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:
   indigo bunting on a credit card
Sunday, March 5 2017
Today was yet another brutally-cold one. You can tell it's unusually cold when it feels warm just walking into the brownhouse (which stores a considerable amount of heat from previous milder days in two separate water reservoirs). It's good that I took advantage of a recent warm spell (I'm thinking the one on Feb. 28th) to change out the brownhouse's shit bucket, which I'd last changed way back in June.
Given the weather, it was a good day to stay by a fire and, if you're Gretchen at least, solve the Sunday Failing New York Times crossword. She'd taken the day off work at the Woodstock bookstore because she would be participating in a poetry reading down in New York City. But she wouldn't have to leave for that for some hours.
[REDACTED] I spent the afternoon doing yet more off-the-clock work on the reporting system for The Organization I work for. This work was for the system's eventual ability to dynamically add whole sets of inputs to a form (to, for example, add more conditions to a query). But to get this working, I needed to make parts of three separate functions (one in Javascript and two in PHP) into recursive functions so that they could be a mechanism for following a complex JSON object down to an arbitrary depth. But even after I got all that recursion working (and I did), I was still a long way off from the ultimate goal, which would require storing parameter defaults and parameters from previous queries as complex JSON objects, as well as a system for dynamically adding multiple form inputs (with labels) to a form in a single Javascript operation.

Much later I painted yet another version of the spectacular indigo bunting photograph I took in June of 2015, this time on credit card.


Today's indigo bunting.


That bunting with the original photo and the painting I'd made back in December of 2015.

Meanwhile, the abdomen belonging to Julius the Cat (aka "Stripey") seems to continue expanding every day. On the chance that his problem was constipation, this morning Gretchen managed to squirt some cooking oil down his throat (which I know to work as a good laxative). But it had no effect. Though he hadn't seemed uncomfortable in the past, today he barely ate any food and retreated for much of the day back in a dark place along where the ceiling slopes down to meet the floor along the west side of the laboratory. Occasionally he'd come out to urinate in a litter box I provided, though he never pissed more than a couple teaspoons at a time. Things were so tight in his abdomen that he probably didn't have much room for a full bladder. He was now having difficulty walking and, for the first time ever, his eyes seemed to be watery. But still he kept watching me, as he always has. He was lying so reliably in one place that I could repaint colored shapes on large swaths of the floor without worry that he would walk through the wet paint. (When, however, Celeste — aka "the Baby — entered the laboratory, I'd have to gather her up and carry her out every time. She seemed to home in on wet paint like a dog tracking down cat vomit.)


Julius (aka "Stripey") this evening. That spot of teal between his head and the amplifier is paint I'd applied in the past few days.


For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?170305

feedback
previous | next