Some more stories, too

Some more stories, too

I just finished putting some water sealer on my porch columns. The wood is already local or treated, but I figure the more the better for the long term. I’ll add some termite spray later since I saw some termites today.

The main cottage has around 8 of them, and the cottage next door has around 3 of them.

Both cottages are built in the California Bungalow style, which was popular at the time (circa 1905). So both are around 110 years old.. The main cottage has 10 foot ceilings, and the second cottage has 12 foot ceilings, which is the old time way to keep things cooler in the warm season. Of course I freeze my buns off in the cold season, which normally means just put more clothes or long johns on. That includes high tech long johns sometimes.

The last time this kind of porch work was done was in 1971, so every so often one has to just keep things going I guess.

I suspect someone will tear the cottages down later (like 2050) but I expect I won’t be around then, anyway.

While recently up at West Point I got to help pin the bars on my new 2nd Lt son.  There was some food at the ceremony, too. I ate heartedly. It was very good to me. I was kind of a greedy pig.

Some wives (I assume) had helped make a wonderful meal/snack out of flour tortillas wrapped around various kinds of thin sliced meat (like Black Forest Ham) mixed with some shredded “something like lettuce or cabbage”, all aligned along the long axis of the wrap, including the thin sliced carrot things. I would say they even used a very sharp knife to best present this meal/food. I would say this presentation of food (which I scarfed up on) had as many as five kinds of meat, too.  Well somebody has to be the old guy, and the food eater, and in that regards I think I represented that element just fine.

At a nearby lumber yard many years ago we found an old arrowhead I twice had independently dated as around 7,500 years old.

So that cave, and people, have been around here a long time. My guess is that we were south of the old edge of the last ice age ice cap, but don’t really know that for sure. Almost certainly it was cold then, too, kind of like what a lot of people think about northern parts of Siberia these days.

My guess as to age is from a Professor Stoddard at Vanderbilt. He wrote in the late 1930’s that the Cumberland Plateau rose in about 200,000 years and many millions of years ago. The cave probably was not there at the beginning. Back in the 1970’s, there was a major rock and dirt slide across the Hollow from the that cave, and to make a long story short, suggests another similar cave is beginning to form in that region. If we could come back in a million years, we might find out what really happened.  There’s already a small cave over there now.