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


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(nobody does!)

Like my brownhouse:
   maybe not such a dumpsterfire in Staunton
Wednesday, July 21 2021
At some point today Joy Tarder, the woman who has (for some reason) been looking after Hoagie ( my demented mother) called. She said she'd just helped Hoagie pay her real estate taxes, something that, in Virginia at least, must be done every six months. Given all the tsuris around the last time Hoagie had paid those taxes (accompanied by some uncertainty that they'd actually been paid), this came as a huge relief. Better still, it seems Joy is also has set things in motion for Hoagie to pay her income taxes, which was one of many things she'd let slide this year. (She has likely lost all the information necessary to have them done.) Additionally, Joy says my mother's dementia hasn't seemed as severe since being treated for her urinary tract infection. These developments constituted good news, and immediately lifted my spirits, a feeling that was further inflated by the 150 milligrams of pseudoephedrine I'd taken.
I brought up something my brother Don had told me, that he'd recently found a couple hundred dollars of money that had been lost in the clutter and piles of my childhood home. I said that I'd told Don to put the money in a safe place to be used as an emergency fund should food and money run out at the same time and that if he were to return it to Hoagie, she'd simply lose it, perhaps forever. Don is extremely rigid in his worldview and the idea that he should now start treating our mother like an irresponsible child wasn't something he could absorb in one conversation, so I think he actually did return the found money to her. In any case, I got the feeling that Joy Tarder didn't think this emergency fund idea was a good one and seemed to think Don would just blow the money on books, cheeseburgers, and toys. So I was sure to point out that Don considers this money as my mother's and that he might have better money management skills than she suspects. "Bless his heart," Joy replied, which, since she's not from the South, she may have intended positively. I added that Don and I had grown up in a household that taught frugality and that I'd never in my life lived paycheck to paycheck, not even when I was earning $6 an hour (starting in June of 1996).
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