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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decay & ruin
Biosphere II
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dead malls
Detroit
Irving housing

got that wrong
Paleofuture.com

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Backwoods Home
Fractal antenna

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   blue-light-special secret society
Friday, August 17 2012

location: southwest corner of Lake Edward, Fulton County, New York

[REDACTED]
Gretchen and I landed in the canoe with Ramona on the shore behind Swampy Inlet Island and walked barefoot up the trail through the swampy woods to wherever it led. Several hundred feet away we came out of the woods at the back of a building that appeared to contain a full bar (43.113985N, 74.372115W). But it wasn't a public bar; Gretchen went around to the front and found the building unlabeled. Perhaps it belongs to the Kiwanis, Elks, or some other wood-paneled blue-light-special secret society.

My ongoing web development project continues to force me to frequently take my netbook to the cracked plastic bench in the front of the house so I can tap into the open Linksys WiFi hotspot. The WiFi has gotten more reliable, particularly after figuring out how best to put the dongle and antenna in the overhead flowerbox and disabling one of the two drivers trying to control it. But the experience of using the WiFi has nevertheless grown less pleasant over time. This is because the insect population has changed over the past week. At first there were no flies, perhaps because of the ongoing drought. But recent rains have brought out a kind of fly that looks exactly like a housefly but which inflicts occasional painful bites, usually on the ankles. Perhaps it is a Stable Fly. There is similar housefly-like biting fly back home in the Catskills.

At some point in the afternoon, I kayaked out to a large granite outcrop (43.117012N, 74.368413W) near the house and landed. I found it lead to a large clearing dominated by the barren outcrop itself but also including a collapsing partially-built treehouse and an acre or so of hillbilly forest management. When I was getting back into my kayak, I accidentally slipped and fell and the whole thing flipped over on its back, plunging the book I'd strapped on into the water. But I righted the kayak so quickly that the water didn't have a chance to soak in more than an eighth of an inch and the book was not ruined. Now it had a vague organic-shaped watermark edging every page. Appropriately, the book in this case was Chaos by James Gleick.

This evening Gretchen made a fire of our paper trash and the pine firewood that came with our house and we used that to roast various things included fake barbecued pulled vegan "chicken," Trader Joes burritos, bread, and red onions. With that and a bottle of vinho verde, we managed to cobble together a nice dinner on the shore of Lake Edward.

Later we went inside and watched the first two episodes of season three of Mad Men. By this point I'd transitioned from vinho verde to a large 22 ounce bottle of Boatswain IPA from Trader Joes. It was nothing special.


Sally joins me at the fire this evening. She still is capable of getting around in her halting, clockwise-circling way.


Ramona joins me at the fire.


Ramona looks out off the dock. She loves the lake!


For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?120817

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