Spring 2009

I'll be putting pictures from Spring 2009 here. As always, most of my pictures these days are baby-related and are on the relevant baby pages. On the rare occasion I do something not baby-centric I'll try to post it here.
It's the end of May, and the weather is almost getting warm again. We went to see Excelsior Glen again, and we took our friend Brandon along. We made sure to go after a week of heavy rain, to avoid the dried up conditions of our last visit. Indeed, conditions were closer to those from our first visit.

Brandon and I hiked down from Jolly Road. There were tiny gasshoppers all over, and lots of trees across the trail (possibly from a recent storm). We took the re-routed finger lakes trail, under some interesting cliffs. We met up with K and the baby and stream-walked to the big falls:


We had a few views of Seneca Lake, though unfortunately a lot of obstructions were in the way:


The flume above the lower falls is fun to watch:


The middle falls is nice too, though hard to photograph due to the mottled sunshine:


The lower ampitheater is impressive, but that just doesn't come out in photographs:


Here is the GPS track of our walk:


On the way home, we stopped briefly by Hector Falls:

The rest of the family is down in Virginia for a graduation, but I was left behind to get some work done.

I replaced the failing hard-drive in my 2001 iBook. For some reason they designed these things so you have to completely disassemble them (including taking out roughly 50 screws) to get to the drive. Thanks Apple. Non-sarcastic thanks to the people at iFixit for publishing docs on how to safely take things apart.

Here's a picture mid-surgery, when I paused because I needed a T8 Torx screw to get the drive mounting hardware off and the smallest I had was a T10. My good camera is down in Virginia too, so I broke out the 10-year-old Agfa CL18.

It's pollen time, so lots of sneezing. I never had allergies before moving to NY. I think the current culprit is some lilac bushes that unfortunately we are downwind from. We did get the rest of our garden planted, after being inspired to buy tomatoes after going to Agway to get 25 pounds of guinea pig food.

We went for a walk at the Lick Brook in Sweedler Preserve again. Here is the upper waterfall, easy to see as the foliage is still sparse:


Here is the baby and I at the lower falls:


Another view of the lower falls:


The trillium was in bloom. This particular area has lots of trillium, you can see it throughout the second photograph:


We were worried it might rain (it didn't) so we took the steep route down but the "less steep" route back up. It is still impressively steep with a baby on your back! Here is another falls along the route:


Here is the GPS map of the trip back, starting at the lower falls:


K went to a rock quarry near Rochester (she left at 4am!) to do some rock hunting. Here are her findings (mostly dolomite, selenite, and sphalerite):


We went for a hike at the Mundy wildflower garden at Cornell Plantations. They were having deer problems there, and they took some pretty severe measures:


We were intrigued by the last line on the sign. I wonder if this has happened yet, and if so what exactly the Cornell Police did about it:


We went hiking at six mile creek:


As always I get sidetracked looking at wildflowers on these spring hikes. The trilium were starting to bloom, but no pictures of that. The following are Carolina Spring Beauty, Dutch Man's Breeches, a Jack in the Pulpit, and some uncoiling ferns:
We went hiking at Ellis Hollow, our first "real" hike with the baby. It's a bit heavy going up those hills!:


There was trout lily everywhere, but it wasn't blooming yet. The only thing blooming was some hepatica:

I entered the 2009 Cornell University Library Book Collection Contest. This year my entry was on guinea pig books. I won honorable mention in the graduate student category (there was even a cash prize)!

For those who expressed interest, you can read the essay here: 2009-book-contest.pdf

I was the only Engineer finalist. Most of the other entries were related to their majors. So a lot of history majors with history collections, or archaeology majors with Egypt colletions, etc.

Anyway, a picture of me with my collection:
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