June 4 Day of Relaxation

So today was a pretty easy day in comparison to the rest of our week. This morning, we went to the science lab to talk about bio-diversity, Silent Spring, The Lorax, water bottles, and our Eco-Troy project. Silent Spring and The Lorax are books that reference environmental problems that Toby strongly suggested we read. I have read The Lorax many times and I have seen just about every version of the movie there is; it is one of my favorite Dr. Seuss books. I did however, reread the book and it was as good as ever. I have not had the time though to read silent springs. We moved on from the books to our specimen that we collected at Peebles Island. I looked as muck from the river, there was not much to it, though I did find a shell. I broke the shell open to see what was inside. There wasn't much there, but it was still pretty cool. I also looked at goose poop; I learned that geese eat a lot of grass, that was pretty much all I saw there. On the plant that I looked at I saw black dots. I thought it was pretty cool to look at the colony of bacteria that formed a film on the outside of the leaf. After about 45 minutes of us looking at our specimen, we discussed our Eco-Troy project. It doesn't seem too difficult at the moment, though we haven't really gotten in depth yet. We were assigned a part of the city, for example I got energy, and we have to come up with an eco-friendly was to run the city using our topic. At the end we have to come together and see how eco-friendly our city is. It should be an interesting experience. Overall it was a nice easy morning. After lunch we ventured off to second street where we visited the Rensselear County Historical Society. I thought it was nice. We learned how to look deeper into objects when we visit house museums. We even got to visit the Hart-Cluett House Museum, shown in the picture below, that was located right next to the historical society building.

Front Door of Hart-Cluett House

Grandfather Clock

Two things stood out to me when I first walked into the house; the grandfather clock shown in the picture above and the scene from the wallpaper shown in the picture below. I thought that they were really interesting. I knew that grandfather clocks were popular throughout the 19th century, biut this one really interests me. The sun and moon are shown right above the clock above the twelve. I thought it was a nice touch The scene from the wallpaper shown below is an Egyptian scene, and Stacy, our tour guide, said that she knew this paper was on the walls at some point due to the receipts she found. 

Egyptian Scene on wall paper

I really enjoyed the staircase shown in the picture below. We were not allowed to climb the stair case but I still thought that it was pretty. We got free range on the main floor before we assembled, but a part of me wanted to venture further. This museum tour was much different than those that we went on in the past. I enjoyed that we were able to focus on things that we found interesting in each room, write down our questions, and then once we reassembled, we got our questions answered.

Maine Staircase

Wiawaka exhibit

Once we finished with our house tour, we went back to the historical society building where we looked at the exhibits and discussed our projects. We are doing a project on an artifact. We have to look closer at the artifact and write a description of it. We will be returning to the historical society on Monday to go more in depth about our projects. In the exhibits, I found a case that was about Wiawaka. I thought this was interesting because we were at Wiawaka just last week.

Tally for amount of times Stacy said Umm.

The picture above shows a tally. I kept this tally while we were talking to Stacy. Some may believe that it would have been a distraction, though I was able to listen closer to what she had to say about everything. Believe it or not, she said umm, 357 times in just over an hour, I found this to be hilarious. The break today was nice, and it was in the middle of the week; who knows what tomorrow will bring.