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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   random view into a life
Wednesday, February 3 2016
As predicted, today was a rainy one, and there wouldn't be any firewood salvaging. I couldn't even take the dogs for a walk until the rain petered out late this afternoon. When I eventually did, I brought along my drone so I could try flying it around in the relatively-large mowed (treeless) area south of the farmhouse at the end of the Farm Road. I had a reasonably good flight, though I somehow managed to drop the drone against the tree near the farmhouse as it landed. By a sheer miracle, the drone bounced off and made it down to the ground. Perhaps my decision to cut the hooklike ends off the rotor guards had been a good one. In any case, the drone failed to record any video. That function tends to be pretty unreliable.
Later this evening, after Gretchen returned from the City and we'd watched an episode of Shark Tank, I tinkered with the networkable surveillance camera that I'd gotten for cheap the other day at the Tibetan Center thrift store. I'd managed to get it working well enough for some sort of use, so now I was investigating the camera's many options. Eventually I found the system for navigating stored images and video clips on the microSD card and was delighted to find many dozens of them from the camera's former owner. Let this be a lesson to anyone who donates items to thrift stores: you have to erase or remove the stored media first.
The videos took place in January and October of 2013 in an older residential house with exposed timber beams under the ceiling (a common look in the Woodstock area). The camera was generally pointed at the door and tended to catch the woman of the household as she was coming and going (she would often leave at 6:00pm, suggesting some kind of bar or restaurant job). She was an attractive young woman with long dark hair and a fondness for ankle-length wool skirts. She spoke with what sounded like an Australian (or possibly British) accent and had a tall skinny male companion with long stringy bleached hair having dark four-inch roots. The household included two cats and, unexpectedly, a pig. Initially it looked like a small porcine (farm) pig, but it was probably just a light-colored pot-bellied pig. The woman could be heard talking to herself and to her boyfriend and the various critters. She complained at times about the heat in a way that suggested the house was a rental, and at one point she made her boyfriend promise not to "say anything negative about Catherine to me or to our lawyer... unless it's something that she needs to know, okay?" ("No, I wouldn't do it, unless she pulls out that fucking [indistinct] angle..." he'd agreed.) When she spoke to herself, the woman was often working her way through a list of things she'd remembered to do before leaving: the camera being on and pointing at the door, no candles are lit, light and heat have been left on for the cats, etc.
Gretchen seems to know just about everyone in Woodstock, so I showed her the clips and asked if the woman looked familiar. Gretchen didn't recognize her, though now she'll be keeping an eye out for her at the bookstore. Gretchen said it seemed perhaps the camera was designed to catch the landlord in the act of poking around the house. Perhaps the woman wasn't supposed to have animals, or maybe just pigs were the problem.
It was a strangely-compelling (and very limited) candid view into someone's life, and it had me wanting to organize it into some sort of coherent story.


For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?160203

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