Your leaking thatched hut during the restoration of a pre-Enlightenment state.

 

Hello, my name is Judas Gutenberg and this is my blaag (pronounced as you would the vomit noise "hyroop-bleuach").



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Like my brownhouse:
   well in the greenhouse
Tuesday, February 24 2009
The hole in the floor of my greenhouse, though of uncertain utility, speaks to me somehow. In the context of the bare bedrock floor, it now looks as though I've built the greenhouse over the mouth of a cave. Caves are the closest objects to found buildings for creatures of our scale, and the fact that they are also zero-emissions-climate-controlled is also compelling. I'm sure I'm not the only person who wishes he had the freedom to drop $300,000 on the Missouri cave-house recently offered on eBay.
Despite the other things I needed to do (including providing heat to Gretchen's basement library), I kept returning to the greenhouse today to chip away at the bottom of the hole in the floor. Who knew how deep I'd be able to dig? What practical limits are there to the depth of a hole drilled in bedrock?
At some point I left the greenhouse and walked along the precipice of the terrace formed by the bluestone I'd encountered in my hole. The precipice is the line where the soft underlying shale meets the bluestone and that plane intersects the ground's surface. The bluestone, being much harder than shale, resists erosion and so above it is a gently-sloping terrace. On the particular terrace where my greenhouse sits are a number of other human artifacts that require flat terrain. Fifty feet to the south of the greenhouse is the raised mound of our septic field, and beyond that, the Stick Trail. To the north of the greenhouse, Dug Hill Road uses the last remnants of the terrace to scale one of the final legs of its climb from the Esopus Valley. On my walk along the edge of the terrace, I found many loose pieces of bluestone that had probably come from the layer I'd encountered in my greenhouse hole. But I was more interested in the pieces that were still attached to the bedrock. I wanted to know how thick this bluestone layer was so I'd know whether I stood a chance of digging through it in my lifetime. From what I could see, it wasn't more than five feet thick. I'd already dug through nearly a foot of it in the course of a day.
Later this afternoon two things happened that I hadn't expected. The first was that I broke through the last of the bluestone and into shale after only having contended with about a foot of bluestone. And once I was in this new, sub-bluestone layer of shale, water started ponding in the bottom of the hole. I hadn't expected to encounter water so soon, but it was definitely welcome. Having a well in a greenhouse provides enormous advantages. Of course it's possible that this well will go dry in other parts of the year. But if that happens, I can just dig it deeper.


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http://asecular.com/blog.php?090224

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