It seems hard to believe it was a year ago I took a drive out to Grandma Moses Country – you know along the Batten Kill and NY 40 – Buskirk, etc looking at land that way to potentially buy and build my homestead out there. I still can’t believe a year came and went, and while I looked at houses and explored my options so little happened. Still just a dream, as I put away more money, boosted my savings and investments.
It’s now a bit tough when I look back at what seems like a wasted year, when I could have had land. I could be getting chickens at this point, planning a garden. Doing on my own composting, heating with wood not freezing in my dumpy apartment. My net worth has gone a touch since the market declines, and it’s painful as I could have baked in some of that by buying something.
If heaven wasn’t so far away … I keep telling myself.
It’s fine, and I know it will be fine for now. But I feel like I’m wasting time, though I think when you run the numbers, it actually come out ahead staying where I am even with higher rent. Small apartments are cheap to heat and light, and bicycling to work saves a lot of money. I can put off replacing my pickup truck for a while.
The late Albany historian John Wolcott talked a lot about risks of climate change driven wind causing local calamities. The jet stream winds is rapidly accelerating as more and more energy in the form of carbon is dumped into the atmosphere and cold and warm are fighting it out. The right conditions and insanely fast winds can be pushed to the ground.
Wind is no joke. Mr. Wolcott told stories of the Great Appalachian Storm of 1950, that Thanksgiving Day storm that not only devasted the south with flooding and a blizzard and caused a great blow down of trees in the Adirondacks. During that day in Albany winds blew at speeds averaging 50-60 mph with a peak gust of 83 mph recorded at airport. Several buildings in Albany – some built before the Civil War – collapsed under the forces of the all day winds. The New York City area saw winds in excess of 100 miles per hour during that storm.
Not to mention the fire risks. Much of the Albany Pine Bush is a fire dependent ecosystem, and there is a belief that local fire departments can control brush fires and that brush fires are unlikely to burn far into suburban neighborhoods or even urban areas. But that’s a dangerously ignorant belief. A small brush fire may be containable but a fire pushed by 100 mph plus winds might burn through whole neighborhoods, incinerating Crossgates and SUNY without mercy, even pushing into the Pine Hills. While such things are thought unthinkable, such thinking is dangerously outdated.
I was reminded earlier in the week, that it’s been a year since the former Data Services director retired and it was fully my department to manage. At least some of the staff had their doubts I would last a year in the position, as it was a bit of a transition to the suburban office over looking the old city dump and smelling like sewage treatment plant after nearly two decades working downtown in a skyscraper with a whole new team, new working hours, new technologies and concepts to grasp and modernize. I don’t take well to change, I am very set in my ways.
I inherited an office where a lot was still done on paper, manually. Still too much, but it takes time to change institutions. The code base was old and complex, and a lot of things were not automated or scripted. It was a weird paradox – creaky but clever was so many things in the office. Things were often done, carefully, by hand through a web interface on a district-by-district by basis – rather then taking advantage of SQL, bash and R scripts that could work throughout the night processing complicated datasets rather then manually inputting them. It was a kind of a culture shock for all involved, though I think thing have gotten better and we are cranking out more data and developing new ways to target communications then ever before.
Truth is, despite the creaky nature of all things in that office, I enjoy the work immensely, as I get to work with Linux and R Code – and constantly have to think of clever solutions to fix bad data and process things efficiently. In many ways, I do wish I had become a professional programmer so I could do more problem solving on my own, but it’s good to have a lot of skills and be able to present clear ideas to be implemented to the programming staff – and know when wool is being pulled over my eyes about how the complexity of a solution. And be able to fix a lot of things myself with a few lines of scripting or SQL without going to the programming staff.
