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bluestone and cellulosic resources
Thursday, August 11 2011
At around noon today I began mowing the grass for what might have only been the fifth time this year. I mostly used the cord-powered electric weed whacker, though for a couple hundred square feet in the northwest corner I actually used a scythe. This was because Gretchen's friend Celia had come over to go with Gretchen and the dogs to the Secret Spot, and I was trying to not make so much annoying yard maintenance noise while she was around.
Later I buried a five gallon mix of urine and leaves under the broccoli in the main garden. These days, though, I collect urine in two places; the other is a bucket downstream from the piss collection gutter in the brownhouse. Typically I do not put many leaves in this bucket, and I also leave it exposed to the elements. So over time it gradually fills with dilute urine. I've noticed, by the way, that mosquito larvæ can live happily in undiluted urine.
I took the bucket of diluted urine and gradually poured it into a number of holes in the asparagus patch. I could be wrong about this, but asparagus seems like the sort of plant that would do well a diet containing large amounts of urine.
Despite my attempts to close up the urine holes, they continued to stink of diluted urine (a fragrance that reminded me, at least in this case, of freshly-applied Band Aids). So I gathered leaves and sticks in the nearby strip of woods to use as mulch (first I put down the leaves, and then anchor them by laying sticks across them). I depend so much on this particular strip of woods for scrap bluestone and cellulosic resources (leaves and sticks) that it has, over time, developed an unusually tidy appearance. All the dead branches have been removed from the lower trunks of the evergreens, and all the sticks, much of the leaf litter, and many of the loose rocks has been removed, making it resemble a tidy parkland.
This evening our friends Michæl and Carrie (whom we know through Deborah and KMOCA) came over for dinner. Gretchen had made a sort of Mexican stew with white beans, tempeh, and green tomatoes (which substituted for tomatillos). They brought over a vase's worth of flowers, ears of corn, and sixer of Mountain Brew Beer Ice, the most unintentionally-hilariously-packed beer ever. As usual for this season, we ate out on the east deck.
At some point mosquitoes drove us into the evening, and there was enough of an autumnal-seeming chill in the air for a cardboard fire to seem appropriate. Outside, the slowed cha-cha-cha of the katydids were an ominous harbinger of colder weather to come.
Michæl and Carrie ended up hanging out with us for five hours. We had a lot of good laughs and even listened to a few tracks from a Lea Delaria CD that had she had recorded back in the 1990s. The things right wing fuckers were pulling back then (as documented by her commentary about it) were creepily similar to the shit they're pulling today; even some of the names were the same. But there were differences; history doesn't repeat, but it rhymes and alliterates.
By the end of that five hours, there was nothing I wanted to do more than go back to working on my project in xcode. I'd made a big breakthrough this morning when I figured out how to interact with programmatically-created subviews, a skill that made xcode suddenly almost as easy to work with as javascript.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?110811 feedback
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