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multiscreen sausage party
Saturday, May 23 2015
As I mentioned, my recent head cold largely left the right half of my body alone. But by last night, big blood clots were coming out of my right nostril. I get nosebleeds easily, and perhaps all the blowing of my nose had aggravated the lining of my right nostril. At various times today, it would seem that my nosebleed was over. But then I'd produce another massive bloodclot and it would start up again, usually as a watery blood dilution that would flow for several minutes and then gradually stop.
There had been a frost advisory for the Mid Hudson Valley last night, so I'd put a temperature probe out in the open in the garden to see how low the temperatures went. I was pretty sure we would not have a frost up here on the mountain, but there might've been a risk for some people in frost pockets in the Esopus Valley. (Frosts in the early part of growing season effectively move the start of the season to whenever they happen, and they can happen surprisingly late; one year at my childhood home south of Staunton, Virginia, there was a morning frost on June 8th.) This morning my base station said that temperatures at that probe had fallen to 36 degrees Fahrenheit.
Despite the chill in the air, I suggested to Gretchen that we drink our weekly french press of coffee out in the yard. I said that the sun would make us comfortable. Gretchen was skeptical at first, but I was right. The power of the sun in late May is formidable, and Eleanor and the cats eventually had to retreat into the shade even though air temperatures had not risen out of the 50s.
This afternoon, I began work installing a motion-sensor light at the northeast corner of the house to help me get to and from the brownhouse and greenhouse at night. I began by adding an extension ring to the junction box where wires from inside the garage connect to wires running underground to the greenhouse. The extension gave me room to add a handy GFI duplex outlet and then run (via a PVC conduit) a romex cable up to a round box overhead. For now, I've just got the wires hanging loose there, but eventually light will shine down from there to illuminate my path.
This evening Gretchen set out with the dogs to go meet Michæl (of Carrie & Michæl), but quickly ran into car trouble, this time with the Prius. A pair of plastic shields under the front of the car had hit something and pulled loose while Gretchen was backing up, and now they dragged on the ground (the same thing happened with our old Honda Civic Hybrid; these newfangled hybrids all have super-low clearance as part of their ærodynamic design). So Gretchen abandoned the Prius and took the Subaru instead. I immediately drove the Prius up onto ramps and rejiggered the plastic shields so they'd stand a better chance of not causing trouble in the future. I cut them so they'd fit tucked up over parts of the framwork and then drilled a few holes through that crappy plastic so I could secure them with zip ties.
Partly in hopes of staunching the continuous rivers of snot flowing from my nose, I'd taken another 120 milligram dose of pseudoephedrine today. But by this evening, of course, I needed a drink. And the only way to get that drink would be to produce some art. So painted another quick and dirty image without consulting any models or photographs. The result was a three inch by three inch painting of a balding man. It wasn't great, but given that I dashed it off in about ten minutes, it wasn't terrible.
As I was drinking a celebratory Sierra Nevada Torpedo Extra IPA, my buddy Mark called. We'd been sending cryptic emails back and forth, but now it appeared as though he really would be coming for a visit. He, his wife, his kid, and their dog were all staying at Ray & Nancy's house down in Old Hurley (while Ray and Nancy are in Los Angeles), and whenever that happens, Mark likes to make some time to visit me, if only to reorganize my greenhouse. He arrived without his dog, and we went directly to the greenhouse basement, mostly so I could show him all the excavation I'd done during the drought at the end of last summer. It's also Mark's favorite place for the consumption of smokable vegetable-based snacks.
Eventually we moved up to the laboratory, where I did a slow-running show & tell of the things I'd worked on since he'd last visited: Hackintoshes, barometric arrays, and a high-voltage jacob's ladder. At some point I heard Mark singing a song, and when I asked about it, he said it was a heavy metal song from the 1980s called "Balls to the Wall." I immediately downloaded it, and was surprised that I'd never heard it before and that it was great. Sure, it had plenty of homoerotic-tinged 80s cheese, but it also had certain timeless elements that remained relevant even from the perspective of today, particularly the affect of the chubby singer with his squinty delivery and close-cropped hair. After that, Mark became VJ and we watched a series of Black Sabbath videos from the time when Ronnie James Dio was the singer (Mark's favorite is Mob Rules, an album I once had on vinyl; he especially likes the trippy machinations of E5150). Mark seemed delighted that I had no special fondness for the original vocalists of bands like Black Sabbath and Iron Maiden.
Eventually Mark took advantage of the multiple screens of my main computer to stream multiple YouTube channels simultaneously. One played nothing but car crashes from Russian dashboard cams, another played obscure 80s metal and punk, and in another he showed me various things from Cryptome.org his favorite collection of Internet conspiracy-minded crankery. I switched the Russian dashcam stream to multiple perspectives of the Chelyabinsk meteor, and when that ran out the YouTube algorithm gave us first UFO video and then, when that was exahusted, Big Foot.
When Gretchen got back from her evening, she wondered if we'd eaten anything. We'd been drinking cheap beer leftover from Robert's stint of housesitting earlier in the month and food hadn't really occurred to us. So she made us some dip from salsa and refried beans, gave us a bag of corn chips and two bananas. Then she closed the laboratory door to contain the smoke and watched teevee with the dogs and cats, most of whom appeared to be preferring her company.
But Ramona did come into the laboratory for a time while Mark and I were hanging out there, but she was too exhausted from her earlier hike to do much socializing. I tried to inspire her playful side, but she made a big point of rolling over onto her side on the laboratory ottoman as if to say, "I'm too pooped for all that." She did, however, keep an eye on me just in case something really interesting came up.
Meanwhile Celeste the Cat, who had been making a big show of not being frightened of Mark, was cuddled up in a nest among the wires at my feet beneath my big five-monitor array of displays.
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