I spent the day out at the bale house. So far I’ve learned about drain tiling and conduit wiring and two methods of wall construction (stud and bamboo, stud and string lattice) and practiced one of the methods on my own, the latter, in which you pack the bales overtight then lattice them into place then cut the cords and they expand the one inch or so to make a solid wall. And I learned how they make the rounded windowsills, which involves lathe around a curved particleboard frame stuffed with clay-tossed straw (I finished off three of those today). I’m starting to think of keeping closer track of all these details and if I wind up actually building one of these at some point some kinda way, or something something, I could add up the route I took and write about it.

So far two main things stand out about this experience: 1. the environmentalism implicit in every choice that would result in the construction methods, including the aspect of communal labor and 2. the communal aspect of communal labor. Social situations are not my strength. The only thing I’m good for in a social situation is observation. If what you want is an outsider on your insides, I’m your girl. Otherwise, the smallest exchanges can fill me with unease, and I mix my animal metaphors, and wind up looking like this right before I head for cover. But if there’s a TASK involved, that helps a lot, and if the task is PURPOSEFUL that’s even better. Plus this is a church not a bar we’re talking about, Church of Christ Something Liberal, and definitely NOT into proselytizing about anything other than environmental and social issues. They quietly added me to the “many hands make light labor” email list and left it at that. That all suits me very well. It’s like an Amish barn raising (ish).

[I like quiet work.]





Then it was Halloween of course. There was only one punkin, so the compromise was three eyes and two mouths.

I had one too many conversations with myself throwing my own voice for the other part, conversations in which I had shit-canned myself, and then I didn’t want to talk to any of you sons of bitches any more Playlist:

Nina Simone - Love Me Or Leave Me

Josh Ritter – Come and Find Me

Snow Patrol – You Could Be Happy

The Killers – My List

The Blow – True Affection

self-help reading + music

Spinoza conceives of “God or Nature” and its relations to the “finite modes” (that is, the ordinary finite things of everyday life, such as rocks, tables, trees, animals and human beings.) The first is the standard interpretation, according to which God-or-Nature is nothing less than the whole of reality, on which ordinary finite things (“finite modes”) depend as states of qualities that it produces in itself. . . Spinoza defined “religion” as “whatever we desire and do of which are he cause insofar as we have the idea of God, or insofar as we know God.” While not a person, not purposive, and not transcendent, his God is nevertheless the omnipotent, omniscient, eternal, blessed and necessarily existing cause of all things. There is indeed an appropriate attitude to hold towards God, in his view: not worshipful awe, but rather the pure “intellectual love of God” of which many theologians have written as the soul’s highest good. In Spinoza’s revisionary understanding of it, however, all knowledge is ultimately knowledge “of God”, and so intellectual love of God is the final affective result of any fully adequate rational understanding (of anything) whatsoever.

-from “All Necessarily So: Spinoza’s Ethics” Don Garret (TLS review)

"Wolf Among Wolves," Bonnie Prince Billy

self-help reading + music

A girl cries. Her father beats her, convinces her she’s dumb.
She’ll land back on that cave of herself again
And again for the rest of her life. So many are like mythical creatures
Blindly returning to tackle whatever invisible monsters
Brought them down so long ago in the Trauma Caves.
Maybe the greatest wonder of wonders
Of being alive – the lake like a glittering shield,
The leaves turning to tangerine, gold, ruby
And so infinitely on – is we have not, as yet, undone our world.

"The Wonder of Wonders", Greg Delanty

"100 Days, 100 Nights," Sharon Jones and the Dap Kings

dontcha wish you had patented this?

Cowboy Junkies - Cutting Board Blues

"They became more than 60 percent more reactive to negative emotional stimuli. That's a whopping increase—the emotional parts of the brain just seem to run amok."

It was a beautiful day here, probably the last before my ass is cold til May. So I plucked the boys outa school and took them to the country out through Albion to Lake Ontario, apple picking and walking around the closed beach-front shops. The colors are a little over-ripe, but still good. They loved the picking part, especially Ears, who kept picking and picking and saying “I like quiet work, I like the quiet here, I like this because it’s quiet” until I had about 80 pounds of crispins, grannies, and idareds to find recipes for. Then maple ice cream before heading home. Through it all, I was inexplicably anxious – not so as you could tell, just under the ribcage like a mouse running around in a cabinet inside of a tidy-looking house, making little scratching noises. I wish I could tell the bouts of pointless anxiety from the bouts of intuition.

I think talking to my grandmother this morning [in hospital w pneumonia again], listening to her speak in short words with a suck on an oxygen machine between each one as she tried to get out “thank breath for breath the breath books breath I breath love breath you . . .”, and the ominous sounding horoscope got hooks into me that I just couldn’t wiggle entirely free from.

for virgo today : Now is the best time for you to check in with the powers that be. - After months or even years of going back and forth in a relationship, you will reach a major turning point, thanks to a revelation, today. Sometimes things come to an abrupt ending, while other times they just slowly fade away. Certain truths are starting to become too obvious to ignore -- so you will have to stop ignoring them. Until you see things as they truly are, you can't move forward and give your full attention to someone who is much more deserving of your time.



don’t be a stranger – perfect problem

the Harlem Experiment House Band - One for Jackie : The Harlem Experiment

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gallows_humor

why did the chicken run around with its head cut off?
why?
because he wasn't used to it.

nerdy girl

Deee-Lite - You Sexy Thing (Hot Chocolate cover)

for Virgo this week: A study by the University of London's Institute of Psychiatry concluded that overindulgence in text messaging and emailing typically leads to a ten-point loss in IQ, whereas pot-smoking causes a decline of only four points. You probably won't have to worry about either of those dangers for a few weeks, though, since you're entering an astrological phase when your mind will be working more efficiently than usual. In fact, given how smart you'll just naturally be, you could actually afford to kill off some brain cells. Even if you toke up while texting, your IQ is likely to be above your normal level.

actually, I'm not sure how to take this . . . "above my normal level" . . . hmm :/

"Just Like Heaven (The Cure cover)," Katie Melua
bonus - jos gonzalez - time to send someone away
Fionn Regan - Be Good or Be Gone

[manic day]

I went to a sustainability conference Saturday, then Sunday took the little guys out to a new house being made of straw bale construction. It’s going to be part of a church, actually, on Grand Island and it’s being collectively built by congregation members under the direction a contractor who also knows how to do living roofs. I’m going back to help plaster and then there is going to be an earthen floor, which is not at all like dirt, it’s all the clay excavated out to make the foundation mixed w slag and whatever and then hydro-stamped flat and oiled repeatedly to a sheen that’s as waterproof as lino and looks like leather.

The contractor says he’ll let me help w each of the steps so I know what they entail and then can repeat the process with my own friends [ha] someday whatever. Having something built from scratch out in the country has been one of my longest-running desires, but [aside from the lack of man power, so to speak] when it comes to standard new builds, the wood and other materials are so expensive and also inferior to old growth woods of older houses that then I fall back on a fixer upper farmhouse train of thought, then lose my mojo. I looked at micro houses for a while, but . . . well they’re cool from an environmental point of view, but they’re more nifty than beautiful and not very durable. The bale houses are sturdy as fuck and are god sooo beautiful, and o you should smell it (though straw makes my nose run like hell, but still worth it), it’s like that new-construction cut wood smell mixed with clover of hay and if you’re into this kind of thing it’s like porno practically, like the equivalent of a cottage dancing around a pole.

The one I saw is about this size, though without kitchen/etc. bc it will be more like for weddings and other worship gatherings etc.:








But I like this one, which would be something like 25-30k (minus land), or 15k if you did it entirely yourself:

and this one is cool
(I'm not kidding.)

In other news, I was up at a grueling 6 am this morning for another one of those emergency meetings at work. After nagging FPH to worry 3x (my self-imposed limit), I went Zen/limp about the EDU dept kicking the bucket etc. - that's good because the situation has a decent chance of shutting the place down entirely, so t'z probably wise to be thinking 'say la vee' about it all as much as possible.

time

"Miracle In Itself," Ron Sexsmith

the cat empire – lonely moon (rec'd)

(self-pity party heatin' up . . . hit the tunes)

It was a burst day. I worked from 9am-10pm on campus and in the stretches between classes I got approximately everything done. It goes like that, boom and bust. The booms come mostly when I’m bearing down and enduring something I don’t like, so I might as well be effective if I’m going to be forbidding anyway.

(Thanks to DmS for that one laugh.)

lol

for Virgo this week : The faintest star in the night sky is Van Biesbroeck's star. It's only about as big as the Earth and is just .002 percent as luminous as our sun. Every other heavenly light outshines it. From one perspective, then, it's a puny little thing. And yet it is visible despite the fact that it's almost 19 light years away from us. From that point of view, it's an amazingly intense, potent, brilliant body. Is there anything about you that resembles Van Biesbroeck's star, Virgo? I think there is. Celebrate and show off that part of you in the coming week.

I was in high school
when I realized that not doing anything
was categorically different from deciding to do nothing,
but beauty blew a fuse, the hold music put me in a trance,
and what was black and heading towards me
transported me here like a cow in a comic hurricane.

--David Berman
from "The New Idea"

9 am class
11 am class
12 30 class
2 30 class
get agenda out for ugc committee
grade speeches
prep improvisational speaking exercises
answer 11 emails
grade 37 papers (fail at this by half)
tkd practice
gather camping equipment for Montessori trip
dinner lunches bath homework
pre-bedtime reading
8 30 class
clean kitchen . . .

I am not essentially optional in my own life, a lesser imperative than the necessities/tasks – That is a hard thing to remember.

Heard B. B. King on “Rock n Roll Roots”, one of those Midwestern radio pleasures I do like when I’m there - For an old round black guy, B. B. is hot:

B. B. and Van Morrison – Day Like This (If You Love Me).

Home. Sis and B-in-Law came home last night and he told me Helen Keller jokes until I thought I was gonna piss my pants.

"Chains and Things," BB King