Some Rigging

I want to get down and see what's happening at the bridge site but it's a ten mile dead end right now. Settle for a walk in the woods and realize quickly that it's going to be a bad tick year, I have to bag my clothes when I get home, until the next trip to the laundromat. Still and quiet all day, as if in anticipation of something. No crickets or birds, no planes, trains, trucks or sirens. I'm filthy again, from cleaning out corners, but it's supposed to warm back up tomorrow and I should be able to take a sponge bath. I had sliced smoked beef with morels on toast, with a browned butter sauce, which, with B's French bread made a wonderful sop. As a dish at my imaginary restaurant, Shit On A Shingle, it would have to be $40, to make any profit, but at my house it costs about 42 cents. The meat was free, the mushrooms are free, B baked the bread, and I used half a stick of butter. A friend had sent me some rigging diagrams, and they're quite complex, the stays on the main mast alone are almost beyond comprehension, and they're not even working lines. In the nautical world, the half-hitch is the perfect knot, because it releases under load, you can try this in several different ways, but you need to be careful, because a whip-lashed piece of hemp can take your head off. A boarding party used axes to chop at the stays, drop the mast and you win the day. 100% chance of rain for several days, so I got outside again, before it moved in, and picked a few mushrooms. Heavy feel to the air, and the soft leaves of spring are all hanging down. Back inside it's cool enough to need my bathrobe but not cool enough for a fire, get a drink, roll a smoke, slow my heartbeat, and read Thoreau for a couple of hours. Dripping rain on a metal roof is a lesson in the infinite. I read that a cord of dry white oak, burned, would yield 23 million British thermal units, which is about the same as 100 gallons of fuel oil. I'd never seen that comparison made before, which led to a sidetrack, into comparing relative values: one comma or three bananas? A rabbi, a Baptist minister, and a duck go into a bar.