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:
   coronavirus evidently not present
Tuesday, May 12 2020
Late this morning, Powerful already received the results of his coronavirus test. It was negative. Because false negatives are a thing, the original plan was to get Powerful tested for coronavirus twice. But he's been asymptomatic since getting out of prison, and he had no cellmate while in prison (and had been effectively in quarantine there), so we decided to relax our social-distancing rules. This might've been premature, but it sure made everything easier.
For lunch, Gretchen made one of her fancy pesto-based soups, this time with tortellini (since she didn't have gnocchi). It had been a fairly cold day, by then, at least with the sun shining on us, it was warm enough to have our lunch out on the east deck.
Tonight Gretchen made an Asian peanut-sauce-with-noodles dish featuring tempeh. She also added strips of toughened tofu to the side salad, all in an effort to broaden Powerful's culinary horizons. I have to give the man credit: he's been eating everything Gretchen has been making. Since we're no longer social distancing within the house, we all sat at a cluster of chairs at one end of the dining room table. It was still early in Powerful's exposure to our various habits, and, since one of mine involves using hot sauce on everything, I found myself explaining the evolutionary origins of capsaicin, the chemical that makes things hot. I explained how most of the world knew nothing about it until Christopher Columbus brought some peppers back from the New World. And I also explained how capsaicin hacks mammalian biology, tricking it into thinking temperature heat is present where it is not. Birds, on the other hand, have no such response to capsaicin, allowing peppers to spread their seeds with the help of birds and without the interference of meddling mammals.

I'd been drinking kratom tea since 2:30pm this afternoon, and as I wound down for the evening, I decided to take something to make me sleep well tonight. I have a bunch of olanzapine pills from that errant prescription Gretchen received in lieu of celexa when we were in India, so I took one 10mg pill (that is, half the dose that sent Gretchen to an Indian hospital). I've taken as many as 20 mg of olanzapine without problems, though evidently that was never while under the effects of kratom tea. About a half hour after taking the olanzapine, I felt weak and unsettled, so I climbed into bed (where the dogs denied me legroom) and attempted to wait it out. My anxiety gradually rose and eventually I felt enough nausea to get up and go to the bathroom. But I've been unable to make myself throw up in recent years, and my body didn't actually want to throw up either. I checked my pulse with the oximeter and saw it was up to 112. That's high, but not too high. And my oxygen levels were at 99%. Soon after returning to bed, I started feeling better, and eventually I fell so soundly asleep that it took my cellphone alarm to waken me the next morning.


Powerful took his first bath since the 1990s today and then shaved his head with my electric clippers. Here he is on the east deck today after lunch.


For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?200512

feedback
previous | next