(on the fifth day of blogmas my true love gave to me...)

Five lab repoooooooooorts!


This lab report is based on the field trip to the Ocmulgee National Monument.
[I missed a part of this experience (with prior approval of Dr. Rood) because I had a Fulbright foreign language evaluation scheduled the same day. I'd like to first complain about that: I am terrible at interviews. It's some sort of please-don't-judge-me-too-harshly phobia. I get nervous. I say stupid things. I forget how old I am. I can remember almost literally nothing. And it turns out, when the interview is conducted in Spanish, I can remember even less.
So I kinda blew that interview. I'm the saddest.]

Now, to get down to business. I made it in time to walk to the greater temple mound.
I'm a particular fan of looming mounds like that, because they're so in keeping with the strive in so many religions (ancient ones particularly) to establish a worship shop located on a spot of high altitude. The greater temple of the Ocmulgee National Monument is similar to the elevated sacred grounds of other cultures.
Take, for instance, the Mayan ruins in Honduras, the Copan Ruins.

Three of my adventuring friends and I spent New Years in Honduras and got lost in Copan after some whacky bus hijinx. Copan is an entire Mayan city. It's giant! This photo is of the temple pyramid where sacrifices to the gods were made. (The sides allegedly ran red with blood once.)

This desire to increase altitude for religious ceremonies-- communal ones in particular-- probably stems from the idea that gods are in the skies.

The greater temple of the Ocmulgee National Monument was built handful by handful of clay and dirt. Super cool. It now proves to provide one of the best views of Macon available. (Although I'm a pretty big fan of the view from the law school.)


I found the discussion about the geologic Fall Line of Georgia to be particularly interesting. Most of the great Georgian cities of ole-- and yes, Macon was at one time a great city-- are situated along the Fall Line, because it is the farthest west that people could go from the coast through the plains.
Rivers, such as the Ocmulgee, the Cherokee, the Oconee, and the Savannah are navigable through the coastal plain to the Fall Line. Since cities are generally built where there is a supply of fresh water, the Fall Line is prime real estate for any culture looking to settle down and built a city.
The coastal plain exists because that entire region was once under the ocean. The Fall Line is the boundary between the coastal plain, which is so flat and generally easily navigable, and the Piedmont, which is all sorts of rocky and hilly. (The Piedmont also is home to that famous Georgia red clay.)
A link (from uga.edu) that I found particularly informative about the Fall Line and Georgia's geology in generally is right..... HERE!

It's worth mentioning that Macon as well as Milledgeville, Columbus, and Augusta are all located along the Fall Line.

Lab report the fourth

Hello, computer people!

First and foremost, Nancy and Viktor (my plants) are doing quite well. I keep them on the windowsill in my bedroom, with the window cracked. I block it from my cats with a giant map of the United States. I'm pretty sure Nancy's a sunflower and Viktor's a tomato plant. I had the flu or something when I planted them, so I didn't think about the fact that it might be stupid to mix the kinds of seeds. Oh well, they get along.

I accidentally left my notebook with the information about the lab at home, where I have no internet, so I'm working from memory.

Our lab on September 28 was fun, because we got to play in the dirt.
My particular favorite aspect was the community garden.
You can find information about Macon's community garden, Macon Roots, right here.
I guess that the best part of a community garden, besides training people to become slightly more self-sufficient, is that it promotes a sense of community where it might not have originally existed. (I know, it seems like a cop-out, because it's in the name.) People learn to work together with this sort of thing, but they also learn to work.
[Oh man, these html codes confuse me.]
When you only know how to go to Kroger and buy a can of green beans, you don't really know what goes in to what you ingest. When you farm the goods yourself, you appreciate them.
I don't really come from a community, per se, but I do come from a farm. And, as sick as I get of pickled okra after the 8th jar full in a month, I have to admit that I'm still more likely to eat them than I would be if I had purchased them in absurd bulk at a store, because wasting time seems far worse than wasting money.

If you're interested in knowing how to start a community garden, go to this link.

One potential danger when it comes to community gardening is the possibility of city-born pollutants within the soil contaminating the foodstuffs.
I don't think that's an irrational concern, honestly.

I was going to make the graph today, but since my information is in my notebook, which is at home, I'll have to add it tomorrow.

Also, at this lab we discussed an environmental activist who was concerned that earthworms were destroying the earth.
The Aquabats issued a response to this nonsense:
Worms Make Dirt.


Ta-daaaaa!