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
Chernobyl
dead malls
Detroit
Irving housing

got that wrong
Paleofuture.com

appropriate tech
Arduino μcontrollers
Backwoods Home
Fractal antenna

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Like my brownhouse:
   Hodor at the pet store
Friday, August 30 2013
Gretchen and I would be leaving for the Adirondacks yet again tomorrow, and, because our house was still fairly clean after last weekend's party, most of the prep work to make it suitable for our housesitter involved doing loads of laundry and then hanging them on the clothesline to be battered high-energy photons from the nearest star. We can usually be a little casual about whether or not we change the sheets in our guest rooms, but the last person to stay had used some sort of cloying body scent (Calvin Klein Obsession?) that lingered on any surface it came into contact with, including the couch in the teevee room. (Something that has significantly degraded the experience of teevee watching in the days that have come since.)
In the late morning, Gretchen and I organized a run to the Hurley transfer station, which is just four miles north on Dug Hill Road. As usual, we'd put off the run for so long that we needed to take both cars (especially if we wanted to take the dogs, and we always want to take the dogs). This was the first time we'd ever attempted to dispose of blown compact fluorescent lightbulbs. One of the initial selling points of CF bulbs was that they last considerably longer than conventional incandescent bulbs, but that hasn't proven to be the case, at least not for some brands. It turned out that the Hurley transfer station does accept old CF bulbs, but we have to pay a dollar each to have the good folks there take them off our hands. That's a lot; in the future I'll just put them in a bag and leave them somewhere in a Home Depot.
Back at the house, I cut a new path to the kayaks under the east deck (this involved hacking through numerous Blackberry canes and thick pulpy stalks of Pokeweed that had crown in since I first hacked this trail path back in the spring). Once that was clear, I had Gretchen help me lower the kayaks, carry them to the car, and put them up on the roof. It didn't take long for me to lash them down securely using all the straps that came with the roof rack I'd bought the other day. It certainly helped that the straps came with built-in ratcheting systems (unlike the conventional ropes I normally use to lash things down to the roof).
At some point Gretchen determined that there wouldn't be enough cat food for our housesitter to keep our cats happy, so I made an emergency run to Barnyard on Route 28. The main guy who works there is a big lumbering hulk who reminds me of Hodor from the HBO version of Game of Thrones, though (unlike Hodor), he is capable of operating a credit card reader (the kind that communicates with an audible old-school modem).
This evening Gretchen picked up our Onesha, our house sitter, from the Kingston bus station. Onesha is a 31 year old writer based in Park Slope, Brooklyn whom Gretchen met at Blue Mountain Center. Back at our house, we had a meal out on the deck of pesto pasta and leftover partial bottles of party wine. It didn't take much conversation for me to understand why Onesha and Gretchen had hit it off so well. Onesha has the same sort of irreverent dry wit, and with her (for example) it was easy to transition to go from casting faux homophobic aspersions of "gay" to serious discussions of what precisely had caused "Wigger John" (her Blue Mountain Center "boyfriend") to go AWOL.


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