It’s been a fun twenty-one years.
Archive for September, 2006
In keeping with weekendly tradition (how’s that for a word?), Joe, Joanna, and I headed out to explore a new gorge on Sunday once we were sure that the sun was going to grace us long enough. This time we went to our backyard–quite literally–to explore part of the Six Mile Creek Gorge.
There’s a footbridge from Quarry/Ferris Street to South Hill near our apartment and we headed across there and found a path down to the water. Using the rock outcroppings on the southern bank, we followed the creek until we ran into Wells Falls and the abandoned mill there. At the time, we didn’t know the names of any of these places–Google is our friend! It turns out that Six Mile Creek is where the City of Ithaca gets its water, so, even though swimming is sorely tempting in several places along the creek, we’re not allowed to. Above Wells Falls, there are apparently some better developed trails, which we’ll have to check out another day (but not a warm summer day because Google also informed us that some areas up there are popular with those who enjoy being, um, au natural.)
As an interesting historical fact, the area we explored below Wells Falls used to be the winter encampment of the Cayuga Indians around the time the first white settlers established Ithaca. Guess we’ll have to look for artifacts next time, ha.
The whole trail was lovely, but the area right near the waterfall is especially nice. The far side is just a bluff and on the near end is a rocky beach with several big old trees with the most spectacular roots. Joanna suggested that they look like something out of Middle Earth. If one looks closely, one notices that the roots have actually caught rocks and are growing around them. More photos are in the gallery, as always.
In completely unrelated, but exceedingly exciting news, B is coming to visit this November and will get to spend Thanksgiving with me!
Those of you who know Mic Christopher’s music will know how much I enjoy it. Those with a keen eye have probably noticed lyrics from his solo album, Skylarkin’, popping up just about anyplace I’ve got an established web presence (”Curious Notions”, the tagline of S-S.Net–we’ve been out here looking for life–and the chorus of “Heyday” hiding in my Facebook profile, for example). Today, were it not for an unfortunate accident in late 2001, would have been Mic’s 37th birthday. Happy birthday, Mic! Rave on!
If you’ve never heard Mic’s music, some tracks from Skylarkin’ are here, thanks to his sister, and I have some live tracks:
- That’s What Good Friends Do (Cobblestone December 2000)
- Heyday (Whelan’s 13 March 2001)
-
- Show with Glen Hansard - Vienna - 6 October 2001 (Full show)
- Kid’s Song
- Loneliest Man In Town
- Fogtown (Michelle Shocked cover with Glen Hansard)
- I’ve Got Your Back (with Glen Hansard)
- Oxford Town (Bob Dylan cover with Glen Hansard)
- The Whole Of The Moon (Waterboys cover with Glen Hansard)
“We saw too much beauty to be cynical, felt too much joy to be dismissive, climbed too many mountains to be quitters, kissed too many girls to be deceivers, saw too many sunrises not to be believers, broke too many strings to be pro’s and gave too much love to be concerned where it goes” - Glen Hansard on Mic #
ETA: Many more live recordings of Irish artists are available on my bootlegs page.
Given another fantastic day like last Saturday, some of us decided, again, to spend part of the afternoon hiking. This time Joe, Jon, and I headed over to Robert H. Treman State Park, which is perhaps fifteen minutes by car from downtown Ithaca. There we hiked the Gorge Trail up to Lucifer Falls and took the Rim Trail back down.
In the end, we hiked close to five miles from the mid-afternoon to the early evening. It was pretty up and down, and I imagine that I’m really going to feel it tomorrow, not being accustomed to such things anymore. The views were definitely worth it, though–as with some other things around here, I was reminded of some of the places my family used to hike in the Ozarks when I was younger.
Of course, the Ozarks haven’t got waterfalls like Ithaca. Along the hike today, I commented on how I was going to have entire photo albums full of waterfall pictures by the time I leave here in five years. Then it occurred to me that there’s a certain irony in that, seeing that I came here to get a PhD studying fluid mechanics. This led to the declaration that I must, somehow, manage to fit a picture of one of the waterfalls near Ithaca into my thesis.
More pictures from this afternoon’s adventure are in the gallery. That will do for me for the moment, since it’s now past midnight. Must get some sleep or I won’t make it through fluids tomorrow morning.
I love days like this one where I walk home from class and the sky is sunny and clear so that when I reach the edge of my landlord’s property, I can look out over the buildings and see the ridges in the distance beyond them. It reminds me of Arkansas in the very best way.
I’ve asked myself several times what it is I should say and feel today. I could look on the media’s sentimentality with distaste, or I could mourn the freedoms America has lost in the last five years, or I could mourn all those who lost their lives on 9/11 and those who have lost life and limb since in conflicts both justified and unjustified. But when I look back on that September day five years ago and I remember what I felt that day and in the days that followed, I do not simply remember fear. Yes, I was afraid–the U.S. border had closed behind my classmates and I on our field trip to Stratford, Ontario, and we didn’t know what was going to happen or when we would see our families again. But overwhelmingly, what I felt that day and in the weeks afterwards was a sense of togetherness.
Across America and around the world, people were united then. While my classmates and I gathered around televisions to hear the latest news, the Canadians around us offered us food and shelter while we couldn’t get home. In New York City, firefighters and police officers and emergency workers showed a kind of courage I could barely imagine when they rushed to Ground Zero to help the survivors. It didn’t matter what color you were or where you lived or what language you spoke or what God you worshipped that day. We just helped one another.
It seems to me that, five years later, what we should do is not publicly mourn those we didn’t know, nor should we simply mourn what it is that we have become since then in the name of so-called security. What we should do today is take a moment to celebrate what it is that we did that day, when we were a nation undivided by color, race, or religion and united in caring for our fellow human beings.
The little geek in me was delighted to learn this morning that Donald Duck in Mathmagic Land (thank you, Cheryl) has made its way onto Google Video. How awesome. I used to love watching this was a kid; it was only much, much later that I happened to see it in my Theory of Knowledge course in high school. Rewatching it now is kind of funny–I never did master the billiards discussion (because I never watched the video at a time when there was a pool table around and always forgot how it worked) but many of the other things stuck with me. I had to laugh when I realized in the golden ratio discussion that I’d been to every ancient and medieval building they showed and seen each of the pieces of art as well. Whoosh!
After I suffered through office hours and the remainder of my math homework today, I felt like I deserved something special. Luckily, the weather was lovely and I was able to rope Joe and Joanna into hiking the Cascadilla Gorge trail with me this afternoon. And, naturally, my camera joined me.
Considering the steepness of the trail and the number of drops the creek runs through, it’s no wonder Ithaca can claim to have 150 waterfalls within a 10 mile radius.
We can now officially mark that hike off our List of Things To Do Before Leaving Cornell. I’m hoping to make it back to the trail at least once before it gets closed off for the winter because I’m sure that there will be some great photos when the leaves change. Also, I still want to go wading there.
They rode far in the first day so that they had passed the foothills completely and now could see the three major mountains of this region: Carhyrad, Matyharis, and Denaityr. First stood Carhyrad; they would reach its feet tomorrow and hopefully pass by it in the course of the day after that. After Carhyrad stood the tall, white peaks of Matyharis and Denaityr. [...] Jeanne stood at the top of the rocks, looking toward their peaks as the last daylight reached from behind her and bathed their snowcapped crowns in red and golden splendor. [...] For a moment, she felt as though she were someone else, long, long ago that had stood in this same place… looking toward the future, but the feeling passed before she could understand it [...] — The Fairie’s Daughter
Today my classes broke my brain. By the time I got home, my mind was so miserable over a myriad of items conspiring to stress me that I felt like there was only one possible course of action: giving in to the little, insistent voice that demanded I attempt rendering a particular Faerie landscape. Well, because tensors are evil, I gave in. The final result didn’t turn out quite as I’d originally envisioned it, but I’m pleased, nonetheless. This time I rendered two slightly offset images of the same landscape and Photoshopped them together into a wallpaper for myself (or others, if anyone has a particular interest in the landscape done like one of my photo wallpapers).
The quote above served as the inspiration, but those will a careful eye will note that this view is actually in the opposite direction of the one Jeanne’s looking at in the passage. The largest mountains are to the west of the camera, whereas Jeanne was viewing them at sunset from the east. And, yes, I realize that I’m ridiculous.
Today Joe, one of my fellow first-years, introduced me to a program that I’m certain will be responsible for many hours of work that gets left undone. It’s a very good thing that I did half of my 737 homework before downloading Terragen because otherwise I would have been profoundly unproductive. That said, here are the first results of my fiddling. After generating the images with Terragen, I used Photoshop to punch up the colors a bit and convert them to JPGs. Clicking on images will give you a full-size (i.e. wallpaper size) version.
It’ll be interesting to see if I’m able, in the future, to generate some of the specific landscapes I have in mind for Faerie and other stories. What a very dangerous pasttime this is!
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