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:
   end of a CRT
Tuesday, July 28 2009
The wind was kicking up, so I thought it prudent to get my window latching system in place down at the greenhouse. The windows had been latched crudely through the winter, but they'd been unlatched since I began gluing bits of wood in place for the latching system to come. With a little stick of metal to allow one window to hold in the other, I could latch both windows using only one slide bolt, though there's still the problem that the windows, once open, tend to flap around freely in the wind. In the low-wind environment of the laboratory, I have a computer monitor on a hinged support held in place by a telescoping antenna, but such an antenna wouldn't offer enough resistance to the wind.

Since the Spring, we've had five monitors in the garage that I'd removed from a computer lab in Eastern Correctional Facility. Today Gretchen took them to Bard College to be disposed of, since we could find no other takers, not even from freecycle.org. I'd managed to give one seventeen inch monitor to my brother, and that was it. While I was loading up the car with these monitors, Gretchen wondered if we should throw in the big nineteen inch ViewSonic in the basement closet. This seemed like a good idea, though the monitor was covered with the accumulated scrawlings of six and a half years of use. So with paint thinner, alcohol, and soap and water I scrubbed away all the passwords and such, taking away the ViewSonic logo in the process. And so marked the end of a monitor I'd first bought from TigerDirect as a refurb back in 2001 when I was living in Los Angeles. That monitor hadn't had a great life. I carried it in an unregistered 1965 Volkswagen Beetle over the Continental Divide to Brooklyn, but its face was soon scratched up by Edna the cat, and my attempts to buff away the damage left the screen even more fucked-up. Eventually I got used to these surface imperfections (as I have to the floaters in my eyes), but I finally replaced the monitor with an LCD on May Day, 2007. It has languished in storage for two years, unused and increasingly ridiculous, like a brick-sized cell phone or a box set of Huey Lewis and the News (someone who doesn't even warrant an ironic revival).
The water table has dropped away and I've resumed work chipping away rock at the bottom of the greenhouse well. This is something I can continue doing indefinitely. If I ever break out of the bluestone to shale (and I know shale is within ten feet of where I am), the digging will suddenly get very easy.


For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?090728

feedback
previous | next