alternatetheory

this is what shuttering looks like.

you could call it reprioritization, or giving up, or prudence, or failure, or wisdom, or heartbreaking or inevitable. pick your narrative. i'm going to work mostly on other things for an indefinite period.

the structure is suffering from the fact that i'm pretty much just pulling every design choice straight out of my head (or my ass), without discussion or debate or alternate points of view. i'm pretty good at this stuff, but not THAT good. yet another way that i NEED more people.

it's been a strange week. this is a tree that almost fell on me.

the close-up is of the fruiting body of the toxicodendron radians (poison ivy berries).

lets see, what else happened this week..

we had a 4 inch rain - in ONE NIGHT. another inch the next day.

the guys who clear under powerlines showed up, mowed a 30x150 stretch of forest, got all their equipment stuck on my road, thrashed it, and disappeared after promising to return and repair it.

tonight is the solstice party.

structural strawbale:

goat shelter is easy!

the news is dire, i'm considering not listening anymore. depression certainly won't save us.

i'm pondering doubt - it's ability, in the scientific method, to refine truth from imagination, and it's troubling power to keep us from working together, as we must, if we're going to bring about a new golden age, or at least avoid a new dark age. 

i think of myself as a big picture, idea guy, i feel like i should be able to solve humanity's problems. but perhaps, yet again, i need more people. 

unanimous

winter

trifoliate orange (native citrus) FRUITING. 

they were suprisingly good, very grapefruit-y, but with huge seeds, and a strange tendancy to stick to your teeth.

logan at the nashville kids museum. whack-a-mole is not easy for 3.9 yr olds. personally i cheat - i dont use the mallet.

not thanksgiving, the end-of-the-csa party for workshare folks, at Sequatchie Cove Farm.

straight to yo' head.

burn a smallish wad of salvia divinorum, pull it all in one long slow draughty tube, lie down and close your eyes, peek behind the curtain, lift the scenery and look beneath.

the flow of all possible lives diverges from you every moment. your nearby selves are not necessarily so similar, and you must start to wonder if you converge more often than you'd thought. these are the people whose lives you dream, and they dream yours.

lean on a wall lost in thought, and you could be anyone. if this wandering psyche is any guide, it seems most of the mes spent this moment in hallways, speaking to someone elses. they flash by and fade like falling into black, flickering by at uncountable speed. there is no countable quanta nor anything distinguishable from not-anything.

reality trickles back in sensory givens, and their accompanied string of associations, surprising and absurd. strange life is back.

my strange life.

dur.

been a beautiful fall.

also:

there's been lots of crap going on, mostly in my head, but i haven't found words suitable to express it.

in any case, the apogee of crisis has passed. i think (and/or hope).

pure frosting

so lets see if i can turn this into a narrative;

backstory: we have solar power. nice, expensive batteries. big fat lugs on the big fat cables. lugs so big they need washers (too big lugs, ok). here's the moral of the story at the start: dont use galvanized washers (duh?). 

story development: for months now, over a year in fact, our power capacitance has slowly dwindled. each day, the batteries would be empty quicker until yesterday they were completely depleted by our single cfl bulb in under an hour. 

crisis: not the pathetic, near-second-world electricity situation, but the slow crushing, the imperceptible accretion of real loathing for the evening, for the situation, and the dread of tackling the project, after a couple unsuccessful attempts at repair.

climax: so today i filed all the corrosion off the lugs. problem, apparently, so far, after two hours of power use without a beep from the charge controller.

anticlimax: a beeping charge controller is actually my power monitor. short of climbing under the house with the multimeter, an annoying beep has been slowly taking over my life.

hahaaaaaaa ha ha ha ha ha ha hah ahaaa haaaaaaa heh heh heh heh, ack! 

no really.

erür

titles are worthless metadata placeholders when entries are so brief.

south is not where i thought it was.

also: dirty goat. 

(those aren't sores, they're berries.)

durr. titles aren't poetical.

general update. stuck in the middle, for the moment. 

the big bags are a joy to work with - they're so big, you can fuck up bad and have a fifteen inch wide solid mass wall. not that i have any four inch errors, but still. it's been good practice for switching to the smaller bags, which will only be 12" wide, filled. 

i'd love to go all the way up with the big bags, but i always knew i'd have to switch when i ran out of labor. the big bags are roughly 200# filled, you really can't lay them solo. it'll certainly be nice to have half as much dirt to move, per bag, even though it's not that drastic a reduction of mass per sq. foot of wall surface, as they're only 20" long, instead of 36". 

see the little vent, right above his head? corrugated plastic ventilation, baby. 

close up (from above) of re/movable window box. built by carl, the freakin awesome (that's his official ulinawi title). see that engineering? diz-ope.

more on the window; the view.

there is no middle ground here

i've grown to hate this blog. i know you're loving to read this.

anyway, i can't figure out how to reconcile the different interests here. i mostly write to process, and i dont want to turn this all livejournal, mostly because i havent got the anonymity that would require. i could resort to photoblogging, but i was trying to make it more personal than that. 

and i dont have any idea what people actually want to read here, want out of me, and this. 

i guess i could find some way to squeeze a narrative out of finding an old half-rotten log under the pile of fliches (cut offs) next to the saw mill, and squeezing enough cured heartwood pine out of it to start the staircase.

how about attempting to rewire my solar batteries more efficiently, and it not working till i put them back the inefficient way? what's the story there?

or nada's first attempt at canning, tonight. not quite epic, but certainly a trial. 

there's so much strangeness that you dont know - maybe i need an anonyblog, i feel there're things i could tell, but not to my friends and family (assuming that's who's reading this). life is strange. and i'm not going to vent/process here. there're enough variables involving hurt feelings when i know who i'm talking to. 

progress