ME II: Slow Sunday

Oct 9, 2022 · Maine Event

It is cool and crisp! We woke up to blue skies which grew increasingly cloudy over the day. We are wearing a sweater and a coat on our walks and it is definitely time to wear a sweater inside. Today we had a low of 34° and a high of 59° with light breezes. It felt good to be on the sunny side of the street. We had a morning walk to the Western Cemetary near our house, there are some really nice trees there changing colors. In the afternoon the birds came out and it really was a bird fest out there as we wandered around the West End. Made popcorn and had apples, which was a Sunday afternoon tradition growing up usually served with some homemade hard cow cheese.

On social media, I follow someone who is exploring cheese-making around the world. That led him to cultures practicing transhumance, where they move their animals to different grazing areas in winter and summer. There are many kinds of cheese that are made in these cultures that are semi-nomadic. You can read more about his journey here and his IG account here. I grew up where most of the rural people around us took their animals up to a higher elevation in summer and down to where we lived for winter. Milk cows were usually kept in the lowlands (~6,000 ft) so they could be easily milked. I don't know about the sheep they were always taken to the highlands. I think goats were rare enough they were kept local also. I found this research article about this practice in California. It really makes sense to make cheese when you have milk-producing animals and less so if you don't. Anyway, his posts have gotten me thinking.

The other thing that is fun is that cities are digging into using GIS maps. One can geek out in all kinds of ways with these new hyper-local maps but my favorite kind are the Street Trees Maps. Here is the one for Portland and here is the one for San Francisco (It takes a minute to load so if you aren't seeing green dots wait). You can Zoom in and find specific trees what their names are and how big they are and so on. Unfortunately, the Portland map is not complete and my friend the Red Oak is not included. What is there makes the city seem boring. There are so many different varieties of trees here that the Portland Maine GIS map doesn't do them justice. That said, they are still fun.