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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Like my brownhouse:
   more inviting and parklike
Sunday, September 11 2022

location: 800 feet west of Woodworth Lake, Fulton County, NY

On this 21st anniversary of 9Eleven, I again woke up early and went down the Farm Road with the handtruck to gather large chonky pieces of granite. Now, though, I considered work on the stone patio mostly done (except, perhaps, for some triangle infill), so these pieces were intended to further improve the steps leading down from our backyard to the trail down to the lake. I got the handtruck with its load to the top of those steps but did nothing else with them. I just left the handtruck there with its rocks.
Meanwhile Gretchen had a phone date with Mary P. scheduled for 11:00am, but before that, she wanted to have a little time at the lake. So she went down there early, before 9:00am. But eventually clouds blew in and a few raindrops spooked her, and she returned to the cabin.
Later, after Gretchen had been talking with Mary for awhile (mostly about a memoir Gretchen's mother is writing but that Gretchen finds embarrassing and unpublishable), I walked down to the lake by myself, improving a few of the existing steps out of the backyard on the way.
Gretchen caught up with me on the trail as I was about to prune some roots from the part of the trail where I'd trenched through a hump in the terrain. Once I got to the lake, I went kayaking in the outlet bay and then put the kayak away. At some point Throckmorton the Loon made a single plaintive call.
Before heading back to the cabin, I did some futher cleaning up of grounds on the lakeshore above the dock, removing a small dead hemlock, numerous fallen limbs, and dead branches from living trees. Such cleanup makes woods seem much more inviting and parklike. Ideally, I want to be able to walk around barefoot without stubbing a toe or impaling a foot, and I've largely achieved this for the whole 1200-foot route from the cabin to the tree dock.
Back at the cabin, I managed to get a solar-powered outdoor surveillance pan/tilt IP camera connected to the cabin's WiFi and then tested and found that it could connect from the edge of the woods northwest of the cabin, well over a 100 feet (and several walls) from the Moxee hotspot. It's not an ideal camera, as it requires a phone app to use and there is no way to view and control the camera from the web (a basic standard I think all smart electronics should support). But if it can operate indefinitely from solar power, I can use it until I implement a better solution using something like a Raspberry Pi Zero. For her part, Gretchen is actively hostile to surveillance technology, which she considers creepy and Big Brotheresque. But she's also said things about perhaps having a camera to see how much snow is on the ground in the winter and that sort of thing. So before installing the camera on a tree, I chatted with her about it. She said she was okay with there being a camera so long as it could be turned off whenever we're at the cabin.

Eventually Gretchen made us a meal mostly of kale and ramen, but I'd been snacking so hard I could only eat a few tablespoons of it.

We left the cabin at around 7:00pm with me driving through occasional sprinkles of rain. For much of the weekend, I'd been suffering an unusually severe bout of acid reflux, and this seemed to get even worse on the drive. But once we were back home in Hurley and I could climb into bed, I felt much better.


Inside the cabin today, featuring Neville. Click to enlarge


Looking down from the upper deck at Gretchen, Neville, and the results of the stone patio work. Click to enlarge


The cabin from the east. The stones spread in a line nearer the camera are mostly leftover bluestone from the various stone projects. Click to enlarge


For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?220911

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