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:
   down payment on the cleaning jihad
Monday, October 12 2009
Marie (aka "the Baby") has been suffering from a perennial ailment whose symptoms include constant scratching and ripping out of hair, leaving a thin wiry coat and, in some cases, patches of baldness. In the past the cure for this was to take her to the vet for a $62 visit culminating in an injection of some sort of steroid. And so today Gretchen made an appointment and I took her in for that injection. In the past the vet was unable to find any obvious cause for the itching, but today he gave her the once over with a fine-toothed comb and found fleas around her lady parts. [REDACTED]
Ours is a good vet, but he's forever trying to interest us in procedures that make no sense, and today that included a rabies shot for the Baby, who rarely ventures outside. When I said I didn't want her to get one, he tried to scare me with images of rabid bats. But if rabid bats are an issue, shouldn't I be the one getting a rabies shot? A bat stands an even bigger chance of biting me than it does of biting the Baby, since I'm a bigger target and I like to go into caves.
After the Baby had her shot, the vet clipped her rear nails, the only ones she has (some sadist declawed her many years before she movedin with us). I was amazed by how thick and hooflike these claws were, evidence, the vet said, of her age. Old cats, it seems, often fail to shed the outer layers of their claws, which accumulate into gnarly masses of keratin.

Sarah "the Korean" (who is not Korean) was coming over to spend the night, so I went on something of a modest cleaning jihad around the house. This included the usual cleaning of bathrooms (only one in this case), vacuuming of carpets, sweeping, and cleaning up of dead insects. There were actually be more guests in the form of Gretchen's parents coming later in the week, and they tend to draw attention to cleanliness issues that we can't even see, so this was just a down payment on the cleaning jihad that was to come.
Meanwhile Gretchen was preparing an elaborate meal of tamale and chocolate (molé) chili. Soon after Sarah arrived, I gave her a tour of the greenhouse, which, when she'd last seen it, was nothing more than a rectangular hole in the ground. The most compelling thing these days about the inside of the greenhouse is the enormous three-foot-deep hole in its bedrock floor. Sarah, it bears noting, became the first person other than myself to stand in that hole. She has interests in things like urban design and archeology, so, unlike most people, she was interested in the strata of the bedrock and what they were comprised of, even though they couldn't speak for past civilizations or reveal modern utilities.


For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?091012

feedback
previous | next