What is happening at the quarry?

On Sunday I heard that there had been activity at the quarry. Neighbors had received a letter informing them that the owners of the quarry had requested a permit to renew pumping water and that equipment had been moved from the south side of Emmett Avenue to the north side. There was speculation that the old office/house on the south side would be torn down and the stone under it mined. The scales that were next to the house and south of Emmett are now north and next to a small white building that is new on the site.

There is fencing around the entire quarry and the fencing extends to enclose part of a farm field to the west of the quarry. I wonder how much longer this old house will be there.

Part of the north lot that has been used for stone storage was once dug out and used for making ice. The water from the Iroquois would flow in and without current would freeze and then be harvested. That area was filled when the quarry was established, probably with the soil removed to get to the limestone.

You should notice the lack of snow in the two pictures above. Rensselaer escaped almost all the snow that was forecast for Saturday night and Sunday morning. Shortly after the rain turned to snow, the precipitation stopped. The temperatures plunged and the winds howled, but the wind also dried up the roads so they were not icy Sunday morning. We will have some very cold weather in the next week with lows approaching zero. I will be happy if we avoid the snow.

On the bright side, days are getting longer--about a minute a day, mostly in the evening. Every day the sun is a little bit higher in the sky, though it is too small a difference to notice.

On a completely different note, a former SJC student who I knew fairly well, though not as well as her husband who took a number of my classes, has published a novel, The Aletheian Journeys. She has a Facebook page and a blog to promote her book, which is in the style of some of the C. S. Lewis fantasies. She has published through CreateSpace. From personal experience I know that it is cheap and easy to publish via CreateSpace, but it is not easy to get people to buy your books because you have to do all the marketing. Right now the Kindle version appears to be free, so if you are even a little bit interested, get it.

I was invited to join a new social media group called nextdoor.com. I am not sure if it will take off or die. Have you heard of it? It divides Rensselaer into several different neighborhoods and I do not know how easily it is to see those in other neighborhoods. Here is the Wikipedia article on it.