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").



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decay & ruin
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got that wrong
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appropriate tech
Arduino μcontrollers
Backwoods Home
Fractal antenna

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(nobody does!)

Like my brownhouse:
   something like xanax
Wednesday, August 5 2020

location: southeast shore, Twenty Ninth Pond, remote Minerva Township, Essex County, New York

Yesterday's storm was done blowing through by sunset last night, though throughout the day today, brief periods of sun kept being interrupted by the passage of large, dark clouds, some of which brought enough sprinkles to make Gretchen put away the kayak and me bring in my birdfeeder cam. That cam has yet to record any actual birds, but had I had it plugged in last night when it sat (with other electronics rescued from the porch) on the bureau in the second bedroom, I could've gotten some great video of deer mice. It had taken them only hours to discover this randomly-arriving food source, possibly because of their superior powers of olfaction.
By late this afternoon, the biggest and darkest of the clouds had blown through, and Gretchen, the dogs, and I could finally lie around on the dock like we like to do. At some point when I wandered out of the sunlight and into the gloom of the cabin, I encountered a sassy little chipmunk in the kitchen. He (let's assume the male gender) was semi-tame and didn't seem particularly concerned by my presence, going right back to what he was doing (licking the remains of beer from inside a Hazy Little Thing IPA can). When I later told Gretchen about him and asked for a name, she suggested "Anton." She hadn't been watching Silicon Valley, so this was not a reference to a powerful (though improvised) computer named by one of the characters after an influential voice in American satanism.
I'd been having terrible reception at the nearby cellphone spot (only several hundred feet up the hill to the north of the cabin), so eventually I went to the better cellphone spot at the high point on the access road, mostly to download recent news articles and check in a little on the state of the Facebook part of my social network. While I was doing these things, a very excited Neville came snorting through in pursuit of something that eventually eluded him. He then doubled back and waited patiently while I did my internet things and drank my can of Hazy Little Thing IPA. Since he was there being adorable, I uploaded a picture of him to my Facebook news feed. Among the things I checked was the CenHud.com, where I learned that there was no longer a power outage on the lower mile and a half of Dug Hill Road, meaning Powerful no longer had to worry about food going bad in the refrigerator. I also got word from Rich that the problem he'd wanted me to debug yesterday turned out to be with the client's Oracle setup, meaning I didn't have to do anything on my vacation. (Interestingly, Ramona never materialized while I was doing these things, though Gretchen later told me they'd gone off together to follow me.)
Back at the house, I continued celebrating these items of good news with various concoctions involving gin. By dinner time, when I started frying up some mushrooms and onions, Gretchen noticed enough of a difference in my personality to ask what drug I was on. There hadn't been many ingredients in the burritos I made, but they were delicious all the same.
Before climbing into bed, I made myself a cup of kava tea, hoping it would put me right to sleep (something it seemed capable of doing). It did indeed. The takeaway from this experience is that kava isn't good as a daytime drug and should only be taken in cases where one might take something like xanax.


Ramona and Gretchen in the kayak today.


For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?200805

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