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eyeglasses by the bedside
Thursday, November 14 2013
Last night I took an Ambien and drank some vodka while, following a tip on To the Best of Our Knowledge, I tried to watch Andrei Tarkovsky's film Stalker. It was, of course, neurologically impossible to appreciate anything involving subtitles, and I have no memory at all of going to bed. I found my eyeglasses on my bedside table, suggesting I hadn't noticed I was wearing them until I was in the bed. Usually I leave them near my computer, which is at the other end of the upstairs.
Concerning a worry that I didn't used to have: I was relieved to discover I'd made no Facebook status updates while in an Ambien-and-vodka-induced blackout. In the days before both Ambien and Facebook, I'd made many drunken posts to my online journal. But it's hard to go into blackout on alcohol alone, particularly in any way that preserves the computer skills necessary to work an FTP client. But Facebook makes completely nutball posts effortless, and Ambien erases common sense and the ability to record memories before it profoundly limits basic skills.
This morning as I was doing my initial noodling around on my computer, Verizon left a message on our answering machine about a "possible violation of copyright" happening over our DSL line. It seems I'll need to take more precautions that Gretchen's computer doesn't act as a seed for a lot of popular torrents (though from what I hear, these ISP-initiated calls are mostly propaganda and nothing bad ever really happens to anyone from them).
The first major goal of today was to gather firewood in the nearby forest. The chainsaw easily started up when I tried it, suggesting a night spent in the house had given it better working temperature. The firewood I harvested today was all from trees that I'd actually begun cutting up a year or more before. The largest of these was a tree I'd last visited in 2010. The problem with not harvesting fallen wood promptly is that it definitely will begin to rot (or at the very least soak up moisture) when it lies in contact with the ground. The log that had been lying there for three and a half years was a bit soggy on one side (despite the ongoing drought that has made it possible for me to dig into a part of the greenhouse basement that would normally be flooded). Since my goal was to gather firewood for use by people who know nothing about how archaic technologies works, I wanted the driest pieces possible and I wanted them stacked up in the living room, with layers of big klutzes interspersed with dry (and perhaps pitchy) pieces suitable for fire starting.
Because we'd be turning our house over to housesitters tomorrow, another thing I had to do today was wage a mid-sized cleaning jihad against the grime and skudge the house gradually accumulates over time (for the most part, our house does not have a clutter problem outside the spaces primarily controlled by me).
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