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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   questions from a cat
Monday, February 7 2011
I ran across our neighbor on the farm road this morning just as he finished rigging up an improvised drag-behind-his-truck snowplow. It was shaped like a triangle. Seeing it in action, I wasn't impressed. About the only thing it did effective was scrape away the pile of dog shit left by Sally in the middle of the road. Sally had been lazy and hadn't ventured out onto the crusted-over snow. But Eleanor had, and was finding it a good solid surface for romping around. The crust was strong enough to support an energetic 44 pound quadruped, but not a 175 pound biped such as yours truly.
It ended up being another relatively warm day, with temperatures rising up into the low 40s and thawing continuing, perhaps forging a harder crust capable of supporting human weight.

To an unusual degree, the household's cats kept distracting me from my various little projects today. Julius (aka "Stripey") repeated came into the laboratory and hung out back behind the computer desk, where the hydronic radiator provides heat when I have it on. But if I get up to get hot water from my hot water pot or to piss in the laboratory urinal, he always makes that noise he makes, a sort of warbled interrogation: "Blrrrrt?" He almost never meows, mostly speaking instead in muffled quasi-purred utterances. Such questions, even coming from a cat, are enough to break my concentration. Usually what I say in response is, "Really? Really? What?"
Sylvia (our black cat) meows a bit more but also makes those same muffled purred utterances. Like Stripey, she likes to come into the laboratory to distract me, though usually more directly. She often ends up as a living stole around the back of my neck. By contrast Marie (aka "the Baby") never asks questions. She speaks entirely in plaintive declarative sentences. If she's cold in the teevee room, she'll march into the laboratory and announce, "Meow!" That's her way of asking for me to either start watching teevee (so as to provide a warm lap) or, failing that, get her a fresh hot rock off the stove.


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