A Walk in the Forest

So I did my presentation this morning to graduate students at Morehead State University. I used Skype for audio and video, and join.me for the slides, and everything went pretty well, except for the Audacity recording, which died before saving the audio. I have a bunch of 10-second clips, but they account for about 3/4 of the talk, and would have to somehow be reassembled. So I was disappointed.

Anyhow, the whole exercise ended after one. I had broadcast it on Ed Radio, and that went well too - it was cross-broadcast on #ds106 radio, which made my day. So I threw some tunes on Ed Radio and tried to recover the audio, but it wasn't happening, and I gave up around two, went to get a coffee, and didn't come back.

I went, instead, to this forest, the forest I think of as 'my forest' partially because it's the forest just down the road from the office and partially because it's the forest that has been a refuge for me in the past. So it's my forest, and it's my pond, even though I am probably not even its most frequent visitor.

The forest is on a deadline. The city is beginning to approve development in these so-called 'vision lands', the rugged scrub brush to be changed into the 'environmentally sustainable' Halls Creek Village filled with high-quality residences for those with the cash or the connections. And sure, there will be a bike path along the easement along either side of the creek, but my forest will be gone.

So, here's what it looks like in late June, without very many pretty flowers, almost bereft of wildlife, as the sound of tractors and dump trucks bank in the distance. Here it is, the path now mostly a mountain bike trail, the bird feeder stations abandoned and overturned, Halls Creek Forest, my forest, in its last days.