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:
   inside Sylvia's mouth
Friday, June 2 2017
First thing this morning, I loaded the old refrigerator (originally from the brick mansion's #1L) into the Subaru along with the few recyclables we'd generated since the last such trip and drove up Dug Hill Road to the Hurley transfer station. When I asked Bob what the price was of dropping off the refrigerator in his pile of appliances, he said he didn't take refrigerators any more. "Is it because of the freon gas?" I asked. "Yeah," he said, adding that he had problems with vandals attacking the appliance pile, implying that even intact refrigerators might cause freon release if they went unsupervised. "My only concern is that people will start dumping their refrigerators in the woods," I said. I told Bob I'd find some other solution and drove that damn refrigerator back home. I don't know how many times I've moved that thing into and out of my car.
My next chore of the morning was to drive out to the Wall Street house to fix a leak in the plumbing under the sink. Something about the description of the problem had me thinking the problem was in the water hoses supplying the faucet, but I soon discovered that the actual problem was a crack in a drainage pipe. The pipe was an ancient 1.5 inch piece of brass, a material that (for whatever reason) seems to rot over time. It had developed a thin crack, causing a small leak. Unfortunately, I couldn't disassemble the pipes enough to remove the cracked piece. I thought maybe I'd just fix it with JBWeld, so when I went to Herzog's, I got some of that in addition to a plastic replacement pipe. But then, back at the house, a brass T-junction in the pipes started to crumble in my hands, sending me back to Herzog's for a plastic version of that. Miraculously, though, when I finally had all the rotten plumbing replaced, the sink didn't leak at all when tested.
I drove out to the Tibetan Center thrift store on my way home, though there was nothing I wanted there. Perhaps they've started turning away the kind of crap I like (old Linksys routers, old digital cameras, and high-end erector sets for creative children).

I felt a sense of dread and foreboding as the hour for Sylvia's veterinarian appointment approached. Eventually it was time to put her in a cat carrier and get going. It was all very sad, and Andrea (who has a special fondness for Sylvia) said goodbye to her multiple times. But before we went there, Gretchen drove us to two of our rental properties to pick up checks because she didn't want to be doing those errands with a dead cat in the car.
At the vet, Sylvia was a listless pile of cat bones without much cat meat on them, all covered with snarled patches of unbrushed hair. She looked about as bad as any cat we've ever brought to the vet. She'd lost 25% of her weight since her last visit, which seemed like an ominous metric. But the big mystery was: where had all the blood come from? Eventually the vet (the youngish female one who'd euthanized Julius — aka "Stripey") looked her over and eventually found the likely source of the bleeding: a rotten molar in the back of her mouth, one of only about three teeth left. If the bleeding was coming from there, then it meant she didn't have something horribly wrong with her. Indeed, according to the vet, she stood a good chance of improving with a course of antibiotics. Gretchen asked me what I thought and I said sure, let's give the antibiotics (and subcutaneous rehydration) a chance to work. So that was what we decided to do. Gretchen sent a text to Andrea back at the house telling her that Sylvia would be coming home alive, and she responded with out a dozen emojis. She would be on a high from this unexpected good news for the rest of the day.
I barely had a chance to do any work today, because the Sylvia adventure ate up chunk in the mid afternoon, and then a little after 6:00pm we (including Andrea) had to head over to a little party being hosted by Chris & Kirsty, the photogenic vegan Buddhists. Chris had supposedly bought a hot dog cart and would be serving a new kind of vegan hot dog called Alpha Dogs. There would also be a presentation by "the Mentalist," a guy named Lucas who happens to be a tenant in the attic apartment of our Brick Mansion rental property.
I knew all but four or five people at the party, though I stuck mostly with people I know really well: Susan & David and Juliana & Lee. The hotdogs were good, though it was hard to say for sure if that was because they themselves were good or was it the sauerkraut, chili, etc. that I used it as substrate for.
I've seen Lucas several times when I've done work over at his apartment. He's always looked like he just woke up, and he's always seemed like he could stand to brush his hair and drink a couple cups of coffee. Tonight, though, he was looking dapper and handsome, and his girlfriend, seemingly carved from flawless alabaster, was beautiful in an enigmatic way. Lucas' performance amounted to a series of magic tricks that somehow benefitted from a combination of slight-of-hand, studied props, and other tricks (of course, I'm perfectly happy allowing to be magical mysteries). The spin on this performance was that he was claiming to look into people's soul and puzzle things out using careful observation. Perhaps to further the illusion that this was his method, he occasionally claimed to not be able to read someone. We in the crowd were spellbound, as he charismatically led us from one trick to the next, periodically pausing to recount a dream so as to maintain the mood. It was amazing, and afterwards while he regrouped with his girlfriend, several of us (particularly David and Lee) tried to deconstruct the magic, something Andrea and I considered somewhat in bad taste.


A catbird singing on the telephone cable.


Charles today.


The moon during the daytime.


Sylvia after her visit to the vet.


For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?170602

feedback
previous | next