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
Chernobyl
dead malls
Detroit
Irving housing

got that wrong
Paleofuture.com

appropriate tech
Arduino μcontrollers
Backwoods Home
Fractal antenna

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Like my brownhouse:
   brownhouse door
Wednesday, October 14 2009
I thought maybe I'd be spending the day doing web development, but I'd reached a stopping place and nobody was telling me to do anything else, so I turned my attention to cleaning the house in anticipation of this evening's arrival of the inlaws. This mostly involved running multiple loads of laundry through both the washer and dryer. There was no sun today, but at least I could benefit from the dryer exhaust by routing it into the house, where its heat and humidity could erase some of the dreary indoor chill typical of this post-summer-pre-attention-to-heat season. When I wasn't washing clothes, I washed dishes instead, or else did more vacuuming. Gretchen is a neater person than me, but things end up being cleanest if I am the one doing the cleaning.
Down at the brownhouse, I installed the door with its nifty stainless steel doorknob and then added a strike plate and a strip of wood to the define the inside limit of the door's swing. Over the years I've gotten fairly good at using a chisel to countersink door hardware, though with this door the only thing I've countersunk is the latch bolt escutcheon plate.
To make our house warm and inviting, I built a roaring fire in the woodstove an hour or so before Gretchen's parents arrived. (They keep a warm house and Gretchen's mother doesn't cope well with low indoor temperatures.)
After Gretchen's parents arrived, I gave a tour of the greenhouse, giving Gretchen's father the opportunity to snap numerous photographs. They always seem agreeable and unflappable when it comes to my creations, even when they take a turn for the truly bizarre, though I wonder sometimes what they're really thinking. As we passed it, I described the brownhouse as "like the greenhouse, but for the other part of the nutrient cycle."
Later the four of us drove to Woodstock and met our friend Susan (the author) for dinner at the Garden Cafe. I've gotten to the point now where I know how to order a good meal there, though there's still some ineffable something I don't like about the place, and that something hasn't been remedied by their acquisition of a liquor license.


For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?091014

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