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hoarding affliction so gratuitously satisfied
Sunday, June 4 2017
I'd stayed up late drinking and smoking pot in the greenhouse, so I ended up having a mild hangover today. Sometimes my hangovers are typified by a headache, and those only last the morning. More commonly, though, there's no actual pain but instead of feeling of malaise, and those last all day. This one was more about malaise than it was about pain, but it faded away during a nap I took this afternoon.
Dan and Eva were planning to come visit me here at the house in Hurley this morning and had hoped to meet Gretchen. But Gretchen had some poetry reading to do at an animal rights event up in Albany, and so they just missed each other. I was actually a short distance down the Stick Trail when they arrived, hoping to see if some shingles that had fallen off the southeast sector of the roof had opened any gaps through to the underlayment (they hadn't). Of course, Neville and Ramona were already greeting them in the driveway. They might be animal rights people, but I got the distinct sense that neither Dan nor Eva had much fondness for big doggy dogs like Ramona, who kept trying to put her nose up Eva's dress or taking all of Dan's wrist into her mouth. Most visitors find such things adorable and completely understandable, but they clearly didn't.
Dan is a minimalist, and he and Eva had just moved out of their apartment and gone on the road, where they'll be couch surfing to Colorado and eventually California. He'd asked me a couple months ago if I'd be interested in taking some of his old computer equipment which he no longer had any use for. You know me. "Sure," I'd said. I was especially excited about his OLPC international kids' laptop, whose rugged design, long battery life, flexible networking, and sun-readable LCD had impressed me when I'd first heard about it. Dan had lots of other goodies besides that: a pile of keyboards, a tower PC with a Core-2 Duo processor, a first-generation Amazon Kindle (full of reading material), a first-generation Apple iPod, a Core-2-Duo-based Thinkpad T61, a Star4 Starling Netbook, a first-generation Mac Mini, a Netgear WNDR4300 WiFi router (yes, it works with DD-WRT), esoteric music hardware, a Garmin GPS, various thumb drives and SD cards, and a toilet seat designed to fit on a five gallon bucket (for a trip to Burning Man that never happened; Dan knows I'm into alternative toilet hardware). There were also random other things; ratty headphone, high-end earbuds, a cheap 256 megabyte MP3 player full of English lessons in files with names in Chinese characters (that was probably Eva's), and a travel toothbrush with a built-in UV sterilization case. It was a good thing Gretchen wasn't around to see my hoarding affliction so gratuitously satisfied.
I gave Dan and Eva a tour of the first and second floor (we stayed out of the basement, where Andrea was still holed up). The grand reveal, of course, was my laboratory, which reliably blows everyone's mind. When Dan pointed out my urinal, Eva freaked out a bit, suggesting she's not as hip to my experimental DIY lifestyle as nearly everyone else who comes through. She also seemed terrified (or at least, she performed terror) when I fired up my old boiler igniter coil to produce a makeshift Jacob's Ladder. [REDACTED] Eva did, however, seem to like my weirder paintings significantly more than others who have toured the laboratory have seemed to like them.
Dan and Eva were in a bit of a hurry to get going, so they were only around for about a half hour and never got to see the greenhouse and brownhouse or, say, go for a walk in the forest.
By the time they'd left, it had begun to rain. Any plans I might've had to continue my deck foundation project would have to wait. I took that nap down in the greenhouse, which was made all the more special by the patter of raindrops on its metal roof. Gretchen doesn't like that sound, but it has nothing but good associations for me. I grew up in a house with a metal roof in one of the most arid places in the East, and the only times I was allowed to bathe with hot water in a bathtub was after a cistern-filling rain.
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