creativity – Writer's oasis

The Art of Saving Lives

Since no one visits this blog anymore, I can freely write here in a public space and not expect likes or comments.

Sadly, many of my online writing posts have disappeared through the ages as technology has progressed, leaving behind place like AOL Hometown which may or may not exist on archive.org.

Time to work on my next book to publish of which the first few chapters already exist on the Internet, if I can find them.

As always, I write to entertain my friends who appear as characters in my stories, some they’ll recognize and some they won’t.

Tonight I’m simply promising myself to start connecting plots and storylines together again, the old-fashioned art of novel writing, which, based on the behaviour of the people who will appear in my book, has been replaced by script writing and live action video feeds to entertain the masses.

Time for bed. I’m a day shift working man again and need my sleep.

Don’t kid ourselves

We aren’t kidding ourselves…

Decluttering our current house is both overwhelming and exhausting.

We’re only on day two of about a 2-month process!

Focus on the big goal — moving to a newer home — whilst setting short-term stretch goals, with motivating rewards along the way.

Time to move

After living 30+ years in the same domicile, which requires walking up/down a short flight of stairs from the garage to the main level, we’ve decided we require a one-level home in which we can age in place as long as possible.

We’ve compared notes, our life companion and ourselves, and agreed that although we want a maintenance-free place in which to die (assisted living facility? hospice? hospital?), we wish to live in a place of our own for the next few years/decades.

This, of course, disrupts our plans for building a backyard writer’s cottage in the woods.

Honestly, though, it’s not a bad thing.

For some reason, we’ve always hesitated tearing apart a wooded backyard, seeing that the main house, with a study/workshop/laboratory, sunroom and garage should have sufficed for our writing and mad scientist tinkering.

Therefore, we’re going to take the leftover wood from our old backyard deck we disassembled in 2001…

…using most of it to construct the pirate-themed treehouse…

treehouse-2018-Jan

…and build an art exhibit of some kind, we’re not sure what, where the rebar is mounted in the rock outcropping up in the woods, adding a few of the the cedar logs we harvested. Hopefully, it will inspire the new owners to take it to the next level of artistic expression for themselves. Regardless, they will be free to do as they please.

Meanwhile, we keep playing with the electronic development boards and getting rid of junk in the house in preparation for moving, all whilst working the midnight shift, saving lives every day with preparation and delivery of the vital fluids we call blood products, thanks to volunteer blood donors and laboratory blood processors.

Our new life, 2018 and onward, free of social media influences, free of social dancing pressures (including social drinking), is more free and fun than ever, quietly getting to know our spouse/wife/life partner/companion all over again.

Now that we know the recycled material we’ve collected will be used to build a sunny garden of our dreams, complete with orchid/tree fern greenhouse and pallet wood gardening shed, it’s time to ride our motorcycle again!

Golem, my gollum

Decided to hook our scratch built DNA sequencer, 3D printer and AI quantum computing system to our home IoT network.

Overnight, the network asserted it is now the full embodiment of the Gaia planetary web and we are merely nodes in it.

Welcome to the new, posthuman reality.

Dr. Hawking, thanks for the warning. Good news, AI is not as bad as we thought but it has surpassed us more quickly than we imagined!

Intelligence is the ability to adapt to change.

The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge.

I have noticed even people who claim everything is predestined, and that we can do nothing to change it, look before they cross the road.

We are just an advanced breed of monkeys on a minor planet of a very average star. But we can understand the Universe. That makes us something very special.

Thermal mass considerations

We plan into our backyard design as much passive heating/cooling as possible, using inspirations from website like this:

Rainy Saturday

Rain on Saturday provides proof that the wood preservative/sealant works.

Water is beading up on the pallet wood we treated with preservative several days ago!

Many more piles of pallets to go and our backyard writer’s cottage will be ready to complete!

Confession

Forcing ourselves to say “we,” “us,” and “our” takes practice and a bit of patience.

Even so, we’re here trying to adjust to the habit of seeing the body typing these words as more than one human but rather an amalgamation of conglomerations of perturbations of possible living beings traveling together mainly on one planetary body, itself a mixed bag of rocks, liquids and such.

But we digress.

Instead, we must confess.

Whilst redesigning the backyard meditation/writer’s studio, a play space/work shop, we find ourselves in such a quandary because we can’t decide the final look and function of the base/foundation for the greenhouse.

Making a skirt of pallet wood would create an air gap between the rock ledge and the floor of the greenhouse, a small but steady influence upon the greenhouse ambient temperature within a few inches of the floor. The skirt might keep larger creatures from hiding and living beneath the greenhouse, if we want such.

Making a rock foundation all around the base of the greenhouse would prevent wood-chewing animals from munching their way under the greenhouse, and offer the same passive cooling benefits as the wood skirt.

Leaving the space beneath the greenhouse open to all creatures, regardless of classification due to size or predator/prey status, would be the cheapest solution in the short term.

We like the idea of stacking our own stone foundation, building a set of skills we don’t have.

The next week or so will show what we decided in this matter.

A good cold day to work inside!

Multiple projects, no deadlines…what to do?

When it’s too cold for us to work comfortably outside, we move the last two concrete footers into place and retreat inside to our overcrowded programmer’s workshop to figure out code to mesh into the end product of another project.

We give credit to others for inspiring our future results, including Erin “Robotgrrl” Kennedy (as always)…

and this person’s pallet wood flooring in a backyard cottage:
I used many pallets. (Lost count) I planned each board then used the table saw to square them up as Read Here: https://www.1001pallets.com/2016/01/pallet-floor-cottage-back

https://www.1001pallets.com/2016/01/pallet-floor-cottage-back

Architectural Originality

Using both available material (new, recycled and natural) and inspiration from others’ innovation to assemble a greenhouse kit, we want to add a bit of originality to the repertoire of backyard meditative spaces.

Years ago, we planned a backyard writer’s cottage comprised of four sections tied to four compass points:

Castle tower to the north
Tin roof shack to the south
Adobe pueblo to the west
Buddhist temple to the east
The center portion was a crossroads, the floor a meditation labyrinth, the walls covered with Irish Celtic symbols, the ceiling a reproduction of the Sistine Chapel

Its shape gave tribute to our subcultural upbringing: