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:
   deprocrastination
Sunday, April 22 2018
I was up before 8:00am, and my hair (which has gradually gotten fairly long) was in my face and bothering me. So when I took the dogs on their morning walk, I brought along a pair of scissors. Not far west of the Farm Road, I started cutting out chunks of hair by the random handful. Though I'd thought I was being careful, it wasn't long before I'd cut through an audio cable that connects my headphones (which were on my head) to an MP3 player. So I did the rest of the hair cutting with the headphones off my head, even though this meant that I was missing a Radiolab podcast (it was one about the decomposition of the corpses of migrants who die crossing the desert on their way into the United States) being broadcast from my computer. The scissors were maddeningly dull, and since they couldn't get much worse, I tried honing the edges of their blades using a small piece of bluestone found on the ground. A few strokes with that and the scissors were as much like new as they probably ever were!
Meanwhile, the dogs quickly lost themselves in the forest and didn't reappear for hours. They've only recently gone back to doing this, which is a warm-weather behavior. Indeed, the birds were singing and day was on track to be the sort I usually associate with late April (yesterday had also been gorgeous). But I'm a bit of a nervous dad, especially with the the dogs only recently returning to this behavior and Neville having had dual knee surgery over the winter. So at some point I went out again and walked south down the Farm Road with my camera, hoping to take a picture of a bird. I eventually crouched down on the edge of the Farm Road in the place that is also the edge of an escarpment above the Stick Trail and waited. It was such a lovely day I felt like I could just be there in the sun for hours. Unfortunately, the birds failed to materialize. I eventually stalked a semi-tame nuthatch unsuccessfully, and a pair of battling cedar waxwings came through, but I didn't get any pictures. And the dogs were still nowhere in evidence.
When the dogs did finally show up, it was hours later and Ramona had an articulated deer leg in her mouth. She proceeded to eat the whole thing over the course of several hours spent in a sunny spot in the yard. Towards the end of that, Neville came over and drew progressively closer, slowing his approach every time Ramona growled. Eventually Ramona let him have a little piece, but only because she's nicer than Neville about such things.
Later this afternoon, I procrastinating doing some work on Alex's keywording webapp by cleaning up all the dog feces in the yard. But then I managed to motivate myself and get a bunch of that web-app work done (I hadn't touched it before going to Eastern Europe). With that out of the way, I continued my deprocrastination by resuming work on the Gretchen's screened-in porch, which I hadn't worked on since the fall. So much time had passed that some of the floor joists I'd put in place were badly warped. Some of those can be straightened out when the decking goes on, though the one that is badly warped in the wrong dimension will have to be replaced. I suppose it's good to know now what the warp potential of these joists ended up being. As I worked, I listened to a Planet Money podcast with some content pilfered from another podcast on the subject of the advertisements for used car dealerships. Why are they so loud and obnoxious? One explanation is that this is compensation for the asymmetrical nature of knowledge in a used car sale. Everyone knows the dealer can easily exploit the buyer, but if the buyer acts crazy, well, perhaps the buyer has a better chance of getting a deal.

Back inside, I wateched all the rest of the Rajneeshpuram documentary Wild, Wild Country. For all the crazy shit that went down in that story, I felt like something was missing. Perhaps it was that the characters seemed so flat and uncomplicated, starting with the Bagwan himself. What was up with him always walking around with his hands held up as if in prayer? I wanted to slap the beard off that sanctimonious 90-some-odd-Rolls-Royce-owning piece of shit!

Gretchen returned this evening after driving all afternoon from Washington DC. She had a bunch of stories to tell from Split This Rock. People had apparently loved her poetry, praised her book, and affirmed her personality. The experience hadn't only done much for her career, it had also fed her spirit. That sort of thing, when it happens, is nearly priceless. (A similar thing happened to me back on my 50th birthday.) [REDACTED]


For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?180422

feedback
previous | next