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:
   wiring above the Gunther room
Friday, November 29 2019
Despite all the leftovers, this morning I made three BLTs for myself and my inlaws (Gretchen doesn't really like bacon, even faux bacon). We didn't have any tomatoes, but pickles are a good substitute for that (unless you're Gretchen's mother and don't like pickles).
While the others got their hygge on with their books in front of the woodstove, I broke out my recently-purchased long-reach drilling set and drilled a hole in from the outside into a joist bay above the Gunther room about four feet south of its northeast corner. I then pushed in a couple dozen feet of fish tape in hopes I could grab it from a hole in the ceiling of the boiler room, some sixteen feet away. But from there, despite a fairly clear view (made possible when I put my head up in the ceiling) I couldn't even see any fish tape until I illuminated things with a laser pointer (which works amazingly well for illuminating specific things in the gloomy distance). So I set up a better lighting system and then made a new attachment for my screw-together chimney-sweeping fibreglass rods (which can be assembled into a 24 foot total). It was little copper-wire finger on a brass screw fitting. The fitting allowed it to be attached to the end of a rod and the wire could be bent into a hook. Using this, I was able to snag a loop of fish tape, pull it to the boiler room, attach a string to that, pull the string back to the outside of the house, attach romex cable to the string, and then pull it back to the boiler room. By the time gloom started to descend, I had romex cable pulled all the way to the circuit breaker panel. This had required at least a dozen trips back and forth between the boiler room and a step ladder outside the east side of the house.
Before we all piled into the Prius to get dinner at the Garden Café, I started copying Woodchuck's boot drive (the year-old 250 GB drive from a year ago I'd recently reverted to) to a brand new 2 TB SSD (it had cost about $225). The copying program I used this time was AOMEI Partition Assistant Professional, since nothing else worked for some reason. But at least that worked perfectly, and by the time we came home, Woodchuck was living on an enormous boot drive that I could populate with the few things that had changed in the last year (mostly git repos and Arduino libraries).
At dinner tonight, I joked that my glass of wine (Montepulciano) matched the two hematomas on my left hand (one under my thumb nail, the other under the nail of the middle finger). Gretchen's father then told me how pressure is traditionally released from such hematomas in cases (unlike mine) where they cause discomfort. The end of a paperclip is heated until it is red hot and then plunged through the nail, whereupon the trapped blood (which is under pressure) comes squirting out. People are horrified to hear that this is what must be done to their hematomas, but they are always delighted with the result.


Writing and drawing done by children on the steamy windows of the Garden Café tonight.


For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?191129

feedback
previous | next