Yesterday The Wandering Monk came by to pry some lengths of 2×4 off the exterior walls of Ye Olde Wreck. They are among the last traces of the monstrous not-a-garage. I’ve never had any idea of their purpose. They had zero structural function. They were as far from decorative as could possibly be. The only use I could imagine for them was for hanging tools, but there was no sign they’d ever borne hooks or any other hanging devices. They were just … 2x4s. Extremely long ones. Nailed high up on the walls. It baffled me that I’d been unable…
Category: Rural and small-town living
Life far from freeways, Starbucks, malls, and other benefits/distractions
It started raining again Sunday evening. Just a soft, unserious, springlike shower, followed by a few more days of the same. But knowing it was coming, I put in several hours of outdoor work, then prepped for an indoor project.
Since there was not a lot I could do inside until The Wandering Monk arrived to help me drywall a ceiling, I wandered across the little one-lane road and tried to make more progress cleaning the empty lot that will someday, if all my plans and dreams come to fruition, contain a gravel path with steps down to a homemade pergola, a small picnic area, a few fruit trees, a firepit, and maybe some chickens or even a goat or two.
It’s a long way from most of that and I’m beginning to despair.
Sorrys in advance for being unable to remember now where I got some of these links. I’ve been saving them up for a while. So thanks to The Usual Suspects. 🙂 Wanna set up a pot business? Become a nun. Chase Bank holds funds and reports customer to the feds for paying his dog walker. Joel got to this one first, but it’s too pure-and-simply wonderful not to re-blog: the mystery of the squatter in the woods who came and left with no trace. Ghostery to the max! But this … once again takes “small-space living” to crazy extremes. Only…
Summer’s been with us all week (and that’s no April fooling). Aside from a little fog Monday morning, the weather’s been that ideal sort you don’t even have to think about. No worries about shivering or roasting or (thank the gods of the NorthWET) getting rained on. It’s just … what weather ought to be. Everything smells good, too. Like spring. Well, some low-lying places in the woods smell like skunk cabbage. And skunk cabbage smells like you-know-what. But even that’s a welcome aroma; it say’s winter’s officially over. In the warm, I’ve been hammering ceilings, beating rugs (lovely, messy,…
You’ve seen the improvements in my wreck of a house and indeed there’ve been many. I take pride in showing off pictures like this:
What I don’t often show you is how absolutely godawful some of it still looks. In some cases, it’s even worse than when I bought it, largely thanks to said improvements. Really, in some ways a tarpaper shack would be an improvement. I’m not kidding.
I once lived in a town where the most successful realtor had a huge home with its own golf course (just six holes, but still …). Incongruously to me, this estate sat bang on the side of a main highway, enduring vehicle noise day and night. Apparently I wasn’t the only person who wondered why anyone with that much money would choose such a public location. When a curious acquaintance asked him, he had the perfect (and IMHO perfectly awful) answer: “What’s the point of being successful if nobody can see that you are?” My idea of successful householding is…
Seen in the woods this weekend: There were photos, notes and drawings in the baggies attached to the cross. Enough to know that Ms. Boothe was a nine-year-old black Lab. None of Issabell’s young friends may have known how to spell her name, but they sure did love her. Breaks my heart. This girl was a year younger than Ava and six years younger than Robbie.
You and I both know there are a lot of reasons not to vote for Bernie Sanders. But it never occurred to me that fear of burning in hell was one of them. More madness in gender feminism? Or just desperation in Hillaryland? And speaking of madness, if you have to fight and maneuver to keep people from seeing babies in ultrasound images, you’re really not too secure in your pro-choice beliefs, are you? Gutsy wife crashes her own funeral, shocking the heck out of the “grieving” husband who’d paid to have her murdered. A new look at the State…
I finally finished a good first draft of that cannabis article and got it sent off to 10 people so they could check the parts about them and offer corrections on anything else they spot. Already heard back from three. Not a single change requested or goof noted. That’s unusual. It won’t hold for all 10, but very nice start. The interviewees range from a police chief to a couple whose medical dispensary was destroyed by the DEA. And here they are, all in harmony, even as they come from such different perspectives. I simply can’t stress enough what a…
Sometimes I’m not sure which is harder: writer’s block or that rare and supposedly wondrous state of flow, where words fly from the end of your fingers without conscious input from your mind, where things like eating, getting dressed, and taking the dogs for a walk either get forgotten or force themselves upon your attention like the unforgivable person from Porlock.
I used to live for the flow state. Now it exhausts me. Definitely more exhilarating and productive than writer’s block, though.