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:
   featureless plane (a kind of plain)
Friday, September 5 2014
Gretchen had been selected to be one of the presenters at the VegFest happening this weekend in Toronto. Unusually (for a poet), her airfare had been paid. This morning she drove down to Newark and boarded the plane, leaving me to fend for myself for the next couple days.
Early in the afternoon, I loaded up the dogs and drove out to P&T Surplus (taking the usual route, the longer-but-far-more-pleasant Zandhoek, which probably adds a mile to the 9 mile drive that Google Maps (which has yet to get the memo about the opening of the Wynkoop Bridge) says should include I-587 and Broadway. I needed a piece of thick sheet metal with a large dimension of at least seven inches and a small dimension of at least three inches, and P&T Surplus is like the ultimate junk drawer where such things, if they exist, have a good chance of being found. I haven't been in P&T Surplus in a couple years, and that's a long time in terms of its ever-changing offerings. When I went there today, I found that they had an unusually large number of mannequin parts on hand (particularly hands). They also had a variety of $25 laptop computers and a diverse collection of rare earth magnets. (P&T Surplus would have been the only place I spent my lunch money had it been in Staunton, Virginia in the 1980s.) Surprisingly, though it has lots of sheet metal in various sizes, P&T Surplus didn't have any in a reasonable thickness at the length and width that I needed. I ended up settling on a $10 piece that was about a quarter inch thick, much thicker (and harder to drill) than I needed. I also bought a pair of smaller iron pieces that I can weld onto the sides of the main plate to better support the sides of this rail dolly that I intend to build.
After my transaction in P&T Surplus, I washed the grease off my hands in the P&T Surplus bathroom and then walked the dogs in the nearby park. We continued southwestward, beyond the park, to an abandoned factory (41.913096N, 73.993821W). It didn't have a fence or closeable doors, so we could just walk inside and look around (though all the rusty nails and broken glass made me nervous for the dogs, which found this probable Superfund site very exciting). As always, I looked around for things that might be salvaged. There were lots of vintage electrical boxes laid out in a beautiful array, but the most useful stuff looked to be the industrial steel staircases. Too bad they'd be difficult to detach and impossible to carry.
On the way back to the car, Ramona somehow got through the fence into the boat yard (where she probably hoped to scare up a Woodchuck). But then she couldn't figure out how to get back. I tried to show her a place where the fence seemed to have a big enough gap under it, but it wasn't big enough for Ramona. So I thought fuck it, let Ramona stew in her fuckup of going over to that side of the fence. I walked with Eleanor back towards P&T Surplus while Ramona followed us on the other side of the fence. Somewhere along there she must have found a hole, because she'd rejoined us before we arrived at the park's basketball courts (41.915128N, 73.990967W).
From the Rondout, I drove out to the commerical part of 9W with the view to making a cash transaction. I had $5 in my wallet, so I went to the Mid Hudson Valley Credit Union to withdraw some cash, only to find that the only item connecting me to the monetary grid was my Chase VISA Card. I don't need cash very often, but when I need it, I need my MHVCU card. What the fuck had happened to it? (Initially I blamed Gretchen, but she said she didn't know anything about it.)

Back at the house, I went down to the greenhouse and, amid sips of scotch, I jackhammered away nearly all of the undulating surface I'd managed to reach the other day, arriving at another featureless plane (a kind of "plain") in the geologic column.


For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?140905

feedback
previous | next