playing doll house

Rebecca tells me she does not remember having a doll house when she was a child. She remembers having among other dolls, paper dolls that had paper dresses that could be changed. I invited her to make a paper doll house, to make pieces out of paper, a bathtub piece, toilet pieces, sink pieces, a stove piece, and furniture pieces. She needs to make these pieces to scale, perhaps one inch equals one foot. And then she needs to arrange them to make them fit properly and have adequate walkways and such.

She will go to the hardware store and measure bathtubs, but, otherwise she can get all the measurements from the stuff that we already have. There are rules to the game. Any toilets need to be along a particular wall. All the bathroom stuff needs to fit in a 10x10 square, unless she is willing to take space from the common room rectangle. She wants two bathrooms, one with a tub and one with a shower. The bathroom in the house that we rent is about 5 x 10, so this should be possible. But the arrangement of things within spaces is critical, and of the four of us, she is the best at this.



The man that we hired to dig the post holes in a sensible time frame got the job done promptly. While the rest of us raked out a circular expansion of the driveway, Rebecca ran about the full scale layout of her doll house with a tape measure. Then after surveying the area as a whole, she returned to the car for her notebook to make her paper dollhouse pieces.



Of course all such planning should have been done long ago. Mostly it was, but the arrangement of a bathtub, toilet and sink with enough space to get to all of them seems beyond my abilities.



The white piles all over are white marl. In this area of the meadow, there is about a foot or so of rich topsoil full of rocks. Beneath that is marl. The marl here is what they call unconsolidated limestone. It is almost clay like, but it is high purity calcium carbonate. In ancient times quick lime and slaked lime were sometimes made from this, but also it was sometimes used for mortar and plaster without being burnt.

This marl is so common here it us used for road surfaces. It is spread out where a road is to be made or resurfaced. This mostly works well enough, though there is a man in town who makes a living rebuilding struts and shocks. The thing is, this is used for roads without being calcined or converted into lime first.

There remain certain mysteries about how some of the stone construction was accomplished in this region. I believe that a more thorough understanding of how this form of limestone can be utilized might resolve some of those mysteries. I believe that under some conditions this powdery marl can be turned into rock.