Wednesday, 13 August 2003

Not much going on yesterday, except that we drove to Kalamazoo.

Today Jackie went to the first two of her classes at the Michigan Fiber Festival, both on knitting. Katy was taking a class as well.

Dad and I did various things.

We went to the work day at one of the Southwest Michigan Land Conservancy's preserves. We spent most of the time killing cottonwood trees, which isn't quite what I'd expected. The goal, I think, was to try to preserve the character of the wetlands, which were changing because these big cottonwoods were shading the area and were beginning to invade.

It was kind of odd work. We worked in pairs, one person drilling small holes into the trunks and the other person squirting in a bit of herbicide (Roundup). After the batteries on the drills ran down, we switched to clearing bush honeysuckle, autumn olive, and red maple--all species that were changing the character of the preserve.

The preserve exists because it's between a right-of-way for for some high-tension lines and a freeway, so the was never much opportunity to develop the land. Parts of it are really nice natural areas, but the part I was working in was right next to the freeway and it was pretty noisy. It didn't really feel like being in a natural area, more like being working on highway construction.

We had lunch at Bilbo's, my favorite place to eat. The summer before I was going to move away from Kalamazoo, I ate at Bilbo's every day all summer.

In the afternoon I did some geeky stuff with Dad's computers. The iBook, I think has a failing hard drive. Probably not worth trying to fix. The iMac runs okay, but has trouble booting. Zapping the PRAM seems to fix it for one boot cycle, but then it fails the next time. I'm guessing it's the battery for the realtime clock.

I want to get things stable enough that we can work on a website for my Dad, to help promote his book.

We all had dinner at Indian Cuisine. It's just about the only restaurant we ever get to that has dosas, so Jackie's always glad to go there.

In the evening Jackie and Katy showed us what they'd learned in class. Katy had learned about twined knitting, Jackie about knitting with silk roving and freeform knitting.

Yesterday was a rest day, as far as running goes. Today turned out to be a rest day as well, partly because my foot hurt last night. I don't think it's running related--I've had this particular pain before, but this is the first time since I started running. It's concentrated in the ball of my foot at the base of my big toe, and hurts rather a lot, but only for a few hours. Then it goes away and doesn't bother me for months.

Tomorrow I hope to run and maybe lift weights, then work on Dad's website.

I'll fit in some writing as well.