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:
   no problem with an unbalanced bicycle load
Tuesday, August 30 2022
During lunch today, I rode one of the e-bikes up the Farm Road while carrying a plastic five-gallon bucket. I then gathered small pieces of bluestone in the shapes I'm most likely to need when filling in the holes in the stone patio I am now making at the cabin. As was the case with the little bits of bluestone I collected last week, these were mostly triangles and long, skinny pieces. This time, though, I gathered a fair number of very small pieces (less than two inches in length), since triangles of around that size were the most difficult to find pieces to fill with the triangle kit I'd assembled last week. With the bucket heavily-laden with stones, I was able to attach it to the side of the rear paniers and ride the bike home effortlessly. You might think having a huge (50 or 60 pound) weight only on one side of a bike would make it unstable, but the human rider compensates for this imbalance unconsciously, and the bike doesn't even seem to lean away from the imbalance (though it must be doing that).

Gretchen is back to teaching an English course in a prison somewhere down south within range of our all-electric Chevy Bolt. She left to teach it this evening just before the arrival of a massive storm that brought with it heavy rains, hail, a fair amount of wind, and a number of terrifying-close lightning strikes. I was wanting to take yet another bath and decided to wait because of a bit of family wisdom handed down to me that says that a bathtub is not a good place to be should the house it is in be struck by lightning. When the lightning (if not the rain) had calmed down a bit and I went to take that bath, I saw that there was so leaking from the ceiling above the bathtub, likely from the drainage ventilation stack's penetration of the roof. Months ago I noticed the rubber boots on these penetrations were failing, but we've yet to get a roof guy here to fix them due to ongoing labor shortages. Despite the failing boots, this sort of leaking doesn't happen often when it rains and seems to require a strong wind, perhaps from an unusual direction.
After my bath, I was hungry, so I made a pot of pasta elbows to eat with that homemade tomato sauce I'd made yesterday (I've been the only one eating it; Gretchen understandably prefers Rao's). And then I went down to the greenhouse to spend the night. I love hearing rain coming down on a metal roof. It's a sound from my childhood, and it makes me feel cozy. (I grew up in a fairly arid part of the East, and, because the only potable water our family had was collected from the roof, I could only bathe during or immediately after a rain. So I have fond associations with the sound of rain.)


For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?220830

feedback
previous | next