Where are you in the big here?
Kevin Kelly has posted a thirty-question quiz asking about your location in “the big here”. Go take it yourself before looking at these.
My answers:
1) Point north. Easy enough. It helps that I live just off a north-south road.
2) What time is sunset today? My guess (yesterday) was 20:30, and the actual time was 20:22. Not bad.
3) Trace the water you drink from rainfall to your tap. We drink town water, which comes from two wells and is treated and chlorinated. I’m not sure where the treatment plant is.
4) When you flush, where do the solids go? What happens to the waste water? Hm. Some (all?) of the water is treated in town and goes back into the Lamprey River/Great Bay. I don’t know where solids go.
5) How many feet above sea level are you? Dan’s and my ballpark guess was 150ft, and as far as I can tell from peering at TopoZone, that’s pretty close.
6) What spring wildflower is consistently among the first to bloom here? Among the first? Hm. Dandelions are pretty reliable in late April, but that can’t make them first. There’s some buttercups that bloom pretty early, and trillium and Canadian mayflower in the woods. Apparently there are also bloodroots and trout lilies. I had to look those up to figure out what they are, though.
7) How far do you have to travel before you reach a different watershed? Can you draw the boundaries of yours? Well, the boundary between the Lamprey River watershed and the Oyster River watershed crosses NH-108, right around the boathouse, because that’s where the flooded Lamprey went over the road and into the Oyster watershed and caused all sorts of road damage in May. I don’t know the boundaries of the Lamprey well enough to draw them, but the Lamprey River Advisory Committee has quite a nice one.
8) Is the soil under your feet, more clay, sand, rock or silt? I guessed rock (native New Hampshirite here). Dan guessed silt. Playing with the NCSS Web Soil Survey (which is a way fun, if annoyingly slow, tool/toy), I determined that the hill we live on is thoroughly rocky, but that Newmarket in general is sandy/silty.
9) Before your tribe lived here, what did the previous inhabitants eat and how did they sustain themselves? Hm. People who have lived here before “my tribe”: People of European descent working in the factories in town. People of European descent who farmed. People o.E.d. who fished. Abenaki and Penacook indians. I think I have a pretty good idea of how all those groups lived.
10) Name five native edible plants in your neighborhood and the season(s) they are available. Dandelions, all summer. Cattail tubers, but no idea what the season is.. late summer? Blueberries, blackberries, and raspberries. July and August. Are tiger lilies native? They grow wild all over the place.
More later.
July 18th, 2006 at 12:32 pm
[…] More. 11) From what direction do storms generally come? From the west. 12) Where does your garbage go? We put it in the compactor for our apartment complex, and it’s picked up by WM, but I have no idea where they take it. 13) How many people live in your watershed? I guessed 60,000. It’s more like half of that. Newmarket, Newfields, Epping, Nottingham, and Deerfield are almost entirely within the Lamprey River watershed, as well as parts of Durham, Lee, Candia, Barrington, and Raymond. 14) Who uses the paper/plastic you recycle from your neighborhood? No clue. The Newmarket recycling center is out on Ash Swamp Rd, but I don’t even know if the materials that are picked up from our apartment complex go there or elsewhere. 15) Point to where the sun sets on the equinox. How about sunrise on the summer solstice? Nope and nope. According to NOAA’s solar position calculator, it’s pretty much due west at sunset on the equinox, and about east north east on the solstice. I think my mental diagram of how this works is wrong, cause those aren’t what I would’ve guessed. 16) Where is the nearest earthquake fault? When did it last move? Hm, well, something made the Appalachians, but those are old mountains. And there’s small earthquakes around here every couple of years. The nearest true plate boundary, though, is the mid-Atlantic one. USGA has some information, and links to a very interesting discussion of why we get “intraplate” earthquakes. 17) Right here, how deep do you have to drill before you reach water? A guess? Fifty feet. Maybe less. USGS groundwater data has two measurement sites in this area, one with water 29 ft below ground level, and the other 36 below. Those measurements are from a couple of months ago (remember May?), so it may be lower now. 18) Which (if any) geological features in your watershed are, or were, especially respected by your community, or considered sacred, now or in the past? Well, the Lamprey is a big important river, powering a mill industry in several of these towns. I can’t really think of anything else that I know is important. 19) How many days is the growing season here (from frost to frost)? Late April to mid-October. Roughly 170 days. 20) Name five birds that live here. Which are migratory and which stay put? Blue jays, goldfinches, mallard ducks, chickadees, cardinals. The ducks migrate - all the others stick around. […]
February 16th, 2009 at 12:32 pm
Adderall….
Adderall. Adderall addiction….