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:
   chocolate chip cookie icecream sandwich
Wednesday, July 2 2014
When I checked in on the refrigerator again early this morning (not long after 6:00am, when I relocated from the greenhouse to the upstairs bedroom), the temperature had only dropped into the lower 50s. But I was too tired to take any action, so I just left things as they were. Happily, when I checked it again at around 10:00am, temperatures were in the upper 30s, which was great considering that the target temperature for a refrigerator is 40 degrees Fahrenheit.
I took a dose of pseudoephedrine before my meeting at noon with the guy for whom I am building the Lightroom-interfacing web app. This might have made me a bit more talkative and enthusiastic than usual. And though we couldn't do much actual work with the app (because the DSL had been knocked out by an oncoming thunderstorm), he did give me a large check, the first one in a couple months.
Without the internet, I spent the afternoon watching television and drinking after-hours beverages as if it were late in the evening. When the rain eventually came, it poured down torrentially. There were also a great many close lightning strikes, which Eleanor took better than I expected her to.

The original plan was for us Gretchen and I to meet up with our newish New Paltz friends Mark & Maresa to get foodstand falafel at the Wednesday evening farmers' festival in Woodstock. But the rain ruined those plans, so instead we drove over to Maresa's house, which is actually in Kingston (she only works in New Paltz). She lives in a nice old house (evidently it belongs to her mother) off of Lucas Avenue in the southwest arrondissement (if you will). Since Maresa's place is dog friendly, we brought Ramona and Eleanor so they could play with Maresa's dog Lydia. And indeed, there was a fairly good session of surprisingly rough play between Ramona and Lydia, but for the most part today's visit showcased the bratty, materialistic side of Ramona's personality; all she wanted to do was play with Lydia's many toys, the abundance and diversity of which seemed to blow her mind. There were bones to be chewed, stuffed animals with squeakers to be squeaked, and other, furrier toys that were fun to shake in hopes of breaking their necks. Ramona became so possessive of the toys that she snarled at Lydia a few times, a kind of acting out that eventually resulted in Gretchen forcing her to lie down and be toyless for a time.
Dinner was bucatini pasta with a red faux meat sauce and a salad of surprisingly-fluffy lettuce. Later Maresa made us icecream sandwiches using chocolate chip cookies as the "bread" on either side of layer of vegan vanilla icecream. I used to love icecream sandwiches as recently as five years ago, but I've pretty much lost my interest in sweet foods since then and I rarely eat them now. Nevertheless, since Maresa is a professional baker and she'd handmade those cookies, I ate one of the sandwiches. It was like an icecream slider and much denser than it looked, once (that is) it unfolded in my stomach there among the two helpings of bucatini and nut-cheese-with-bread appetizer I'd forgotten to mention.
For some reason, conversations this evening kept coming back to various movies and television shows, starting with The Wizard of Oz (which I referenced when discussing the symbolic importance of various organs; my theory was that the Cowardly Lion's "courage" was actually his "balls," because if what he was missing had been "guts," they would have just used that term). Later Maresa said she found David Lynch's Blue Velvet unwatchably terrifying. And then Mark said that Eraserhead (which I admitted to having only completely watched under the influence of Ritalin) was an extended musing on the soul-destroying nature of parenthood. Somewhere in there, I managed to casually (and completely) spoil Breaking Bad, which neither Mark nor Maresa have yet seen.

For the first time since getting Oscar, tonight Gretchen allowed him out of the bathroom and into our bedroom. But that ended up being something of a mistake, because for long stretches he would meow plaintively for no particular reason, and nothing Gretchen could do would make him stop. As for me, I didn't even try; my solution was to pile pillows on top of my head.


For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?140702

feedback
previous | next