Skip to main content

And People Say One's Mind Goes First!

With the kind of certainty that The Trump shows every time he insults someone--that is to say, whenever he talks--I am sure that you have been following the saga of the mesquite tree that tipped over in our backyard.

The tree is gone, now, to its eternal reward, consigned to a monstrous wood chipper at a facility owned by the green-trucked people who own all the trash in the western world.  It will become truckloads of new "soil", tenderly cultivated by road graders and tanker trucks spraying instant decay.

Since the fence around our back yard was destroyed, anyway, the yard has been enlarged into the desert, hillside lot, and for want of a purpose in life, I decided to build a rondavel.  A rondavel is a traditional African building with a thatched roof and a dung floor.  I am taking some artistic liberties with the details.  "Ron-DA-vel" is pronounced something like "rendezvous", with the accent on "DA".  It will have a conical roof.

There is no hidden agenda or deep logic to building a rondavel in Tucson.  I shall be eighty-four--tomorrow--and only God knows what goes through the head of an octogenarian, and Dr. Ben Carson has not yet said what that is:  something about grain storage, I should guess.

The plastic sheathing was finished today, so I put the tools away and took a shower.  Mari was so pleased (not necessarily about the tools).  Tonight--courtesy of Michael--we shall have dinner at a casino steak house and toast mobility that creaks when we move.

Next, I will cover the sheathing with plastic sheeting and wire for the stucco.  Someone else will do the stuccoing.  Had I been more traditional--think dung floor and a thatched roof--I might have done the wattle and mud walls myself, and that is why I did not do it.

You might remember that, prior to the mesquite tree loosing its footing, I had built a hexagon platform abound the base of an orange tree that drank too deeply of Drano in the septic system, intending to create a display of flower pots.  Jao thought it a fine house, so I had put a tarp-on-2X2s to make a house for him.  The tree, in its lunge for the fence, messed that up, too, so now the hexagon has a new site.

No, no, there is no mythical or mystical geometric plot, in all of this.  It just happened.  It would be absurd of me to add a giant globe or an isosceles triangle, wouldn't it?  I am too young for that kind of absurdity.  Old age will bring its problems, I suppose.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Friends-- My step-father of 35 years died this morning. His name was Conrad Royksund. He was 86 years old. He was born into poverty on a farm near Puyallup, WA. He was the first member of his family to attend college and earned a PhD from the University of Chicago. He paid his way through all of that by fishing in Alaska. He spent his professional career as a college professor. I met him when I was just 3 years old and don't actually have any memories of my life befor e he was in it. He was intimidatingly smart, funny as hell, and worked his ass off. He taught me to meet people with kindness and decency until I was certain they could not be trusted. He taught me to meet ideas with carving knives until I was certain they could. I will remember him as one of the bravest, most curious, and funniest people I have ever met. He left this world with a satisfied mind. We are so grateful. Dan Hubbard
1 comment
Read more

Nice to Run Into You Again

We do not see things in enormous time-frames.  We human beings are fairly new at figuring things out for ourselves.  For instance, some  people today still think of the earth as a newly created thing, perhaps ten thousand years old.  Earth is actually about four-and-a-half billion years old.   That is to say, the earth is 450,000 times older than the Adam and Eve story, and the universe is three times older than that! I recall first hearing that continents were slowly drifting around the earth, and that there quite likely had been several times when the continents were squeezed together.  But people could stand on the edge of their own continents, and not see Africa or Asia getting closer.  It took at least fifty years to figure things out. We called our continent something special. But sure enough, there have been numerous times during several-billion year history of the earth, when supercontinents formed, and eventually drifted off. ...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Sea is Rising

Let us just step back:  two hundred and fifty years ago, or so, the ships of England and Spain had drifted onto a whole new continent, as they saw it, from far north to a savagely cold south; pole to pole, as if there were such things. Millions of people already lived here, some of them still hunters and gatherers; some of them very wealthy, indeed!  Gold and silver stolen from the southern Americas funded Spanish and English dreams. There was land, lots of land, under starry skies above, rich land, and oil and coal and iron ore.  The whole western world learned how to build industries not on simple muscle power, but on steam and oil.  We farmed, too, of course.  All we needed was cheap labor--slave labor from Africa, mostly, so the ships came with slave labor.  Chinese labor built railroad beds where there had been rock cliffs. Europeans, long used to killing each other for good, religious reasons, brought their religious savagery with them. ...
Post a Comment
Read more