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understanding with a wasp
Friday, August 31 2018
Ray came over this morning to walk the dogs with Gretchen, though he didn't bring Jack, who was in Maryland with Nancy. I showed off the screened-in porch, starting with the view from the east deck. While doing that, it seemed I inconvenienced a wasp that had landed on my shirt. She stung my right arm as it accidentally threatened to crush her. I totally understood where she was coming from, and despite the pain and aggravation, I blew her off so she could make her escape. The penalty for trying to stop your own crushing should not be death. [The next day I would noticed that there actually was a small wasp nest between the balusters beneath the railing cap in the place where I like to stand to look out over the deck. Wasps are amazingly docile insects, and as long as people know to avoid actually touching the nest, it can probably stay there for the rest of the warm weather..]
Later I showed Ray the inside of the porch, and proceeded to tell me how delicately he tries to balance his antidepressants and another substance so that he has enough manic energy to be a productive artist without being completely swallowed by the mania.
Now that I have a job lined up (the contract for me to sign arrived today), I've stopped looking for jobs and tried to relax a bit more. I've been watching a lot of YouTube (mostly about obsolete computer technology, To Catch a Predator meta-content, Wranglerstar's somewhat dopey modern homesteading channel, and the delightful staccato repetitiveness of the After Prison Show, where we hear prison stories from a guy who spent seven years locked up on a drug charge). Periodically, though, I go out to the driveway and make progress tearing down the massive 15 foot long crate in which the roofing panels were shipped. There are so many nails in that damn thing that I've already filled a 16 oz bean can with the ones I've managed to easily straighten. (I almost never use nails, but they're handy occasionally, sometimes just to bend into hooks.) As for the wood, the idea is to burn it all. It's mostly beat-up plywood and pieces of two-by-fours shot through with the remains of nails from having been used in other crates. It doesn't bother me for such steel detritus to end up in the ashes. Surprisingly, some of the crate's wood is actually oak, which is the gold standard of firewood.
Working on outdoor projects is actually a bit easier now; the weather has cooled down a little, with highs in the 70s.
Late this afternoon, I made a foray into the new-found chanterelle grounds east of the swamp that is east of the Farm Road. I'd discussed chanterelles with Ray earlier today, and that had me craving chanterelle burritos yet again. Since it hasn't rained for awhile, the chanterelles I found were drier (and not as brightly colored), and consequently they didn't cook down as much when I fried them with canola oil and onions. I didn't find as many as I'd found a couple weeks ago, but I nevertheless found enough for two fat burritos, which is what I ate tonight. (Gretchen had other plans and ate at some restaurant; I forget where.) Interestingly, while coming back from mushroom hunting, I found some of chanterelles on the inside of a bend in the Farm Road, just east of the place where a culvert drains water from the swamp west of the Farm Road (41.929334N, 74.108151W). There were also some sassafras seedlings here; it's one of the very few places I've seen sassafras up here on Hurley Mountain.
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