The official site of Kelly Sedinger: Reader, writer, photographer, and dreamer
…but it’s been a really busy week, and come to think of it, the weekend is pretty jammed up, too. Yowza.
(BTW, on a “metablog” note, I’m noticing that sometimes I approve comments for publishing here, and yet, for some reason, they don’t actually appear, and then I notice when I log on a day or two later that I have a comment awaiting moderation. Odd….)
Tonight, the Moon was only the tiniest of slivers. Also, earlier this evening, a Facebook friend posted something in her Status about how amazing it was to look up into the night sky and see the International Space Station. (Apparently its reflected light was very bright tonight, and the sky was clear.) I had a rock-solid perfect set-up to say: “That’s no space station, that’s a moon!”, but there’s no way she would have got the joke.
Sigh…it’s hard being a geek sometimes….
My Facebook friends know that on Wednesdays, I like to celebrate “Hump Day”, past the midpoint of which the week is all downhill, with the indulgence of a donut or two at my mid-morning break. Above you see two of my unwitting victims: a coconut frycake donut, and a glazed cruller. These I wash down with coffee (from that orange mug there), whilst either reading or talking with a coworker who is at my location of The Store two weeks per month.
And what do I read? Lots of stuff. But right now, of course, it’s this:
Boo-yeah!
I usually go on break about 10:30 in the morning, after I’ve been there about three hours. Other people take their breaks earlier than that, but I find that the day bogs down too quickly if I break too early. At one job I had, years ago, the work day started at 8:00 am, and lots of people in the office would take break at 9:00! I’ve never understood that — how can you need a break after one hour of working? For me, late breaks and late lunches have always been the rule.
So how do you spend your breaks?
(I used Blogger’s scheduled-posts ability to have this post go “live” at the time I usually go on break on Wednesdays. So, if you’re reading this just as the post went live, I’m on break right now!)
(image via)
Yup, time to celebrate the Lord of All Irrational Numbers, the King of All Ratios and the Mostest Cool of All Formulae, “A equals pi R squared”. It’s Pi Day!
Here’s Wikipedia on Pi:
π (sometimes written pi) is a mathematical constant whose value is the ratio of any circle’s circumference to its diameter in Euclidean space; this is the same value as the ratio of a circle’s area to the square of its radius. It is approximately equal to 3.141593 in the usual decimal notation (see the table for its representation in some other bases). The constant is also known as Archimedes Constant, although this name is rather uncommon in modern, western, English-speaking contexts. Many formulae from mathematics, science, and engineering involve π, which is one of the most important mathematical and physical constants.[5]
π is an irrational number, which means that its value cannot be expressed exactly as a fraction m/n, where m and n are integers. Consequently, its decimal representation never ends or repeats. It is also a transcendental number, which implies, among other things, that no finite sequence of algebraic operations on integers (powers, roots, sums, etc.) can be equal to its value; proving this was a late achievement in mathematical history and a significant result of 19th century German mathematics. Throughout the history of mathematics, there has been much effort to determine π more accurately and to understand its nature; fascination with the number has even carried over into non-mathematical culture.
I never saw the cult film Pi, but I heard some good things about it.
Here are a few randomly-selected videos involving Pi:
Of course, we’re talking about the mathematical concept of Pi, not other kinds of Pi, like Magnum PI:
And yummy as it may be, we’re definitely not talking about pie:
All hail Pi!
Roger solicits opinions on Daylight Savings Time, so here’s mine: I hate it. I think it’s stupid and a giant annoyance.
Look, I like sunlight as much as anybody, and being outside is nice and all and I like it too. But I’m not one of those “OMG, it’s summer and I’m not outside! I’m doing something wrong!” people who could cheerfully go outside as soon as I’m changed out of my work clothes and not come back in until after 11:00 except to get a drink or use the bathroom. And I like it to get dark, when my body feels that it should be dark.
I simply don’t like it when it’s light enough outside to read at 9:30 pm.
I think it goes back to when I was a five years old in Kindergarten with an 8:00 bed time; there was something about being put in bed and told to go to sleep when the friggin’ sun wasn’t even down yet that bugged me on a deep, deep level. And to this day, I really don’t like those long days of early summer when the refreshing cooling darkness never seems to come until it’s too late to enjoy it.
I like sunlight, but I like moonlight and stars too and I hate shortchanging one in favor of the other.
Lance Mannion writes a full-throated paean to the United States Postal Service:
Delivering the mail isn’t a side-business the Government has become stuck with. It is part of the business of governing. Privatizing the mail is like privatizing democracy because it makes the flow of information that democracy can’t exist without something to be bought and sold and therefore something that can be owned and controlled by those few who can pay the most for it. Ordering the Postal Service to make money, even if only enough to break even, is part of the ongoing conservative effort to commodify all that ought to belong to all of us and by doing so make it theirs. Theirs to sell, theirs to hoard. Theirs to use as a way to control us.
While I’m not as romantic about the postal mail as Lance is, I generally agree with his position that the Postal Service should be operated whether it generates money or not. I grow weary of the entire notion that a thing is only worthwhile to the extent it makes money.
I’m reminded a bit of the pressures that public libraries face. If I had a nickel for every time some conservative has told me that libraries are kinda-sorta superfluous in the days of Amazon.com, I could probably treat my family to a nice pizza dinner. Same thing.
It’s happened a lot to me over the years. Well, maybe not a lot, since I’ve never been a big consumer of periodical literature, but still enough that I see a pattern. I discover a magazine that quickly becomes a regular part of my reading life, with me either subscribing or picking it up regularly at the bookstore or someplace else. I grow to love it, and the magazine goes through a “growth” period. Its page count grows, it packs in more and more articles, and it makes me happier and happier.
Then, at some point, this growth pattern simply…stops.
The magazine suddenly becomes substantially thinner. And worse, there is a “redesign” that guts interesting regular features, increases the amount of advertising in a magazine whose page count has gone down, and a general “new look” that somehow manages to always involve larger fonts and more white space on the pages.
This has happened again recently to a magazine we love here at Casa Jaquandor, Cooking Light. We’ve subscribed to Cooking Light for years. It’s never just been a magazine about low-cal food; it always had some wonderful travel articles and articles about exercise (alongside beauty tip articles that were admittedly not that useful to me). Most of all, though, we loved that it had a much more livable approach to “light cooking”, an attitude reflected in a recognition that bacon can have a place in the healthful diet, that fat and sugar need not be avoided at all costs, that food should taste good.
That last attitude is still there, but the magazine has unfortunately undergone a redesign that is just ghastly. Articles are uniformly designed throughout, with the same ugly fonts used for everything; more white space; fewer pages; and now the magazine feels like it’s mostly advertising.
Cooking Light hasn’t gone down the tubes, but they’ve made it into a magazine that they can obviously make cheaper, while also making it less pleasant to read. The Wife commented that reading Cooking Light now feels closely similar to reading Family Circle, and I couldn’t argue the point. And I don’t like reading Family Circle. Now, there’s a good chance we’ll allow our subscription to lapse.
I know, these aren’t good times for magazines, but it still would be nice if some of them would manage to rise above the fray.
I’ve waxed poetic about the library in my town a bit over the years. Truth to tell, one of my favorite places in any town is the library, and whenever I’ve moved, finding the local library has always been something I do very early on. So the Orchard Park Library has been a major part of my life — our lives, I should say — for all of the seven years we’ve lived here.
That photo, above, is the view I had a couple of weeks ago when I packed up the laptop and went to the library for an afternoon of writing and whatnot. I hadn’t planned to take the photo, actually, but I did when I realized that I’d never seen the library from that vantage point before. Because the library doesn’t have a ton of seating places that are in close proximity to power outlets, I had to sit way over on the far wall, by the fire exit. That’s over in the Children’s section, actually, which is another reason why I don’t spend much time over there. (The Daughter does, but I don’t.) Anyway, the vantage point struck me, the way the carpet pattern seems to mirror the grid of the new drop ceiling. (Our library was remodeled a year ago.)
After I left, when the library closed for the day, I decided to spend a few minutes exploring a place that I’ve often noticed but never really investigated. The library building is directly adjacent the old Orchard Park railroad station, which was pretty rundown when we moved here but has since received a lot of volunteer-based restoration work.
Behind me there is the library itself (and farther behind that, if I weren’t in the way, is my church). If I’d had more foresight that day, maybe I’d have worn the more railroad-appropriate hickory-striped overalls over there, but we can’t have everything, right? To the station itself:
Walking around the corner there, I found myself standing on the boarding platform, looking southeast:
And, of course, the trains running the other way would go toward Buffalo, because all roads lead to Buffalo:
Here’s the front of the station:
The station has a second, smaller building, which is now the permanent home of an old passenger car and a box car. I assume this was a freight depot:
I love the way the light is, on a late wintry afternoon when it’s snowing so that the air looks like it has bits of starlight in it:
By this point I was cold enough, and decided to go warm up with some soup at Panera Bread. But I kept thinking about the old trains that ran through here, so when I got home, to see where the trains ran, so I pulled up Google Maps. The first view is here, but here’s a grab:
It’s a bit hard to see from this resolution, but I wanted to give a hint of a few miles of train route here. On the screen grab, find South Buffalo St; the library and train station are located just up and left of the ‘St.’ label. You can see the train route very clearly, then, tacking off to the southeast, forming, for a short time, the northern boundary of the Orchard Park Country Club.
Tracing the train route from there, using Google Maps’s satellite view, turned out to be a pretty interesting exercise, as the rail route is clearly not in use today. This means that as the route heads into the rural country south and east of the Buffalo-Niagara region, the rail route shows up as a line tracing thinly through forests and at the border of farm fields and so on. At times it seems to disappear altogether, such as where it comes into the small town of Colden. More than a few times I found that I was no longer following a train route and had instead found a stream or some other land feature, and had to double back.
The trick became obvious, once I thought of it: trains can’t turn sharply, so train routes tend to make their curves very widely. This means that when the train route seems to vanish, all one really has to do to find it again is look in a straight line from where it disappeared. Then, finding a faint feature that might be the straight line of an old railroad right-of-way, all you do is follow that feature until you confirm it. Here’s a good spot: note how the automobile road, Route 24, sticks close to the stream there, forming almost a right angle, while our railroad route makes the hypotenuse through the sudden forest there!
The train line stays easy to follow, for the most part, through much of the countryside. I love the way it looks in this spot, a few miles north of Springville, a town at the very southern edge of Erie County, where the Southern Tier begins (if you’re heading south, that is; coming north, Springville is where the Southern Tier ends and Buffalo-Niagara begins). The route is marked by a double line of trees on each side of the rail line. Were those trees planted along the line like that? Or was that just natural tree-growth by virtue of farmers obeying limits on their fields bounded by the trains?
Exiting Springville, I lost the line again, because the terrain down there is hillier and because there are more distractions like roads and rights-of-way for power lines. I almost assumed the train there ended at Springville, but that just seemed odd to me — surely a southbound train wouldn’t stop there, for no apparent reason, and sure enough, it didn’t. Part of my error was again assuming the trains would have run somewhat along the route traced by US Route 219, which it actually doesn’t; a mile or two south of Springville, 219 jigs west a bit while our train route turns east, and crosses the Cattaraugus Creek gorge on a trestle that I never knew was there, even though I’ve driven Route 219 through that area more times than the best hypnotist could get me to remember:
I’ve always tended to assume that when the automobile arose, the roads tended to follow train routes pretty closely; I’d never really considered what now seems pretty obvious, that train routes would often wind through regions now almost never frequented by car. When I started following this route online, I figured the route would likely trace one of the two main southward routes out of the Buffalo-Niagara region, US 219 or NY 16 (which runs about ten miles east of 219). It turns out that the trains ran roughly between them, through towns I have rarely visited in nearly thirty years of living in this area.
Continuing south, I puzzled over the odd fixture here, just south of a town called West Valley. In addition to our railroad right-of-way, it appears that there used to be a couple of spurs that came off the line and back onto it. Those curving interchange-like lines must be artificial; they’re too perfect to be natural. But I can’t see any evidence of what must have once existed at that spot for trains to enter and exit the main line. Was there a factory here? A big granary? A mine? Who knows? If anyone in my readership is familiar with the history of West Valley, NY, let me know!
Anyway, our railroad line continues south until it “ends”, not in a town, but at a junction of a larger rail line, which runs southwest into Ellicottville or northeast to…well, I didn’t follow it that far. But again my assumptions were thwarted; I assumed that this train route out of Orchard Park might lead all the way to Olean in the Southern Tier, but it doesn’t. It just goes to a spot in between, ending in another rail line somewhere in the middle of the hills of the Southern Tier.
I wish the trains still ran.
Today is The Wife’s birthday. Here’s some music from the movie we saw for our first date, Edward Scissorhands.
Ignore the funky visuals — this video has the best sound of the ones I looked at.
I honestly can’t top last year’s post, so…what I said then. I love you, Honey!
I just know that you, Dear Readers, have always wondered what I look like when I’m driving. So here are some photos taken whilst driving recently.
I’m a pretty paranoid driver, tending to assume the very worst about everyone else on the road. To my way of thinking, the only reasonable stance when driving is to adopt the belief that every other person on the road is a ne’er-do-well or, worse, a just plain malevolent soul looking to smash me with their vehicle. That leads me to looking like this:
I don’t trust any of you. Nothing personal, but when you’re on the road at the same time that I am on the road, you are now the enemy!
Now, one thing that frustrates me is when I get behind the Hesitant Turner. This is the person who is extremely hesitant about, you guessed it, turning. They’ll sit at the intersection until there is absolutely zero traffic in either direction, rather than make a judgment on when they can go based on their knowledge of their own vehicle’s ability to accelerate quickly. These people annoy me to no end, which leads to scenes like this, as I shout “GO GO GO GO GO!”
I’ve already established my loathing of people who refuse to turn right on red. Here’s the look I tend to give such folks, hoping they’ll look in their rear-view mirror and see the laser beams coming from my eyes to fry their brains, but they never do….
And here’s the bored look I get when I’m stuck on a long straightaway behind a lot of slow-moving traffic:
The title of this post is taken, of course, from the “Rules of Driving” that many of us learned in Driver’s Ed. (At least, those are the two I remember; the rest are here.) Try as I might, I don’t recall Mr. Wilcox (my Driver’s Ed teacher) telling me to not make contorted faces of extreme disdain at my enemy drivers, but he didn’t say not to, either. So….
(OK, in all honesty, I didn’t take any of these photos while the car was in motion. Heck, it wasn’t even in “Drive”; the car was stationary at the time. No, I’m not driving around taking self-photos of me making goofy faces while I’m actually handling a car in motion!)
