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:
   not a dog record
Sunday, August 25 2013
We started the day with our weekly french press of Sunday morning coffee. Once stimulated, I found myself trolling on the netbook in the dining room while Gretchen transitioned back to food preparation for this afternoon's party. She looked over at me trolling away and said, "Really, the day of the party, and that's all you can think to do?" She had a point. So soon I was going around the dining room scrubbing various spots and other discolorations. I've said it before and I'll it again: nothing gets as grimy as a white wall. The walls with just a little more color always look much cleaner than the white walls that make up the majority of our inside surfaces.
As the time for the party approached, I did some last-minute weeding in the garden, some of which was designed to cover the soil in the garlic patch. I'd added some nasty (not-well-composted) kitchen compost to it yesterday, and it smelled exactly like shit. Burying it helped, but the smell lingered until I'd piled on a couple inches of weeds pulled from the tomato patches.
At some point I fetched the second-biggest disco ball from the laboratory (it wasn't on a rotator) and hung it from a small battery-powered rotator in the dining room. Pointing a color-changing spotlight at it didn't produce much of a display in the full light of day, so I improvised a two-mirror array consisting of an alligator-clip-based pair of "extra hands" (usually used in soldering) and two mirrorlike platters salvaged from an old hard drive. The clips could position the platters any way I wanted them, allowing me to catch the sunlight from a nearby window and redirect it to the mirror ball. Once oriented, the platter-mirrors worked for about 15 minutes, by which point the sun would have moved on.
About 15 minutes after the appointed hour, our guests began arriving, some of them with their dogs. Gretchen had made no provisions at all for beverages, but that didn't prove to be a problem; before long, we had a couple 12 packs of beer, several bottles of wine, the makings for gin & tonic, sangria (a favorite with the ladies), and, for those not wanting to get their drank on, "sun tea."
Since it was a nice day, the party could radiate out across a large area. One group of people ended up around the picnic table on the east deck, another ended up on the terrace just southwest of the front door, and a surprisingly-large group managed to fit within the confines of the screen tent (at one point it contained at least seven people and perhaps a dog as well). Gretchen gave several tours of the upstairs, all of which made a stop in the laboratory.
At some point I led an expedition down to the greenhouse. Eventually a group of us settled in the greenhouse upstairs (which turned out to be large enough to hold about seven or eight people). One of the guests had given me a very long pipe he'd made from native oak (as well as a couple very dank buds harvested from some variety of Cannabis). The greenhouse upstairs thus became the defacto smoke-out zone. Once I'd added marijuana to my drunk, I started talking in detail about the dildonics of razor handle design.
Whenever it became quiet, I could hear the heart of the party roaring from the house. I could hear the party off in the distance, but it was so sprawling that it was actually the same party as the one I was at. Eventually, though, I felt like I was missing out on my own party, so I returned with the others to the house. By this point it was winding down anyway.
We ended up having a couple stragglers who continued hanging out well after all the others had left. By this point I'd become obnoxiously drunk, and I said a few things that Gretchen found embarrassing. But that's how things go when I start drinking at 3:30pm and the party is still happening at 9:00.
All tolled, about 34 people and eight dogs attended today's party. We'd been hoping to break the nine-dog record of our wedding party. As for parking, cars parked on the side of Dug Hill Road stretched from 41.931217N, 74.107075W to 41.93188N, 74.10907W.


For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?130825

feedback
previous | next