We didn’t see much from the hurricane besides a few gusts, some of them easily 60 MPH: at least they felt comparable to the breezes one might feel riding in an MG convertible at the speed where the piston rings typically begin to disintegrate.
Maybe 40 MPH.
The old maples crowding the house were shedding a few small branches and whingeing slightly, so whenever I went outdoors or came back in I tried to time these manoeuvres with a pause in the downdraft.
For the past several days now I’ve been nursing what seems to me to be an incipient case of gout, or I might have broken my toe when I stumbled over an electric fan during a bout of heavier than usual drinking (celebrating what appears to be the collapse of the Ghaddafi regime). I’m not exaggerating much when I tell you I’ve been working, sleeping, and eating, all the while dismissing the pain that kept George the IVth from being an overachiever.
So today, I’m out in the hurricane, retrieving a couple of plastic garbage pails I noticed flying around the yard and terrifying the chickens. As I bolted toward the house during a brief calm, I slipped in a large pile of goose shit on the front walkway and jammed my gouty toe against the bullnose of the front porch decking. I spoke directly to God for a few seconds before hauling myself up on the porch and into the house, where I began to describe a plan to my wife concerning an 85% reduction in the number of geese that might or might not involve me biting the “motherfucking heads directly off them”.
Then I noticed I was no longer in pain. It’s almost as though I accidentally realigned my metatarsals. So there’s that. Thank you, hurricane!
Here’s a project I’ve been working on, with the threefold aim of reducing some old timberframing scrap that’s been threatening to rot in the yard, finding a use for an old box spring that will actually fit up a narrow staircase, and harvesting the fabric of an old blanket which the cockatiel has been patiently gnawing to its constituent microfibers.
It may look to some like porn furniture, and I suppose that’s going to be necessarily true in a sense, because it’s a natural design that slowly evolved while I considered what I might want to accomplish with it, or upon it. It mostly reflects my Biederbilly/head shop taste in home furnishings, coupled with a half-assed ahistorical orientalism.
Whaddya think?
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August 27, 2011 at 10:00 pm
Barbara
Apparently speaking directly to God works.
I cannot speak to the possible suggested use of the chaise, but I surely do like it. You already know my penchant for Orientalism, et al.
August 28, 2011 at 7:43 am
coozledad
Being a sleep addict, one of my few ambitions is to have a comfortable space to crash in nearly every room. The only action this thing is likely to see is me sleeping off a tryptophan induced stupor. I think I consume too much cheese.
Speaking of orientalism, I was looking through ads for Tuareg furniture for inspiration and found a headboard that looked like a rough drawing for Rodin’s “gates of hell”. It would almost have to be built in situ.
August 28, 2011 at 12:38 am
stefa
It’s beautiful. Great craftsmanship.
August 28, 2011 at 7:50 am
coozledad
Thanks, Stefa. It’s fairly comfortable. I stitched a couple of thin mattresses made of a combination of batting and rags onto the top of the box spring after covering it with a burlap case. I didn’t have quite enough fabric to be able to get everything to line up absolutely right, but it’s a nice use of recycled materials.
August 28, 2011 at 4:21 pm
Joe
I’d lay on it, especially if I made it. ;) It looks nice.
August 28, 2011 at 7:12 pm
coozledad
Thanks, Joe. The trick with this room is sitting down on the furniture without bashing your head into the ceiling. When these houses were built, people viewed every inch of space beneath the roof as a place to cram their numerous children. I worked with a guy who grew up “upstairs in one a them damn things”. He told me “I always froze my ass off in winter and sweated it off in summer.”.
Fortunately, I’m short, so I don’t lacerate my scalp as often as I would if I were normal height. But the people who built this thing must have been tiny. Maybe it was the pellagra.
August 30, 2011 at 10:22 am
MichaelG
I like it. It needs a belly dancer draped over one end.
August 30, 2011 at 1:54 pm
coozledad
I don’t know if the floor is stable enough for a belly dancer. Termites done ruirnt all my fun.