Backyard returns to natural form over time.
Tag Archives: story
There are moments…
There are moments where the incredibunctious creativity of others makes me want to kill myself in bourgeois mediocre banality.
It’s not enough that killing trees and small rodents makes me question the role of our sets of states of energy on other celestial bodies…
…except to tell myself that how combinations of sets of states of energy recombine energy/mass is fractionally fractious if not fictionally close to fractal patterns one step away from randomness whose repetition makes us believe in godlike qualities of beauty, purity and real flavours of ice cream.
Better a silent self-delusional god than a loud and complete fool that I usually play for laughs.
I will never satisfy the rulemaking judges of dance because the noise in my thoughts is more musically challenging than perfecting socially-defined steps toward judgeworthy happiness, but I can try.
Mathematical mousing
Two more mouse holes plugged. X minus five to go!
Design flaw?
Apparently, the plastic cover over the 12-volt outlet in the console cubby hole of our 2013 Toyota Avalon can snag on the underside of the cubby hole sliding door, preventing the door from sliding open.
Solution? According to the specialist at Bill Penney Toyota service department: “just leave the sliding door open.”
Yeah, that’s a great workaround on a >$40k car. I’ll use duct tape and chicken wire next! 🙂
There’s already trim coming loose that has to be replaced and an intermittent powered rear window shade issue with this car in the first few months of ownership.
Otherwise, it’s a near-luxury ride so far.
Will intuition intuit its own future from incomplete data?
Where is Def Leprechaun when you need ’em?
I am a woodsman in that I am a man who lives in the woods. I respect the right for private property ownership such that if we are all responsible stewards of the land we own, then our community benefits us, providing us good health, space for happiness and time to prosper.
I also believe that good fences, even virtual ones, make good neighbours — keep your eyes out of my business, including drones, network snooping/spying and next-door peeping Toms — in other words, I believe I can trust my neighbours to do the right thing, even when evidence points to the contrary, thus leaving room for education, instruction, advice and creative/constructive criticism to steer us toward being good neighbours, regardless of the past.
My next-door neighbours, Robert and Lauren Justice and their child, Olivia Grace Justice, like to keep their outdoor lights on at night — it adds an aesthetic value as well as provides a sense of security; however, when I sleep in the sunroom at night, their lights are disturbing, or, when I want to look at stars, planets and moons, their lights are a distraction.
Thus, I am led here, to this moment, where I begin documenting the privacy fence I’m constructing that simply blocks our back deck and sunroom from our neighbours, allowing both of us to use our private property as we please while leaving as much as the woods open between us.
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A few years ago, a subcontractor built a sunroom attached to our house. During construction, I added a “French drain” under the sunroom to prevent water running off the hill behind our house from flooding our crawlspace.
After they finished the sunroom, I built a new wood deck. At that time, the lot next to ours was undeveloped so our deck extended out into the woods.
= = = = =
Eventually, the lot next door was developed, making us feel crowded in by suburbia:
Before our sunroom was built, I disassembled the old back deck where the sunroom would go, cutting down a tree to make room for the new back deck. I piled the pieces of deck wood on the ground, eventually moving them to the side of the house, where they sat for almost ten years.
Now it’s time to design the new privacy fence. First, I need some architectural inspiration:
Basically, I need a 12-foot tall fence.
So, the bottom six feet will be a louvered fence and the top six feet a type of trellis.
But I want a trellis design that reflects my background, but not overtly. Some inspirations from Celtic crosses:
First “cut” of the design:
…followed by iterations…
I have at least one stained glass piece to add to the fence:
This is the final version I hope to achieve (taking into account the best-laid plans of mice and men, unlevel posts and all that, of course):
The whole fence will be backed by reed fencing from Lowe’s:
But first, time for a beer! 😉
All decked out
Getting ready to use wood panels from an old back deck to make a small privacy fence.
Hope it will cut down some of our noisy neighbour’s sounds.
Details later.
BTW, the ratinator put another mouse in the crawlspace into eternal sleep (i.e., return it to more basic forms of sets of states of energy):
More as it develops!
51-year old ears
Looks like the big C word is here for my half-century sun-drenched ears. Biopsy sampling next month and maybe freezing the spots.
Left ear:
Right ear:
Grinder
Thx to Marcus, hostess and kitchen at Longhorn; Mary and projectionist at Carmike; Aleia at Maple Street Grill.
A ding against mothers and fathers who can’t keep their kids from swinging out car doors which scratch brand-new motor vehicle paint in carparks (yeah, Volvo owner who drove off, I’m talking to you and your careless family — curses on you: may your kids suffer incurable car problems the rest of their lives and may you smell of moldy elderberries to rhe end of your days).
I remember my Ecuadorian mystery teacher from a misty youth…
Leads me to fond thoughts of Latin Americans literature…100 Years of Solitude, etc.
Choices: 1. Monsters; 2. Zombies; 3. Something else
What does “family friendly” mean to you?
Out the fifth floor window of this hotel room, birds fly in the air or search a patch of grass for food.
Hundreds of motor vehicles, parked or moving, transport the sets of states of energy I accept as members of my species.
Rows of businesses take up 30 percent of my view which is accented by a nearly-full supermoon.
The sun sets behind me, having joined me from sunrise onward during this day of summer solstice.
I will soon return to Mars.
What about family-friendly, though?
Rupert Murdoch and Vladimir Putin divorce their wives. I remain married to mine.
What is this family that is so friendly?
As people flock from one business to another — grocery store, cinema, restaurant, mobile phone sales, general merchandise shopping centre, etc. — what average, what mean, what hump under the bell curve would best describe a typical parent/child/spouse unit we would call a family?
And what is friendly to them?
A night out at the movies?
An evening of video games?
Watching/playing ball at the local sports park?
Bailing someone out of jail?
Sitting at the bedside of an ailing family member in hospital?
Is a single person — a party of one — a family?
What about pets or extended social media connections — are they family?
The moon and the stars? The birds?
How about the friendly faces behind the counter in the hotel lobby? Aren’t they my family now, too?
I drink a bottle of Jones cream soda flavored water, produced by the Jones family, independent since ’96.
Is death family-friendly?
Birth seems to be. So does the tradition of marriage.
To secure my household, I killed a rat, three mice, dozens of insects and several amphibians. I chased away a mother raccoon and her three babies. I attempted to scare off the ubiquitous squirrels. I also saved two newts and a box turtle, not to mention the tree seedlings I didn’t cut to the ground or the vines I removed from the side of the house. I cleared uncounted privet bushes and poison ivy that clogged part of our front yard, to open up a sunny spot for our Rose of Sharon bushes and forsythia canes.
So killing can be family-friendly in the right measure.
However, a family that commits murder-suicide is not friendly, is it? What if everyone was dying of extreme radiation poisoning? Would a humane death be friendly, in that case?
What about a family that had lived on the same plot of land for centuries but died protesting their recent or soon-to-be forced displacement? Is that family-friendly, dying for a shared cause?
Watching the cars, minivans and trucks cycle in and out of the shopping district across the street, which triggers my thoughts to fill in the required infrastructure that supports the luxury of internal combustion engines, cup holders, powered seats and large carparks, prelabeled clothing sizes, preapproved dinner menus, landscape lighting and traffic signals…well, I’m easily distracted, aren’t I, by GPS satellites, shopping centre architecture, local building codes and “green” technology implementation schemes.
Since tattooed ladies have walked out from under the circus tents and into suburbia, what is family-friendly?
Is family-friendly an arbitrary label for changing tastes in community standards?
Hmm… All the chain restaurants lighting up their logos for my attention.
Think I’ll go to the local Irish pub for a beer and a bite to eat for dinner tonight, family-friendly enough for my tastes.
treetrunkdings 