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
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dead malls
Detroit
Irving housing

got that wrong
Paleofuture.com

appropriate tech
Arduino μcontrollers
Backwoods Home
Fractal antenna

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   best of the Fussies
Tuesday, September 8 2020
I refer to the house across the street as "that 80s House" and anyone who happens to live there as "the Fussies." There have been four Fussies who have lived there in the nearly eighteen years we've been living here on Hurley Mountain. The Fussies all have a number of things in common: they hire professionals to maintain their lawn, often have some sort of tiny breed of dog, and typically have an endless series of contractors making improvements to the house which, as the term "that 80s House" suggests, has the boxy design that people thought was futuristic in the 1980s. The most recent person living there is a single woman named Kasey who has a little dog. Gretchen met her some months ago, after one of her contractors was freaked out by a random late-night visit by a seemingly-vicious Ramona. In recent weeks, there has been a fair amount of cohesion in the neighborhood on the issue of the constant gunfire happening at the de facto gun range down at the bus turnaround. So at some point Gretchen invited Kacey over for some socially-distanced socializing out on our east deck, and she said she'd be coming over today at 2:00pm.
This inspired a modest cleaning jihad, beginning with Gretchen loading the Leaf with trash and recycling for Powerful to take the the Hurley transfer station. In the process of doing that, she managed to slash oper her left knee on the sharp edge of some tile I'd foolishly left sticking up out of a cardboard box in the garage right next to a one of the few paths through the clutter. The gash was about an inch and a half long, roughly vertical, and almost perfectly centered over Gretchen's patella. She came up to the laboratory to show me after most of the bleeding at stopped, wondering if she would need stitches. I could tell immediately that it was the kind of cut that one would get stitches for. The skin gaped open about a half inch wide at the center and seemed deep. I said she should either get stitches or I could superglue it back together. Knowing what stitches would entail (hundreds of dollars and a day at Emergency One with a bonus risk of coronavirus exposure, Gretchen opted for the superglue. So she dumped a bunch of hydrogen peroxide on it, and then soaked up the bubbling fluid with a tissue. I'm used to supergluing together dogs, and it was much easier to superglue a human, someone who understood I was only trying to help (and wasn't covered with hair). Once the glue had dried, Gretchen was able to get around okay, though she tried not to bend her knee too much. Later she was even able to mow the lawn. Initially the gash didn't hurt much, but later in the day it became increasingly sore.
Gretchen and Kacey ended up really hitting it off this afternoon out on the east deck. I could hear them laughing and carrying on. It turned out they had more in common than expected. Both dislike children and vegan, and both have done volunteer work for animal charities. Kacey is an accountant and still spends much of her time in the City (where she still has an apartment). She has a Senegalese boyfriend who doesn't like coming upstate because of all the "rednecks." Kacey had been unaware that a large African American gentleman had been living in our house since mid-May.
At some point I briefly joined Kacey and Gretchen out on the east deck, and later they came to the laboratory as part of the tour. I was mildly embarrassed, because the laboratory is currently about as messy as it has ever been.

This evening Gretchen and Powerful made a nice meal around rigatoni pasta with pesto sauce. I added diced ghost and serrano peppers fresh from the garden to mine, making it only mildly spicy. Ghost peppers are supposed to be one of the hottest peppers there are, but mine so far have been no hotter than jalapeños. Perhaps they have to be on the pepper bush for awhile before climbing the scoville scale.
Continuing my wave of decadence, this evening I took my third bath in three days. The solar collector is producing an abundance of hot water, so I might as well take advantage of it.


Oscar in the laboratory window today. Note the Ahmed Mohamed clock, which has been working for nearly five years now. Oscar had been extremely needy today. I don't always want to do Oscar stuff when he wants to.


For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?200908

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