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School goes on! We have clients and have started observing their sites and talking with them about what they want to do. We’ve learned to survey and have been surveying each other’s sites in teams. I must say that I felt pretty cool surveying in a team of all women. Now we’re making base maps, which will probably lead to more surveying as we discover where we’ve made mistakes and where we lack important information. Tomorrow we give our first of many, many presentations to our class, introducing them to our sites. This point in the design process is about information-gathering-hearing from the clients, piecing together what the projects are really about (reading between the lines of what the clients say and asking them more questions), and observing and learning about the landscapes so that we can make design choices beneficial to the ecology of the sites. I have a great client-a woman who is retiring from decades of ecologically-conscious work, who loves her land and has cared for it well. Unlike some of my classmates’ clients, she knows exactly what she’s getting into with this project-she actually considered attending Conway years ago. She knows a ton about plants and has taken a permaculture workshop. And as I learned in our first conversation, she too graduated from Carleton!
It’s sort of amazing how much time I’m spending at school considering that I don’t live there. But I’m making an effort to have a life outside of the campus, too. I’m increasingly pleased to be living at Warner Farm with Pepper and Rich and the animals there. Hopefully in the next couple weeks I’ll find a time to pick apples from the dozen or so trees on the farm and make some pies and applesauce! I’ve been hanging out with a few classmates outside of school and continuing to enjoy getting to know everybody. For the past two weeks I’ve attended the UU church in Northampton, which I think will be a great community to be part of, if somewhat lacking in people my age in spite of the many college and graduate students in the area. But I’m definitely at school most of the time, and doing simple things elsewhere, like grocery shopping, is unusually exciting. I suppose part of the excitement is that there are several great co-ops around here.
Fall is falling in New England! (Nanci Griffith sings, “When the autumn comes I see no reason for a fall,” but the autumn feels to me like stumbling blindly into the darkness of winter, and “fall,” gorgeous though the stumbling is, seems a close enough metaphor to me.) There are some incredible colors painting the hills, and I’ll post some pictures soon.
It’s sort of amazing how much time I’m spending at school considering that I don’t live there. But I’m making an effort to have a life outside of the campus, too. I’m increasingly pleased to be living at Warner Farm with Pepper and Rich and the animals there. Hopefully in the next couple weeks I’ll find a time to pick apples from the dozen or so trees on the farm and make some pies and applesauce! I’ve been hanging out with a few classmates outside of school and continuing to enjoy getting to know everybody. For the past two weeks I’ve attended the UU church in Northampton, which I think will be a great community to be part of, if somewhat lacking in people my age in spite of the many college and graduate students in the area. But I’m definitely at school most of the time, and doing simple things elsewhere, like grocery shopping, is unusually exciting. I suppose part of the excitement is that there are several great co-ops around here.
Fall is falling in New England! (Nanci Griffith sings, “When the autumn comes I see no reason for a fall,” but the autumn feels to me like stumbling blindly into the darkness of winter, and “fall,” gorgeous though the stumbling is, seems a close enough metaphor to me.) There are some incredible colors painting the hills, and I’ll post some pictures soon.