Awake Again

I'd really like to take the time to write about school so far. I know my impressions of it will change, but tonight I'll have been to each class once (some of the classes I'm only at six times before the midterm rollover) and have some general idea of what the classes are about; thus far I've worked with each teacher I'll work with, since the one tomorrow is a repeat from last night. I've had a chance to very generally size things up, and I like what I see.

I've made the right decision doing this.

Don't get me wrong; school is brutal. I have no time for anything; when I do have time I have very little patience. I'm pricklier, but I am also more interested in the world. Sitting upright without moving for three hours a night -- every night -- makes me feel like someone's kicked me around a field a couple of dozen times and my body does not seem to be hardening to it yet, but it's easy enough to find a distraction in what I'm learning and drive my focus that way instead. I have no money to spare, but no time to spend money anyhow. I have no idea when I'm going to find time to do homework, but a lot of it I look forward to doing for the way it lets me play with interesting ideas. I haven't yet found a way to respect many of my classmates, but my professors are absolutely aware of their field and-- their field is my field. I've come home.

And so I find myself in a plant ID class where I know the course material, basically, but the prof goes off on a tangent walking back to class and talks about sugaring the native maple, acer macrophyllum, which puts out a lot more sap over a longer time than the sugar maple because it's the freeze-thaw cycle that pumps sap out for sugaring and that happens here all winter, wheras in Quebec it only happens for three weeks, so even though you need to reduce twice as much sap to make the same amount of sugar our maples are more productive-- and then we're talking about multi-use woodlots and the weirdness of names like 'agroecology' or 'silvipasturing' and the philosophy behind land-use design. And that's made everything worth it.

Or I find myself in a course that's trying to cover the basics of sustainable resource management (hint: this ranges from GIS through government and plant science to ethics), and my teacher pulls out a quote from George Carlin in 1830-something advocating "Indian" inclusion in then-nonexistent National Parks -- this during the time when the US government's goal was eradication -- and he says "sometimes ethics are in conflict with the ideas of the times. I like to think in that time I would have had the courage to stand up for something like Carlin did, but I'm not sure I would have. That's what a lot of this is about, though-- that and learning to communicate so you'll do it effectively." Then he goes on to tell us to get a copy of Sim City for class, because we'll be playing it in groups. The guy comes to sustainable resources from the social sciences. He can draw the major dams of BC onto a blank whiteboard from memory.

I'm a little less enthralled by math, which I see primarily as a tool rather than a system I find interesting in and of itself. It's all doable, though, and it's been awhile since I've sunk my mind into that kind of system.

Tonight's mapping and aerial photography.

There's an online technical writing course I need to get around to Friday evening.

And I'm writing all this after a night spent with food poisoning gradually triumphing over my cold-- I came home early from work and napped a bit, so I can shower and eat at home and get out there again for another round of having my sides kicked in by the fight against gravity.

Sometime I need to find time to repot my natal mahoganies and bring them indoors. I need to make chicken soup. I need to finish buying my school equipment - I ran out of money and am not quite finished on the binders-paper-books front, though I have all my awesome equipment like a 'clinometer' which I don't know what it is. Angus is taking care of the squeaky ratty things which disrupted my supposed weekend of relaxation, but I should put some time in with them. I need to register for Sickle this Friday or so, gotta hunt down someone with a credit card for that - I'm taking the Writer for his birthday present, which will present a bit of awkwardness on the poly front but will I think be worth it. And I need to keep making the time to write, which I haven't always been doing.

I already am thinking of a series of articles based on the idea of biomass/carbon management. things I basically know but want to get down concisely. What is a pig's or a chicken's ecological function in an urban system? Why does rain make us mulch? What's the logic behind a no-till system? Is biomass/carbon conservation always the right thing to do, and if so how with regards to burning oil etc for energy?

And to think, this morning my hands were too shaky to actually write. Maybe I'll make a midweek nap a habit-- just gotta start work earlier. My body seems locked to waking up at 7ish, which is why I didn't get any sleep on the weekend; I forgot I couldn't sleep in and stayed up too late with friends I missed. If I roll out of bed and head out the door I can come home, nap briefly and change, and then be fresh for school.

Hmm.

Oh...

...and I need to make time to make sauerkraut. Seriously. I can't afford the real stuff as much as I want to be eating it, and it's pretty mild compared to my preferred kick-you-in-the-face stuff anyhow.

Stereoscopes, Hormones, Apple Sauce, and Corned Beef Hash

First let's talk about the corned beef hash. You know, I really like good corned beef. There's a guy around here who makes it in his garage, and I need to hook up with him. I'm not talking about that kind of hash.

I'm talking about hash made from the stuff in the red and blue can, distilled essence of slash-and-burn Brazilian rainforest, the pink untextured stuff that's slightly less aesthetically appealing than decent-quality canned dog food. Ya with me so far? I love that stuff. There's no way I would ever in a million years buy it, nor would I accept any of it from someone who would replace the can by buying it at a store, or who would buy the can for me. Not gonna happen.

Well, a friend of mine was gifted the stuff by his father, had no idea what it was, ands then his father left for Florida never to gift it again. I'm in posession of the stuff. So I come home from class to make myself corned beef hash which, in a head-on collision of yuppie-foodie values, contains that corned beef and organic purple potatoes.

It's got me thinking, perhaps my next fall dish will be hash. I have a really solid collection of sausage from a source I trust, and also some beef and lamb. I'm getting a little tired of frying it with sauerkraut (at least until I can make some of my own sauerkraut, the storebought stuff is mild and expensive) but frying it with potatoes and maybe rutabaga and peppers seems ideal.

While I'm thinking seasonal, it would be so helpful if I could find a way to put up maybe a hundred liters of applesauce for the winter. Now, it ain't gonna happen, but if I had a good source for cheap apple seconds I could make inroads. Does applesauce freeze okay or would I need to can it?

Now school: tonight's class was so packed with information that it felt like a pickup truck loaded by Dr Seuss, a tower of knowledge teetering all over the place and poorly organized. That's fun.

Even more fun is that I GOT TO USE A STEREOSCOPE. Now, it's been pointed out to me that the viewmaster I had as a kid was a stereoscope. That's awesome. Even more awesome would be a kid's toy that let you put two pieces of paper under it and draw until you figured out how to make something pop into 3d.

Because, for those of you who don't know, a stereoscope is a tool made from two mirrors that takes two photographs of almost the same area and USES THE BRAIN'S INTERNAL EVOLVED BINOCULAR VISION RESOLUTION SOFTWARE TO MAKE THOSE TWO FLAT PICTURES INTO A THREE-DIMENSIONAL IMAGE. And it works. And it's amazing-- it's an incredibly smart thing to do-- there's no software or math or data extrapolation needed aside from what your brain already does when processing an image from both eyes at once. It means that you use your brain's preexisting structures to make sense of a whole fuckload of data, as they were meant to be used-- the same information presented in any other way, say on a contour line drawing or something, is very difficult to get the hand of. This makes it intuitive, and allows the huge amount of info in a photograph to be even more easily absorbed. You can pick out clearcuts, types of trees, heights of buildings-- from a photograph. Amazing. It's right up there with the 5-cent can return as the smartest thing ever.

And further, from deep in the haze of second ovulation or whatever it is, people in my class are starting to look... interesting. Like the boy from South Africa who is pretty smart and his skin is a pretty colour who was my lab partner.

Life is pretty damn good. Now if only I had a little more time.. oh wait! I'll get a free Thursday evening once in awhile too. Ha!