Bridge Across Canastota Creek
Altamont
Wouldn’t have been a good weekend for camping after all 🏕️
Absolutely pouring this morning, started a little after I got up at 5 AM after drying off last evening around 5 PM but alas yesterday was also a stay home day. The weatherman is promising the rain will stop at quarter to nine, which will decide if I take the SuperDuty to Wally World or just ride my mountain bike down Hannaford for a quick stock up.
Got through reading all of My Parents Are Dead, Now What by Becky Robertson, and about a third of James McCommon’s The Feather Wars. Both books are quite interesting, the first one particularly important as I head into my mid-40s. Hard to believe in 7 months I’ll be 44 years old. Dad turning 80, Mom turning 78. While I was hoping to learn more about meaningful conversations when my parents are still alive, it’s good to know what to do if you come across your dead parent (call hospice or the funeral home), various forms of trusts, wills, and how probabate court works. ⚰️ All the paperwork and processes that go into closing out an estate. What to do wit the family homestead? Likewike The Feather Wars is a fascinating look into the near extinction and in some cases extinction of birds due to overhunting, 🪿 land use changes, commercial over-exploition, and their recovery after a massive conservation effort. 🐦🐦⬛ 🦜 🦤 🪺 I had no idea how popular egg collecting 🥚 once was.
Today’s plan is enjoy some apple 🍏 pancakes then either ride my bike to Hannaford or if the rain hangs around go to Wally World and do a bigger shop. 🛒 Don’t need a lot of things besides some frozen vegetables at this point and I could just stock up later in the week riding home from work at Hannaford. Made a big thing of rice, red lentils, carrots, canned chicken as a soup 🍲 though now it’s coagulated into more of a mass with the fats and lentils, for lunch yesterday. I probably could have baked bread this morning, I kind of thought about that but didn’t last night. Saturday I made up the pinto beans. So with some frozen vegetables and bananas 🍌 and possibly apples I would be good through mid-week so a bike ride might be the most sensible way to shop when the rain stops. Tomorrow I’ll ride in, wear my Speaker Heastie shirt under my dress shirt, and then catch the Route 13 bus with my bike to the Assembly Picnic. 🧺 And that way I can enjoy a beer or two 🍻 and can safely ride home. Saves gas too, as that SuperDuty certainly guzzles gas in the city.
Then assuming the rain stops mid-day, I will hike – maybe with my muck boots on 👢 at the Audabon Preserve, followed a quick jaunt up Blodgett Hill to see the Pitch Pine 🌲 and scrub oak 🦋. I am thinking about heading over to my parents house via Alcove, and maybe swinging by for a quick jot through the Greenville Detached Parcel so I can snap some photos for the blog and see what’s there. I drove by it years ago, but never walked through it. It’s only like 175 acres so not an enormous parcel of state land, 🪵 but it would be interesting to poke around and have that to show off on the blog. But first the rain has to stop. First though I need to trim my hair, shower, and then get to the store. And then after my hiking adventures, go out and join the family for Memorial Day. 🍔 Hopefully we will have sun by the end of the day. ☀️
Fixed the DNS issues on the blog, 🖥️ and set it up so that images and other content are serving through the CDN for fast loading. Also implemented a OpCode cash of the blog, installed a SEO plug in, added caching and server-side compression, limiting search to titles, all while seeking out slow queries, but I’m still having some preformance problems with the blog according to Google Site Analysis, and getting punished for moving around post URLs from slugs to post ID format. But the post ID format is much quicker to query, and I am thinking about how I can further improve speed. I will probably remove old charts that haven’t been featured on the blog in a long time, and maybe some very old daily blogs and just keep them locally. I don’t really need notes about how the bus was late 15-years ago at this point. It’s just frustrating to see 👀 I make improvements to code, 🐰 and only Google Adsense punishes me with less revenue and less search engine response. And I keep working on developing better quality posts. Sometimes ad revenue just goes up an down mysteriously based on market forces. I am trying to use more industry-standard WordPress plug-ins, but I like to keep my blog unique and relevant to how I want to express myself 📢 and some of my code just doesn’t work with the standard optimizations you see on many other sites, that Google expects should be the norm.
Waterloo, home of the first Memorial Day
The story of Memorial Day begins in the summer of 1865, when a prominent local druggist, Henry C. Welles, mentioned to some of his friends at a social gathering that while praising the living veterans of the Civil War it would be well to remember the patriotic dead by placing flowers on their graves. Nothing resulted from this suggestion until he advanced the idea again the following spring to General John B. Murray. Murray, a civil war hero and intensely patriotic, supported the idea wholeheartedly and marshalled veterans’ support. Plans were developed for a more complete celebration by a local citizens’ committee headed by Welles and Murray.
On May 5, 1866, the Village was decorated with flags at half mast, draped with evergreens and mourning black. Veterans, civic societies and residents, led by General Murray, marched to the strains of martial music to the three village cemeteries. There impressive ceremonies were held and soldiers’ graves decorated. One year later, on May 5, 1867, the ceremonies were repeated. In 1868, Waterloo joined with other communities in holding their observance on May 30th, in accordance with General Logan’s orders. It has been held annually ever since.
Waterloo held the first formal, village wide, annual observance of a day dedicated to honoring the war dead. On March 7, 1966, the State of New York recognized Waterloo by a proclamation signed by Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller. This was followed by recognition from Congress of the United States when the House of Representatives and the Senate unanimously passed House Concurrent Resolution 587 on May 17th and May 19th, 1966 respectively. This reads in part as follows: “Resolved that the Congress of the United States, in recognition of the patriotic tradition set in motion one hundred years ago in the Village of Waterloo, NY, does hereby officially recognize Waterloo, New York as the birthplace of Memorial Day…”
