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").



links

decay & ruin
Biosphere II
Chernobyl
dead malls
Detroit
Irving housing

got that wrong
Paleofuture.com

appropriate tech
Arduino μcontrollers
Backwoods Home
Fractal antenna

fun social media stuff


Like asecular.com
(nobody does!)

Like my brownhouse:
   caffeine withdrawal attempt II
Friday, May 17 2013
Today I took advantage of my reduced workload by once again attempting to quit caffeine cold turkey. I continued drinking herbal teas fortified with Lobelia powder, but I did not drink any black, green, white, or Yerba Mate tea, or, for that matter, coffee. I could already tell by this evening that the neurochemical progress I'd made from the last time I'd attempted to quit caffeine (ending five or six days ago) hadn't been completely reversed by a work week of business as usual. So instead of being two steps forward and two step back, my progress had been more like two steps forward and only one step back. I had a mild headache this evening, but my energy levels weren't much below normal. Still, it being a Friday night, I ended up spending some hours in front of the television with various alcoholic beverages, including one of those beers I'd bought at the Stone Ridge Mobil's beer cave on Tuesday. Eventually I took a bath and feel asleep for a time (perhaps as long as two hours) in the basement tub. That water had cooled so much by the time I awoke that I had to freshen it up with more water from the tap.
Meanwhile Gretchen had gone down to the city with Sarah the vegan and Nancy. Sarah's was graduating from a cooking program she'd been enrolled in for what had seemed like many months, and there was some sort of celebratory meal to be eaten.
One of the things I've been procrastinating is finding a permanent home for the two kayaks Gretchen and I bought from Deborah last summer. The main requirement for any such location is that the kayaks be out of the sun and out of the way, but hopefully not so inaccessible that we can't be bothered to get them and use them. After pondering several alternatives, I'd hatched a plan to hang them upside down beneath the east deck. This would require some additional carpentry and some sort of pulley system to raise the kayaks into place, but before all that I needed to clear a path through the brush starting from the steps down to the greenhouse. The vegetation beneath the east deck consists of a number of hearty bushes, small trees, and thorny canes fed on ten years of kitchen scraps and cat litter "harvests." These days most of the kitchen scraps are composted and end up in the garden, but there is still a lot of cat litter, urine, and feces adding to the midden below, and in that rich soil are some of the heartiest blackberries and pokeberries I've ever seen. Except for their skeletonized remains, pokeberries are a non-factor at this time of year, but to cut a walkable path through all those blackberries required a stout pair of shears and good footwear.


For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?130517

feedback
previous | next