|
|
|
a number of repellant fragrance issues
Sunday, May 21 2017
While Gretchen was off at the bookstore (without Neville; he'd still been in the woods when she'd left), I dealt with a number of repellant fragrance issues I'd allowed to fester. One involved the piss collection system near the northeast corner of the house. Normally urine from the laboratory urinal flows down a series of pipes and empties into a bucket outside the house near that corner. But the flexible plastic hose carrying that urine had jammed up over the winter, and after removing it in disgust, I'd simply let the urine flow out of the pipe and spray the countryside. Some of it had been landing in a bucket, but a substantial amount had ended up on vegetation and the concrete foundation wall holding up the garage slab. Today I blasted water from the rain barrel through the flexible hose, dislodging a plug of urea crystals the size of a dime. After burying the existing bucket of pine needles and urine and refilling the bucket with pine needles, I put the urine collector back to the way it should be. When the urine is collecting in the pine needle bucket and it's not overflowing, there's no smell. It wasn't quite there yet, but it would be after the next rain (which came tonight).
The other fragrance issue was down below the brownhouse, where I had that 30 gallon bucket full of a noxious mixture of pine needles, rain water, and semi-anærobically-decomposed human excrement. All that needed was some exposure to the air, and the decomposition would proceed ærobically (which doesn't produce foul odors). All I had to do was fork that nasty material into the empty composting bin nearby. As I did so, a barberry bush kept pricking the back of one of my calfs, but I somehow managed to get nearly all of that disgusting slop into the bin without getting any on me or dropping much of it on the ground. What little ended up there, I could gather with the fork. To keep the dogs from licking up any that ended up on the outside of the bin, I splashed it with water from the greenhouse (which is an always-available source of water even if, as is not the case now, there is a bad ongoing drought.)
Later I drove with the dogs out to 9W mostly to return that unused Ryobi reciprocating saw and to get a couple more cat collars with bells at PetSmart. (Clarence had already managed to lose the one I'd fashioned for him from two smaller ones.). While I was out there, I also made a rare visit to the 9W Hannaford (I usually only shop at ShopRite when I'm on 9W), mostly because I wanted non-dairy flavors of Ben & Jerry's ice cream. But I also got myself four bagels, another cat collar with a bell, a proper brush for brushing cats, a bottle of Hannaford-brand V8-Juice knock-off, numerous cans of beans, and a Daiya-brand pizza.
I did not go out of my way to the Tibetan Center today, though of all days this would've been the one to do it. Because as I drove south on US 209 approaching the place where it goes from four to two lanes, traffic slowed down dramatically in a way that's unfamiliar on these congestion-free highways. I could see cop cars with flashing lights, and as I got closer I saw that vehicles were being forced to turn around and head back the way they'd come. When I got to the place where this was happening, I found a police car sideways across the lanes, and I did as all the others had done. I was able to immediately exit onto Route 28 and then head homeward on Hurley Avenue. As I crossed its bridge over US 209, I could see a bunch of flashing lights and a fire engine near the place where one turns off of 209 into the heart of Hurley (the first proper exit from 209 south of the State Police Barracks). I parked at the post office and, munching on chips from a bag of Stewart's-brand Frito knock-offs, I climbed up on the grassy knoll behind it to get a closer look at all the activity. I saw a car with some damage in one of its front corners, suggesting there had been some accident there at the intersection. It probably happens fairly often.
Throughout today, I continued my ongoing scanning jihad of my old hand-written diaries. Today my scanning took me from August 4th, 1984 all the way to December 14th of that same year. I was writing an enormous amount every day during this period, particularly on school days, when I felt the need to document every standout event in every class. The writing itself isn't terrible, though no attention was given to correct spelling and I wouldn't learn "alot" isn't a word until my freshman year at Oberlin and I had a bad habit I'd learned from my mother of eliding the subject of sentences in which the subject was me. There are of tics that come and go, similar to tics that popup and disappear like weather in my online journals through the years. At some point I began writing music lyrics in the space at the top of the right page of every open page-pair. Within a year, I'd decided this was unoriginal and useless, so I started writing poetry or various non-sequitur sentences, a practice that would continue until I quit hand-writing a journal in 1989. In the left side of the top of every right page of every open page I made a point of finding some original way to represent the year (another long-lived practice).
At some point I began marking the top right corner or every right page in an open page-pair and every top left corner of every page pair with a colored slash depending on how I'd felt the day had gone: blue for good, orange for bad. Over time, I found ways to make these slashes into unique pictures, a habit that would also continue for years. There were other unexplained tics that would appear at the tops of pages or in the margins, such as formulaic incantations about "the downfall" and how it must be "cut." (I assume this was some manifestation of grade anxiety in a year, 11th grade, when I did unusually well academically.) There was also an enigmatic "DEL" that would appear in the margin of every day for a time. As for the text, when it wasn't going into detail about what had happened with my teachers and classmates at school, it would be full of intricate accounts of the farm animals, particularly the chickens. There were also lots of little maps of my hikes and illustrations of my "Temple of Lælpohm," a pet cemetery I'd made into an elaborate shrine, complete with its own ancient shamanic no-afterlife religion that I tried to trick myself into being the only member of.
This evening I installed patches against the vulnerability exploited by the WannaCry ransomeware on my trusty Windows 7 laptop as well as the older Windows XP laptop it replaced (the one that went to the Galapagos on the most recent trip there). As I've said before, with the exception of my Chrome and Android hardware, I do not allow my computers to patch themselves on their own because such patching causes unreliability, often in the form of nags about the software having been pirated (which it was). I feel safe with my basic computer competence and in the isolation provided by the DSL router. Still, there are bad things that could theoretically get through a router without my approval, and none of the articles I've read about WannaCry are technical enough to say whether it is one of those things.
I suspect that one of the reasons there are so many unpatched Windows machines on the internet is the Byzantine nature of the website that Microsoft offers for people who, like me, do not have their computers set to self-patch. If I want a patch, I usually just want to download it and install it as quickly as possible. I'mnot there to read endless tl;dr documents about it, especially when the documents are somehow written to be both overly technical and infuriatingly vague. And then, once I manage to find the link to the patch and download it, I have to complete the download (which can come to hundreds of megabytes) and try to install it before it's clear whether or not I downloaded the right thing. But such clarity comes only in the form of it either installing or refusing to install. There is no blurb saying what the patch is designed to accomplish, so I'm forced to Google it based on the patch's name. So, while the website is all information with very little in the way of actual downloads, the download is all download with very little in the way of contextualizing information. What I'd like, and I realize Microsoft has no incentive to provide people who pirate their software anything, is more direct access to patch download links and, when those patches are downloaded, pithy human-readable text saying what the patch is for.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?170521 feedback
previous | next |
