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
Biosphere II
Chernobyl
dead malls
Detroit
Irving housing

got that wrong
Paleofuture.com

appropriate tech
Arduino μcontrollers
Backwoods Home
Fractal antenna

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Like my brownhouse:
   chopping into shale
Saturday, November 6 2010
I spent much of the day down in the greenhouse enlarging the well laterally into rock that I used to need for flooring. Since there will soon be wooden decking over that part of the greenhouse floor, I might as well make the well into an enormous cistern, one whose volume can help further store warmth to be released during long winter nights. I was amazed at how easy it was to break up that stone. Shale isn't really that much harder to dig up and cart away than soil. It some ways it's easier, since it tends to break loose along faults and come up in large pieces. It didn't take long to fill a five gallon bucket with these pieces, and I dumped every five gallon bucket of shale just west of the greenhouse, where I'm hoping to build up the lowland between the bottom of the small hill of fill that the greenhouse is embedded in and the steep slope up to the house that begins just beyond it.

This evening Gretchen and I went to the monthly opening at KMOCA down on the Rondout in Kingston. This month's show featured the art for the seed packets for a local farming outfit known as the Hudson Valley Seed Library. Every year they have a gallery show of the art used to decorate their seed packets (mostly containing vegetable seeds). Much of the artwork for the packet appears to have been done at least a year ago, since I recognized some of the art (particularly the image of the lettuce leaf transforming into a trout, which had been made by Michæl, one of the KMOCA guys. As always, there was wine and finger food (but, since the Seed Libary guys are vegan, it came in the form of little paper cups of toasted seeds and dried fruit). There was also wine and Michæl the KMOCA had brought a large bottle of Stone Ruination IPA, which he poured into little paper cups for himself, Deborah, and me.
Later, after the show wound down, a six or seven of us (included the two Seed Libary guys, Deborah, Michæl, and at least two others) walked over to Mole Mole, the new Mexican restaurant down in the Rondout's commercial center (it's in the place where El Coqui, that Puerto Rican restaurant we used to like, had been). We all crammed into a booth augmented with an additional table, and we mostly ordered vegan (Mole Mole didn't have any vegan cheese or sour cream). The food ended up being a disappointment; Gretchen had ordered something with mole sauce (you'd think they'd be able to get that right) but she didn't like it. And my burrito was bland and lacked a unifying flavor, the sort usually achieved with sauce or through proper seasoning of the beans.
Over dinner, Gretchen regaled the seed guys with the tale of how we'd met, separated for twelve years, and then somehow had gotten back together again. This led into a conversation about blogs and how candid one should be when writing them. I said that I've learned over the years how to mostly avoid getting in trouble with the people I write about (not writing their entire names, and choosing my words carefully if I suspect they might be, or temporarily become, readers). Still, sometimes you have to let yourself go. As I said tonight, "It just doesn't make for good reading to write, 'They were all wonderful, the food was great, and we had a really awesome time!'"
I should mention that Michæl and his wife Carrie (absent tonight), the seed guys, and at least one of the two strangers at our table tonight are all part of a sort of nascent intentional community they're creating for themselves out in Accord near Butyl (sp?) Hole. They even have a blog, though it's lain fallow for over two years.


For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?101106

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