In which I rant about my life
{ Monthly Archives }
My little baby learned (finally!) how to ride his bike the other day (just in time for bad weather, naturally). I didn’t get to see it.
It sure makes Christmas gifts easier to figure out – they each need a new bike. But man I would have liked to see his first ride. Sigh.
I promised my kiddies that I’d have a gruesome photo for them to show their pals at school. But I won’t make you look at it unless you read this whole post:
That’s the first thing I heard in the recovery room after my foot surgery yesterday. Dr. Davis wanted to use screws to hold my toe bones together, but there was too much calcified gunk in the way (I had a screw loose! ha ha ha!) so she had to use wire instead. So the good news is that the surgery went well in general; the bad news is that instead of being back on my feet by the end of the week, I can’t put any weight on my foot for at least two weeks. Arg.
I’m going to wimp out on this right now. I don’t have the attention for the starter that it needs (feedings three times a day! I can barely manage to feed my family three times a day, much less a bowl of flour and water! Aaaaaarg!). So into the fridge it goes, to be played with again after Thanksgiving, I think.
I finally (27 days overdue from the library) finished 1491. What a fascinating book. The author has traveled extensively and interviewed just about everybody doing research in pre-Columbian American history to collect in one place the latest theories about what North and South America were like before the Europeans “crashed the party.” He begins at the beginning (this place has been populated for a lot longer than previously suspected – those people crossing the Alaska land bridge were not the first ones here) and goes right up to the Pilgrims.
The two things that I chiefly took away from this book are:
1. there was a great deal more manipulation and control of the environment by the local populations than previously suspected – just because something didn’t look like “agriculture” to a European didn’t mean that it wasn’t agriculture (forests in northeastern North America, Amazonian fruit cultivation, etc). The local populations understood and worked with their environments with a degree of sophistication that has been completely unsuspected. (a corollary to this is that the population of these areas may have been much much higher than previously suspected – tens of millions of inhabitants rather than hundreds of thousands).
2. the apocalyptic death toll as European diseases swept through the native populations was the precursor to the “virgin landscape” that Europeans thought they were seeing as they colonized this continent. Bison did not roam the prairie in huge herds before colonization because the native populations kept them in check by hunting. Only when 90+ percent of the population died from smallpox did those herds reach their “pathological” size, because they lost their main predator. This “unspoiled” landscape that the Europeans thought they were seeing was in fact a creation of the Europeans.
There was a lot in this book about the Inkan and Mayan empires as well which was quite interesting, along the same lines – there were a lot more people at a much higher cultural and technological level than has been previously suspected.
I highly recommend this book!