No man-eating cormorants
Oct. 3rd, 2011 09:28 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
thanateOf possible interest to certain parties (*cough* zagzagael *cough*): Crania Anatomica Filigre, and size small is roughly doll-scale. Token apologies to those who (like me) did not actually need to be exposed to more tempting ways to spend money which must occur now or never.
It has occurred to me that possibly one of my largest problems with personal budgeting (right up there with the mutable perception of time) is that while I can say, "darn it, I need to stop spending money on books for the next month or two!" or, "Ok, no more considering doll expenditures until Christmas," or whatever, the fact that there are so *many* cool things out there means that a week later I'll be looking at fabric or jewelry or yarn and thinking that I haven't gotten any of *that* in a long time. Or I'll need just this one thing for something I've been planning or working on for a while, and so it won't "count" towards the amount I've spent recently. (For the record, I'm not actually *that* bad at these things, but the main reason I'm not is that I occasionally have this sort of conversation with myself.)
I spent the end of last week out with the aquarium conservation people planting coastal shrubs for the port authority mitigation across the cove from the Masonville Cove park-to-be. At the moment, the park is mostly still dream, though you can start to see it taking shape, but their education center is pretty awesome; it's got all sorts of clever design features (geothermal climate control shafts sunk under the parking lot-- brilliant!, graywater & dual flush toilets, etc) and does school & community programs with the living classrooms people. The cove itself used to be a bathing beach for people across the harbor in Baltimore, but it was already falling into disuse by the time of the 1904 fire, and so it got used as a dumping site for a lot of the debris from that, and then further appalling quantities of junk thereafter. They've got a bunch of posters up with some pretty crazy "before" pictures from the clean-out, and we haven't done any planting there yet because the soil tests came back saying that they need a bunch more fill capping the site before it's safe to start making a park of it.
At any rate, the whole project is mitigation for a dredge spoil site that the Port of Baltimore has put up; they've dammed off about 5 acres of shore & shallow water which in twenty years should be filled in with harbor dredge and used for roll-through storage by the port. At present the site is a giant pond, full of old pilings covered in cormorants, and we went out and planted several thousand shrubs on the cove-side edge of the dam, and collected the quantities of trash you might expect from a soft shoreline just downriver of Baltimore. Every day brings a new crop of bottles, styrofoam, and weird crap (sports equipment, unopened condoms, a drowned teddy bear... Last weekend at the Ft McHenry cleanup, the new CEO of the aquarium was saying things about doing this kind of thing until we don't need to anymore; it's a nice message, but I don't find I believe in a human world that doesn't toss crap into their waterways.) In the spring we'll be back to plant grasses down in the tidal zone, and possibly up on the hill above the shrubs, too.
zagzagael *cough*): Crania Anatomica Filigre, and size small is roughly doll-scale. Token apologies to those who (like me) did not actually need to be exposed to more tempting ways to spend money which must occur now or never.It has occurred to me that possibly one of my largest problems with personal budgeting (right up there with the mutable perception of time) is that while I can say, "darn it, I need to stop spending money on books for the next month or two!" or, "Ok, no more considering doll expenditures until Christmas," or whatever, the fact that there are so *many* cool things out there means that a week later I'll be looking at fabric or jewelry or yarn and thinking that I haven't gotten any of *that* in a long time. Or I'll need just this one thing for something I've been planning or working on for a while, and so it won't "count" towards the amount I've spent recently. (For the record, I'm not actually *that* bad at these things, but the main reason I'm not is that I occasionally have this sort of conversation with myself.)
I spent the end of last week out with the aquarium conservation people planting coastal shrubs for the port authority mitigation across the cove from the Masonville Cove park-to-be. At the moment, the park is mostly still dream, though you can start to see it taking shape, but their education center is pretty awesome; it's got all sorts of clever design features (geothermal climate control shafts sunk under the parking lot-- brilliant!, graywater & dual flush toilets, etc) and does school & community programs with the living classrooms people. The cove itself used to be a bathing beach for people across the harbor in Baltimore, but it was already falling into disuse by the time of the 1904 fire, and so it got used as a dumping site for a lot of the debris from that, and then further appalling quantities of junk thereafter. They've got a bunch of posters up with some pretty crazy "before" pictures from the clean-out, and we haven't done any planting there yet because the soil tests came back saying that they need a bunch more fill capping the site before it's safe to start making a park of it.
At any rate, the whole project is mitigation for a dredge spoil site that the Port of Baltimore has put up; they've dammed off about 5 acres of shore & shallow water which in twenty years should be filled in with harbor dredge and used for roll-through storage by the port. At present the site is a giant pond, full of old pilings covered in cormorants, and we went out and planted several thousand shrubs on the cove-side edge of the dam, and collected the quantities of trash you might expect from a soft shoreline just downriver of Baltimore. Every day brings a new crop of bottles, styrofoam, and weird crap (sports equipment, unopened condoms, a drowned teddy bear... Last weekend at the Ft McHenry cleanup, the new CEO of the aquarium was saying things about doing this kind of thing until we don't need to anymore; it's a nice message, but I don't find I believe in a human world that doesn't toss crap into their waterways.) In the spring we'll be back to plant grasses down in the tidal zone, and possibly up on the hill above the shrubs, too.