August 19

Well, I'm back again. We have had a hectic week. Saturday we woke up to find that the sewer had backed up into our apartment. Enough sewage water came in to soak at least a third of our rug. We didn't lose much when we cleaned out the closet to see what we could keep. Almost everything came out dry. The landlords did get a guy to rout out the sewer line from the house to the street and a carpet cleaner out to shampoo and suck the water out of the rug--in all four of the units on that line. Everything seemed fine until Monday morning when I checked and found the rug soaked again though not as much of an area as before. Our neighbor discovered the problem about 10pm the night before--long after we had already gone to bed. The maintenance man came out again and removed the clog. It is just now drying out again. 

But our whole schedule for the week got compressed and I didn't do much in the gardens. Although I hadn't watered anything and we hadn't had rain since sometime last week nothing dried out and died. I did water all containers this morning and have a mental list of things that need to be done starting tomorrow morning.

For several years I have read various pieces by several authors about whether the world has entered a new geological era and what to call it. A couple argue that no new name is necessary because on a geologic scale the era of humans (prehistory and history) is a mere blip. Others insist that the human passage on this earth, especially since the beginning of the Industrial Age, has so impacted the earth that some new designation is needed. The term "Anthropocene" has often been used and now I find a new candidate "Pyrocene". This piece from Grist reviews a new book by that name.

I read a long article this morning about the repercussions of the Federal declaration of a water emergency in the Colorado River basin as the levels in Lake Meade and Lake Powell have declined to the lowest level since they were first filled in the middle of the last century. Concerns over water  however, isn't limited to the Colorado River and this article hit home for me. I lived in Fort Collins for about 15 years, attended Colorado State, and took frequent day trips along the Poudre Canyon through with the Cache la Poudre River flows. It is a major source of water in northern Colorado so a Denver suburb wanting to build a pipeline to tap it won't go down very well.