Hi everyone – I have what is called in the Technology biz a “Vintage” package with my hosting provider and I was getting memory errors logging in to create new posts, put up pictures and what not. I got part way through moving to a new plan on GoDaddy (which is excellent) but that is a giant pain in the tail since I have stuff reaching back to the early 1990’s on my site. Fortunately while fighting to move things, I was finally able to stumble my way to re-configure the memory on my existing site – so we will shall see how it works out!
What has been going on since my last post? A lot, COVID of course and ton a change at my job. I had to create a timeline of the last 4 years at work the other day for a business re-org and I realized that me and my team have had a major strategy change, project, re-org or some other big event pretty much every 4 months for the past several years – the longest stretch of moving straight towards a goal was 9 months – oooofff. But all good – great bunch of people. So I will skip all the boring bits and let you know what is going on now that is fun
My Dad changed things up and got a new mower. The old John Deere tractor was having a hard time with the lawn, which has been getting lumpier and lumpier with odd off slopes developing. It was a bit top heavy and unstable feeling. We looked at getting a landscaping company to come in but they wanted $900.00 per WEEK just to mow around the house and along the driveway (not including the fields across the pond). At that price, a different mower started looking pretty cheap. We looked around and got a commercial grade Z-Trak John Deere (lower end of the scale, but had the beefier chassis for bashing against the occasional rock – as one does find in Carlisle 🙂
This is basically what it looks like – you steer with the two bars. Once you sit down, you fold them in and then push or pull to go forward or back or spin in place. My Dad says its like riding a horse – gentle. I wouldn’t know since I am afraid of horses – LOL. It does a great job and is super fun to use.
Yesterday my Dad and I went down to the Robbins Museum (aligned with the Massachusetts Archeology Society) and donated a whole car load of Geo-Archeology equipment. Think things to take core samples, sift things, bag things up and what not. This was equipment my Dad had accumulated over a number of years while doing things with the Society and people in the community. I won’t try and trace all the different things that drew him into this branch – but one of the things is pretty neat and interesting to the lay person. When I was in London for work a number of years ago, I stumbled on the Museum of London (aka – covering the history of the City of London). They specialize in Roman period and earlier – basically the period prior to existing written history. It is super – highly recommended. I picked up this book Seahenge: a quest for life and death in Bronze Age Britain On the cover it is about the discovery of a wooden “Henge” (think Stone Henge) that was uncovered along the coast after a big storm washed away some dunes. It apparently was a big deal in Britain when it was discovered and made exciting because it was wooden in a now exposed marine environment – Archeology in Rush, news at 11 tonight, don’t miss it !
That was mildly interesting but most of the book was about techniques used and for that, the author focused on prior sites to use as examples and it was absolutely fascinating when he got into how they analyze soil. The amount of information they are able to determine by examining pollen is amazing. What I found super interesting is that on one site, they examined the ground and were able to determine that wooden posts had been set in the ground, and that they had been shaped with flint stone tools and they could identify with such accuracy the shape of the posts, they could calculate the shape of the stone tools used on the post. Later in the dig, after cataloging the theoretical shapes of the tools used – they actually found them and the shape and size were exact matches. Wow.
Needless to say this was ground breaking techniques that are not being used in New England.
the point of donating the tools is that we are not doing much of that stuff any more and the Archeology Society needs help with things that members can participate in without having a PhD or certification. Driving a 3/4 inch wide pipe into the ground and getting a core sample usually doesn’t require a permit from the State for an official dig and is actually the cutting edge way to do things instead of Indiana Jones pick and shovel stuff!
Here are some pictures of the equipment my Dad donated – not a full inventory since there was a lot variations on the themes here. Basically all methods for gathering, handling and storing samples.
The Robbins Museum was a very interesting museum – it has the largest collection of Native American artifacts in New England and possibly the United States (that gets a bit vague). Here is their website and YouTube channel in case you want to check them out.
- Website: https://www.massarchaeology.org/robbins-museum/
- YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/MassArchaeology/featured
I won’t bore you with every photo of what they have on display but here is a bit of an example – a very neat place!
That’s all for this weekend – fingers crossed this is all working again and I can get back into a regular cadence – I have missed it! Waving to everyone virtually 🙂