Water beads

The waterproofing I did on Saturday is working. As you can see, good puddles from the unexpected shower that rolled through Franklin on Sunday afternoon are lingering this morning.

Which also means that I won't be able to finish the waterproofing of the uprights and railings today. Will need to give it more time to dry before I apply the sealcoat.

heavy water

In some circles, heavy water is a technical term. For purposes here, the weight of water is what is noticeable. After rain, the grass is drawn down.

After the sun is out for a bit, the water evaporates and the grass rises!

Blog Action Day 2010: Water

It is still dark as I write this. The rains have been heavy all night. I think I only turned over once to hear them so it was a good night of sleep. How appropriate to have heavy rains on Blog Action Day?

I expect the rain would be washing down the gutter like in the picture.

Water is important. Humans can live longer without food than they can without water. Getting clean water and keeping our water clean is a challenge.

There are little steps that you can take to help.

• Use a rain barrel to capture water from your downspouts to use for watering the flowers, etc 
• Direct the downspouts away from the driveway, so the water gets into the ground to replenish the aquifer
• As you walk around town, clear the catch basins so the water will flow more freely and not carry with it any debris.

What else would you add to this listing?

water highlight

Starved Rock State Park in Illinois was the setting for a good hike recently. The water falls were slight due to the recent dry weather but still provided a good photo opportunity.

In wetter weather, or spring time, we likely wouldn't have been safe getting as close to this fall. My brother took this pose.

From the Twitter stream

relaxing on rocking chairs on Spectacle Is looking at the Boston skyline - http://mobypicture.com/?yk6pot

How warm is it in Boston? Dolores is in the water at Spectacle Is - http://mobypicture.com/?0fiktw

Yes identify your market and serve it naturesweep.com/ - http://mobypicture.com/?21f5vd

Doing some cloud computing on the Boston waterfront - http://mobypicture.com/?gcyafy

The Ozone Fall - Rickets Glen

Rickets Glen has quite a collection of water falls. This one, if my notes are correct, is called "Ozone" with a drop of sixty feet.



Dolores and the Bastian's are in the bottom left of the photo to give the water fall some sense of scale.

Ricketts Glen water falls

Two meandering streams drop dozens of feet, suddenly here, and there, finally joining together to drop over three more water falls. The two sides of the triangle in Ricketts Glen State Park in central PA provide an up close view of 19 of nature's wonders.



If you are ever in the area, this is well worth a side trip. A hike around the triangle covers about three miles and is not overly strenuous. Stopping to admire the vegetation and the water falls provides enough rest and sustenance to make the hike easily.

Puddles: the deck treatment works!

Puddles: the deck treatment works!, originally uploaded by shersteve.

A wonderful sign this morning: the blue skies reflected in the puddles on the deck after TS Hanna blew through last night, confirm that the work last weekend to seal the deck was successful.

lunch view on the Boston waterfront

Boston waterfront

Mobile post sent by shersteve using Utterz. Replies.

Dogwood bloom, the weight of water

Dogwood bloom, the weight of water, originally uploaded by shersteve.

Following the inspiration of Amy Palko's posting, I took a few minutes between activities to take a breather. The ground was too wet to sit on. No time to grab a chair or blanket. Time enough to grab the camera.

The backyard is fully green now with blooming June glory. The trees have filled in shutting off the views into the neighbors yards and in to the new development encroaching into our previously empty back space.

The dogwood caught my eye weighed down with the rain. A gentle but persistent rain today. It will be heavier they say before it ends. For now, a gentle mist even as I come out into the yard. My shoes getting wet. They will need to get wiped before returning into the house or I will hear of it.

The dogwood weighed down with water. Water droplets so small. So clear. How can they weigh so much to bend the tree and branches down?

Water the fluid of life. The fluid of cleansing, of renewal, of baptism.


Note: the sherku that resulted from this can be found here

Nalgene - Good or bad?

Worries about a hormone-mimicking chemical used in the trendy sports accessory led a major Canadian retailer to remove Nalgene and other polycarbonate plastic containers from store shelves in early December.

"It's definitely a concern but I'd like to learn more before I make any decisions about my water bottles," McHugh, 26, a business manager for a reggae band, said with an easy laugh. "For now, I'll probably keep using my Nalgene until it breaks. It's indestructible, I've heard!"

Vancouver-based Mountain Equipment Co-op is waiting for Canadian health regulators to finish a preliminary review in May before it reconsiders restocking its 11 stores with the reusable, transparent bottles made with bisphenol A, or BPA, a compound created by a Russian chemist in 1891.

There is little dispute that the chemical can disrupt the hormonal system, but scientists differ markedly on whether very low doses found in food and beverage containers can be harmful. The US Food and Drug Administration sides with the plastics industry that BPA-based products do not pose a health risk.

I'd like to follow the money on this story. Who is funding the research to take down the Nalgene bottles? One avenue would be to look at who stands to gain? That is look at the major water suppliers - Coca Cola, Pepsi, etc. After the FastCompany article earlier this year debunking the water bottle industry as a waste, why not retaliate against the competition.

Read the full story in today's Boston Globe here.

Water disagreement makes the Globe

The current disagreement over $43,000 between Franklin and Norfolk finally made the pages of the Boston Globe.

Franklin escalates against Norfolk on water dispute

Norfolk, for some reasons known to themselves, have not lived up to their end of the 1993 agreement on water by either returning the water provided, and providing some $43,000. Franklin has therefore initiated a termination of the agreement as part of the process to reach a more equitable agreement to this situation.

Norfolk will get a year notice to allow their 13 residents to find another water source after Franklin terminates the agreement, unless there is a resolution along the way.

Additional documents pertaining to this are available on the Franklin Town Council web site. (PDF)

The Town Council passed the resolution to terminate the agreement after some discussion to try and tighten the time line.

Updated: Michael Morton's article in the Milford Daily News can be found here.

Announcing a bottled water restiction at my house

After reading the FastCompany article by Charles Fishman on bottled water in the July issue, I will not condone buying bottled water for the house. I had not really understood the enormity of what we have done with this phenomenon.

A chilled plastic bottle of water in the convenience-store cooler is the perfect symbol of this moment in American commerce and culture. It acknowledges our demand for instant gratification, our vanity, our token concern for health. Its packaging and transport depend entirely on cheap fossil fuel. Yes, it's just a bottle of water--modest compared with the indulgence of driving a Hummer. But when a whole industry grows up around supplying us with something we don't need--when a whole industry is built on the packaging and the presentation--it's worth asking how that happened, and what the impact is. And if you do ask, if you trace both the water and the business back to where they came from, you find a story more complicated, more bemusing, and ultimately more sobering than the bottles we tote everywhere suggest.

Read the full story here and make your own decision.

Take the quiz and see how you score on your water knowledge.

Quotes & Links

From AJ Hoge writing at Hobopoet comes this acknowledgment:

What this little experiment has taught me is that the key to being a successful micro-preneur is simply this-- START. I can't tell you how many years I wasted THINKING about starting my own little project. I dreamed. I analyzed. I planned.

I suppose these activities had some psychological value-- helping me overcome doubts, fears, and hesitations.. but thats about it. Beyond that, it was just a lot of wasted time and energy.

The key to becoming financially independent is not a super idea, or a genius plan, or the amazing thing that no one else has ever thought of. The key is to simply start something-- anything. Just start and then adapt. That's all it really takes.

Read the full post here. Explore AJ's new venture site here.

From Rhea writing at the Boomer Chronicles the seltzer comes gushing:

Do you remember I wrote about bottled water a couple of weeks ago and why we shouldn’t be buying it?

That got me to thinking. If I want to curb my bottled-water buying, why am I still buying seltzer? I live on the stuff. The seltzer with the lime flavor, the seltzer with the black cherry flavor, the seltzer with the cranberry flavor, and so on.

Then I remembered there are little machines you can buy to make seltzer at home. I went online and did some research. I found the Soda Club, a company that’s been making seltzer makers since 1903.

Read the full post here.

From Grammar Girl who has a blog and accompanying podcast:

I know it's upsetting to find out that your nearest and dearest beliefs are wrong, so this week, I'm going to talk about my own mistaken pet peeve: it bugs me to no end when people use “while” to mean “although,” but no matter how hard I looked I couldn't convince myself that I was right. The horror!

You see, I think “although” means “in spite of the fact that,” as in “Although Sir Fragalot was tall, Squiggly and the aardvark considered him an equal.” “Although” is what's called a concessive conjunction, meaning that it is used to express a concession. On the other hand, I think that “while” should be reserved to mean “at the same time,” as in “While Squiggly gathered wood, aardvark hid the marimbas.”

To find out the last work on 'although' vs. 'while', check out the full posting.

That's all for now folks, enjoy the language and water sandwich!