Very fluffy snow almost all night, not much accumulation 2-3 inches. But lots of snow on the trees.
Rose bush
Meeting w Seth and David at UTMH about commissions and other. Not very useful. More from Seth about Troy Web and provisioning of new customers.
Up at 6am. Puttered around aimlessly. Brunch at Home|Made Hudson across the street with Dave Drake. Food only so so.
Tomato cobbler with cheese.
…. long nap in early afternoon. Brief trip to ShopRite. Bumped into Ted as I was leaving. Made gore with hot Italian sausages for dinner. Also a salad with lettuce. Maybe getting into more salads. lots of chewing.
Snow started at 7:30. No walk in the snow because there was nothing underfoot even at 9pm.
Saturday 2/23/2019
Breakfast w David Drake at Tanzeys. Clara from across the street invited us to join her. She is surprisingly voluble.
Up to Lake.
Virtually all day on UTM – write up first proposal for Wexelman. Talked with Sam about email campaign.
HAL Program Committee mtg. Evaluation Brenda and Kimberly with Pamela Badilla. She was late as usual.
Met with Seth. Funny conversation about connection between Fyre and Trump.Included Andy king who owned buildings on Front St and for whom i had created a business model five or six years ago. He rooked Brandon, too. Reviewed Lipner proposal. Seth had a couple of good ideas.
Ole at Verdigris. More good ideas. Rushed home to make revisions and get it off to Wexelman.
Tennis. Only lost my serve once.
3 degrees when I left TT.
Sent this photo to Jesse and Anna.
Much of the material originally posted here about politics, economics, foreign policy, racism,and so on has found a new home at AmericanDelusions.com.
CurrentMatters will now pay attention to local politics, libraries, happenings, movies/tv,and other ramblings of a less political, global sort.
Richard Edelman invited us to his front lawn in Saugerties where a parade happened by today. The parade reached our view point at 11:30am or so and only ended at 1:15pm. There were way too many fire trucks and too few marching bands. Then, the Saugerties Vintage Tractor Club appeared with some 22 old tractors. The high light of the day.
The John Deeres are my sentimental favorites. During my college days in Wisconsin I worked for a dairy farmer, Henry Moeller, who had a tiny, by Wisconsin standards, farm with 85 head of milking cows and a few hundred acres of corn and hay. He had a recent vintage Massey Ferguson tractor, but also, being a thrifty guy, he had retained his circa 1948 John Deere Model B. The sound of it running is so characteristic. Here is a video of one being started. Listen for the sound.
My earlier post on this topic was picked up by Gossips of Rivertown. That brought a reference from David Marston to a new source: Radical Cartography where the results of the 1790 Census (the first census) provided further data on slavery in our region and elsewhere. Here are a few examples. In 1790:
It is clear that though slavery in the North was not the dominant economic engine that was true of the South, slavery was present and visible on a day-to-day basis.
Click on image to go to Radical Cartography and the interactive map.
Students presenting their work at HAL.
It is doubtless a fact that most Northerners, including the writer, think that slavery in America was a Southern problem. In the North slavery was an occasional institution, or so we think.
A week ago on Thursday 6/8/17 I attended a program at the library, “Abolition and Women’s Rights in Local History” presented by the students of Hudson Community Schools’ Writing Center at the Hudson High School. More about this project here.
“James W. C. Pennington” by Cecille Ruiz – click to see full size image
The bulk of the program revolved around presentations by the students of their research and creative projects about slavery, abolitionists and women’s rights activists of the 1830s-1850s in upstate NY. The word and image projects are on display in the library now.
But, I want to focus on just one aspect here. The program opened with readings of notices of runaways slaves from the Hudson River Valley. Many were notices from slave owners in Hudson and Columbia County dating roughly from 1795 to 1840. 
The source of these notices is In Defiance: runaways from slavery in New York’s Hudson River Valley, 1735-1831 ((Stessin-Cohn, Susan, and Ashley Hurlburt-Biagini. In Defiance: Runaways from Slavery in New York’s Hudson River Valley, 1735-1831, 2016.)) It is available in the library.
One hint about the deep history of slavery in our region is the fact that over 50% of the runaways spoke both Dutch and English. ((p324. Stessin-Cohn, Susan, and Ashley Hurlburt-Biagini. In Defiance: Runaways from Slavery in New York’s Hudson River Valley, 1735-1831, 2016.)) This is clearly an indication that they lived here long enough to learn two languages.
Here are a few samples from the book: (click on images for full size)
