rice soup and some cornmeal. Basic buck good.
Other then that it just was a Thursday. ❄️ Cold and I walked laps for a while in the Empire Plaza, 👣 before catching the local home. Just the usual homeless bums hanging around in the back hallways of the Plaza pushing wheelchairs and grocery carts full of random debris, and the bus was held up in traffic again both on the way in and home. Had to sprint over to the shuttle 🚀 but I made it in time. Today I might head in and catch the earlier bus just because I have a few things to get done and I assume I’ll have meetings in the afternoon downtown. Tomorrow, I need to finish figuring out what books I want on Hoopla to read in February, read up on new magazines. Maybe I’ll visit my parents this weekend, depends on the weather and their avaliablity. 👪 Other then that it’s just another winter weekend.
Almost heaven, John Denver’s Take Me Home sung on the radio as I headed down to High Point in Huntersland this evening. I’ve always wanted to find some place safe to stop along the road and take pictures, but that was not to be. But I captured it on my dash board camera.
I’ve always loved Appalachia, the hills, the mountains, the farms dug outside of the mountains. I love the remoteness and the freedom of people who live tucked into the mountains with no nearby neighbors. I’ve always loved the land and wildness of the area.
People flock to the Adirondacks and Catskills for remoteness. But I always crave the remoteness of the hills around Huntersland, and so many other places like it. It’s almost a world independent of the big city – probably the nearest big town in Schoharie, or actually more accurately, Cobelskill.
I’ve always told myself I’d some day like to live in a place in the mountains like this – off the beaten track – but not in New York. Like many, I could list the open burning ban and the SAFE Act as top reasons, but really living in Upstate NY, a Rural New Yorker, is one indignity after another. $5,000 a year property taxes are just offensive when many people in other states pay a tenth of that, pistol permits and the Sullivan Act, no un-permitted open carry even in the woods, no places to ride ATVs on most public lands, among other things that most people in other states gets to enjoy.
I can celebrate this beautiful, wild land, while condemning our state’s government. But I realize our state’s Appalachian beauty, is not an exception but a rule. Pennsylvania has many remarkable lands and much better laws and lower taxes. I’ve spent much time in the Pennsylvania Wilds, but I’ve also heard that Ohiopyle area of state in Green County is quite beautiful. Not to mention many of the areas in the center part of state. And so many other states too.
While I feel such bitterness towards the state, I do love the land and it’s beauty. It’s government maybe draconian and take care of these people poorly, but they don’t live a life of natural poverty, even if they struggle to make ends meet. And while I don’t intent this essay to be a rant about state government – we all live in the system we chose to live under – I do have conflicted feelings about this beautiful area.
My office in Menands is down the street from the North Albany Sewage Treatment Plant, which processes about 83 Olympic swimming pools worth of water each day, reducing harmful pathogens and nutrient load before taking dumping much of Colonie, Menands and North Albany’s waste water in the Hudson River. It’s also home to one of state’s remaining sewage sludge incinerators, where they use natural gas to dry and burn off the solids separated out of waste water process, both generated on-site and trucked in 6-days a week from sewage treatment plants across the county and beyond. It wastes energy and produces carbon emissions, but greatly reduces the amount of sewage sludge ash that is currently disposed of in City of Albany Landfill in the Albany Pine Bush.
Lately there has been a push towards more composting of sewage sludge, but that has not been without problems. We live in a chemical-rich society, and wastewater not only often contains treated industrial effluent but also landfill effluent, the remains of pots and pans washed off, soaps and chemicals used in cleaning, and so forth. And it all get mixed in with the poop and pee, that is itself can contain the byproducts of pharmaceuticals. Most notable is the problem with PFOAs which have caused all kinds of issues for farms in Maine when they’ve been detected in farm field soils. Probably PCBs would be an equal problem, had they not been phased out what is going on 50 years ago now.
The thing about it is landfilling and incinerating might reduce immediate human exposure to the toxic compounds in sewage sludge, it hardly makes the problem going forward. And its a terrible waste of nutrient value and only increases climate emissions. I know whenever I can I will pee outdoors, and don’t think twice about digging a cat hole and using my bucket shitter up in the woods. I tihnk that’s a vastly more sustainable option. I really don’t love the idea of septic tanks either and capturing all those solids and having to have them pumped every few years. Yes, there is some biological degradation both in a septic system and a waste water digestion, but you’re still disposing rather utilizing nature’s fertilizer.
“This book has a lot to say about Ancient Greek perspectives and their meaning but there is one perspective it misses. That is their view of time. They saw the future as something that came upon them from behind their backs with the past receding away before their eyes.When you think about it, that’s a more accurate metaphor than our present one. Who really can face the future? All you can do is project from the past, even when the past shows that such projections are often wrong. And who really can forget the past? What else is there to know?” – Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance – Robert M. Pirsig
Birthdays are kind of weird time when you look both backwards and forward in your life. Twelve years until I’m 55 years old, which seems so old in the sense that some people retire at the age, and it’s the earliest you can be considered a senior citizen. But it’s a close as January 2014, which at least in my mind doesn’t seem very long ago. I can remember 2014 just like it was yesterday, working out in the field in Madison County, camping up that beautiful spring day at Duck Pond and getting bumped on the expressway that summer. Age 55 seems so old now, but then again when I was 31 years old, the idea of being 43 years old seemed far off.
Thing were simpler back in 2014, but then again, we will soon enough look at these days as the good ol’ days. My successes, my triumphs and tribulations will seem like small little bumps in road compared to world that is ahead. While there is much I can estimate and predict, many surprises are inevitably ahead. But I do believe in many ways I’m on the right track and the best is yet to come. Things are better now, but they’ll only be better in the future.
So many things will change in the coming years. Will I buy a truck? Will it be a big Ford SuperDuty? Or something totally different, but it’s amazing to think whatever I choose I’ll have it most likely well into my 50s, beyond when my parents are gone. Where will I be in 12 years? Will I buy a house, or take over my parents homestead? Will I stay in New York, work out my career in the Assembly building tens of thousands of data frames and other little scripts to build the next generation of data? Will I make it out to Michigan and West Virginia this year? Or will I do something different? How close will be I towards owning that off-grid homestead? Or will my mind change in the mean-time and buy that 20-year old Honda and the plastic house in suburbs?
“Nothing ages so quickly as yesterday’s vision of the future.” — Richard Corliss
"There's a young man that I know, he's just turned twenty-one He comes from down in southern Colorado Just got out of the service and lookin' for his fun Someday soon, goin' with him, someday soon
My parents cannot stand him 'cause he works the rodeos They say he's not your kind, he'll lead you pine in But if he asks I'll follow him down the toughest row to hoe Someday soon, goin' with him, someday soon
When he visits me my pa ain't got one good word to say I've got a hunch he was wild back in the early days So blow you ol' blue norther, blow him back to me He's likely drivin' back from California He loves his damned old rodeos as much as he loves me Someday soon, goin' with him, someday soon"
I am the child of two college educated parents, but they were homesteaders, and I grew up in a very working class rural neighborhood – and my parents had very working class jobs at the Center for Disability Services.
Having college educated parents that grew up in the suburbs always put me in a different social class then most of the more working class folks who parents graduated high school if even that. My parents had a professional mindset that really wasn’t even in the vocabulary of the hillbillies who lived in trailers down the street.
I was and still am super jealous of them. They always had four wheelers, lots of guns, and livestock. Pigs and cattle. Big bonfires. I’m well aware of what pig manure smells like or for that the distinctively pungent smell of kerosene used to keep their mobile homes warm in the winter – besides the woodstoves they had jerry rigged up. To say nothing of those slurry trucks from Stanton’s Dairy in Coeymans that would traverse the road a few times a year to fertilize the field up the road.
But at the same time, I found it difficult to find connections with them as they were so culturally different in their upbringings and beliefs – the hillbilly way of looking at the world was so foreign to the world I knew with post graduate educated parents. At the same time, despite my college education and professional career I find it difficult to connect with the more professional and educated types with my redneck and small town upbringing.
I want to go back to the country and not just for a weekend trip. Do real hillbilly shit, although I know damn well it will take money, as I don’t have the skills or even the grit and family connections to make it alone in the country. Now I don’t want to live in a fancy house – I’d rather have livestock and junk in my front yard and a garbage burner out back – I just know how important having money is to survive out in the country when you lack so much else that true country boys and girls have to survive and make a life off the land.
Like most towns in New York State, Bethlehem doesn't have Wards. All elected officials are elected at-large.
But could you draw equal population districts that represent actual communities of interest? Not looking a demographics or political competitiveness, but actual communities of interest based on my knowledge of the town -- like Slingerlands, Delmar, Elsmere, Glenmont or South Bethlehem, and have them come out to be equal population? I tried, and here was the results.
There are different ways to look at this problem. One could use an algorithm to draw districts, although I've yet to find one that does a particularly good job. Turns out it's hard to automate district drawing, as often different demographics live next to one and another, and you get stuck with pockets of similar demographics living on opposite ends of the town. You end up packing and cracking or splitting similar demographics, unintentionally. It always seems like equal population is enemy of building communities of interest.
Drawing districts is a fascinating GIS question. But often the best districts are still drawn by humans, watching the totals add up in redistricting plugin, and then looking at maps of demographics. And that involves a lot of acceptance of the fact that districts you have drawn still have a lot of problems with packing and cracking. I don't like how this ultimately came out, but the equal population constraint really causes a lot of problems. Having more districts, might help solve the problem.
The qgis plugin I used for this was the Statto Software Redistricter, using a PL 94-171 Census Data joined against the block-level files. I didn't load any political or demographic graphics, just raw population along with my knowledge of what the neighborhoods look like from a map and having explored them in person, with a goal of grouping highly dense and very rural neighborhoods separately. A goal that was largely a failure in this effort! But it is a fun thought experiment.
