Dating Events

I'm not very good at this, too many places, too many faces, so I rely on people with better memory. Glenn, for instance, can actually remember things in context. Jude too, and TR, B has great recall (to call again, G. Spencer Brown), but I can barely remember where I was. So a visit with Glenn tends to put things in perspective. For instance I had recently decided I wholly fabricated an event, removing the broken bell from the church, but it turns out that it did actually happen AND more or less as I imagined/remembered. Mildly shocking. Fritz setting his sport-coat pocket on fire with a lit pipe? It happened. Herbert drawing perfect free-hand circles on scraps of Upson Board (a wall covering composed completely of glued and pressed paper), he did. That the whole sick crew, for a few years in there, was as good as I imagined/remembered, it was. Now I'm beginning to think there was a Janitor College, and I was trained as a CIA agent to infiltrate a foreign country as a custodian that didn't speak the language. Next thing you know I'll be playing the guitar. What did Kevin say? I have large palms and little fingers, so I tend to finger the chords differently. I have to cut back on the radio, the political bullshit is just too deep. Best just be a hill-walker and keep the pantry stocked. B and Ronnie picked five gallons of blackberries on Thursday, and Ronnie was quite bloody from a thousand pricks, sitting at the end of the bench down at B's, playing guitar and dobro, then banjo, singing with his eyes closed. Ronnie did the math and after buying the necessary sugar, he stood to make maybe $50. His jam sells for $7 a pint. Not a great profit margin. I've been watching wasps build a nest in the space between the thermo-paned window. They have an access port, between the sashes, come back to the nest and vomit paper. I'm completely fascinated. Once, in three days of close observation, a wasp comes back to the nest with a bubble of paper foaming out of its mouth. I've been saving wasps' nests, to make a sheet or two of paper. There's quite a bit of particulate matter that needs to be removed (by soaking) and it seems fairly delicate, but I'm sure I can make a couple of sheets. It might be a good medium for block prints. It's a very weak fiber but I could make it fairly thick, and make a small press with a little 3 ton jack to compress it. Some Indian paper is polished, by hand, with a smooth stone or a bone folder, and that would further strengthen the sheet. It's a complete folly, making two sheets of paper from wasp's nests, but it seems like an interesting thing to do. Glenn brought several single-malts and we didn't drink half of it. One of them, a 16 year old Lagavulin, is a winter sipping whisky, set aside. So much peat as to turn your head around. Also one of the Japanese single-malts, quite light and very smooth, and another, cask in used sherry barrels. The Japanese bottle is lovely. Tricked-out a nice new shower, with a shipping pallet as a base, a pulley and tie-off cleat for the solar bag. I have a black square of plywood I heat the bag on, and I keep a five-gallon bucket of ambient temperature water at hand, for the occasional douse. I like using a liquid soap, so I don't have to waste water lathering. Another thing I noticed, having people over for dinner, was how much water we used. 25 gallons in three nights just doing dishes. In my primitive mode, this is a lot of water, water weighs a lot, 62.5 pounds a cubic foot, moving it around is a pain in the ass, I'd rather not move it twice. Five gallons of water is just short of a cubic foot. Despite visual evidence, it's difficult to translate a cylinder to a cube. 2.4 comes up a lot, hectares and centimeters, two clicks NW, on the weather channel, later I avow any knowledge. I thought I made that up.