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immersively-detached audio
Saturday, May 10 2008
I spent the whole day doing household chores, beginning with walking the dogs in the forest (after first extricating myself from amongst the animal thumbtacks pinning me to the bed). The second chore of the day was the relocation of all the remaining firewood in the garage to the woodshed. When that job was done, I brought up the last of a pile of wood that had been beneath a tarp at the head of the Stick Trail since February. (I feared that if I waited much longer rattlesnakes might move in.) While I did these outdoor tasks, I listened mostly to things like Car Talk and Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me on the local public radio station. Moving and stacking wood is incredibly dull and repetitive work, but because it is also very quiet, it makes an ideal occasion for listening to talking voices on a radio.
Later I moved inside, finished cleaning the kitchen, and eventually I fired up the vacuum cleaner and attacked carpets on all three floors of the house. I found that I could continue to listen to prerecorded audio even with the vacuum cleaner running if I wore a pair of shop earmuffs over the earbuds of my MP3 player. This placed me in such an immersively-detached audio environment that the only way I could tell that the phone was ringing was that an LED was flashing on either the handset or the base station.
Gretchen arrived with her two parents at 6:30 pm, having spent the night in Long Island visiting with her 97 year old great aunt Helen and a variety of second cousins in various stages of removal (both genealogically and culturally). For Gretchen, it was good to be home in a region far more to her liking than Long Island. The four of us went out to dinner at the Garden Café in Woodstock, her favorite local restaurant.
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