Nature Day

So we were going to visit the Corning glassworks today but the forecast interfered with the plan. Or uninterfered. Tomorrow is, in theory, going to be Wet, so MW suggested we switch activities and do the Finger Lakes today.

The Finger Lakes are long, narrow lakes. They were carved out of the shale plateau here during the last ice age by the march of glaciers as they flowed south. They are called the finger lakes, but they look more like claws on a map and almost like Scottish lochs up close, although they're nowhere near as deep and peat-blackened. They are river-fed, and because they are low places on the northern edge of the Appalachians, the water has a long way to fall off the hills.

We visited Watkins Glen, which has been carved out of the shale in the last ten thousand years or so. The water goes through no less than seventeen waterfalls, and falls six hundred feet over a mile and a half. We hiked it, starting at the bottom and going toward the top. There were stairs. And then more stairs. Followed, not to put too fine a point on it, by stairs. Dad and I gave up around the mile mark and headed back down. MW and JJ went all the way to the top.

The glen itself was quite amazing. The deep, U-shaped carving held in the heavy, wet air from all the water those falls threw into the air; the shale held onto heat, so the air was extremely warm and damp wgile we climbed all those stairs. It was, in fact, very nearly a temperate rainforest and certainly it was its very own microecosystem. At the bottom of the trail, there was a sign telling us to be on the lookout for the Grey Petaltail Dragonfly, and not swat at them, because they are apparently quite rare and only live in these glens. About half a mile up, one landed on Dad, which caused JJ to nearly jump back off the stair he was on and into me because he does not do well with bugs, even rare ones. I was just as glad to come down, though, because I was unpleasantly damp and hot and the gift shop at the bottom had AC and cold drinks.

Then we went and ate at a lovely little restaurant overlooking the lake. There were hot pink roses.

The other thing about this rocky soil and the more gently sloping land near the lakes is that it makes the whole reason ideal for grapes. Which is to say, it's a wine region. We stopped at a few wineries. I'm not old enough to drink in public yet, unless I'm on the Continent, but according to Dad and MW, the wine is actually really good. I shall partake when we get the bottles home and break them out. We also stopped by a winery that doubles as a meadery (the process for making mead is totally different), but it was closed; I was disappointed, because I'd been promised a beehive and didn't get one. JJ won't let me keep bees, and really I can't anyway because working the logistics of beekeeping from seventy miles away three months out of six are impossible. And I didn't get to visit the hives, because they were closed!

We came back, napped, went to dinner, did my cold water laundry, and returned again.

A Thing about the streetlights here: they are surrounded by actual clouds of insects. I kid you not. The laundromat had bugs everywhere, including in my hair. Ickickick! So my opinion is that the people of this region would seriously benefit from hanging up some bat houses. Not only do they not turn into bloodsucking smexy vampires and kill everyone around, they eat their weight in insects every night, and produce guano as a useful byproduct.

So, in conclusion, we ought to have arrived a few decades ago so as to not have missed the hot rod street races through the wine country. That is all.

Glass Day

Today, we went to the Corning Museum of Glass. Corning glass people came up with the kind of glass used for LCDs, fibeoptic cables, and space shuttle tiles, so they really know their stuff. I got in free because (get this) I am below twenty. That will never happen again in my life, I'm sure.

The first part of the museum was an exhibit of arty glass. I'd never really thought of glass as an artistic medium before, but. One of the most beautiful pieces, Woven Heaven, Tangled Earth, looked like a giant filigree snowball. The giant, slightly convex Black Cube appealed to me as something that could be stolen and made into a starship drive in a story somewhere. But by far the most frightening and thinky thing there was It's Raining Knives; it so seems to me that it's about to.

The next section was all about glass through the ages, starting with the Ancient Egyptians and moving forward. There were some brilliant examples of glass out of Rome, the Islamic empires, and a lot out of Venice. I was really stunned by some of the things they made, showing once again that just because they lived a long time ago does not mean they were stupid. I was most impressed, however, by the ruby gold glass, and how little time it took for medieval alchemists to figure out how to turn a piece of gold into a nanoparticulate suspension of the same through the use of strong acid, even though they had no idea why that worked. And these were some absolutely gorgeous modern glass pieces, ranging from a stained-glass screen to a beautiful table to an iridescent . . . thing.

Next I went and saw a couple of shows. The hot glass show was pretty standard, a guy making a bowl by hand, and the old man who was dealing with the blowtorch and small glass rods didn't make a glass dragon and instead made some kind of glass zippo lighter, complete with glass flames. JJ immediately went to submit his own design and, being a geeky engineer, he drew it to scale in top, front, side, and isometric views.

The last bit of the museum was things done with glass. It briefly explained how to make LCD screen, car windshields, even glass that's opaque unless there's a current running through it, at which point it becomes clear. But the most interesting part by far was the part about the development of optical glass and fiberoptic cable. Fiberoptic cable is really amazing stuff, and it's actually not that hard to make. Basically, you coat and ingot of optical glass with a sheath of a different kind of reflective glass, and then stretch; much like the kind of taffy with patterns in, the glass layers stay in the same place, but get much thinner. Then end width is barely thicker than a human hair. In a demonstration, it showed how much coaxial copper wiring it would take to match the bandwidth of a single fiberoptic cable. And the phone companies didn't initially jump on fiberoptic cable because they saw no need for it.

The gift shop was like a china shop. Some of it, in fact, was a dishware shop. The gifts ranged from chintzy to works of art in their on right. And that was Corning glass.

Then we drove to Rochester. We finished A Hat Full of Sky on the way. MW went to dinner with her friends Suzie and Barry, while they rest of us went to have dinner with my Aunt Janet and her more-or-less husband Dave. They gave me a livertini. It's exactly what it sounds like, and exactly as surreal as it sounds. They also gave me meat-stuffed peppers and cake (not a lie!). And, since I hadn't seen her since JJ's Bar Mitzvah, we got all caught up.

Tomorrow we're going to Stratford (the one not upon Avon) and seeing Taming if the Shrew.