That’s such a lovely sound. Chicken wire, or maybe better: “chickenwire”. (I would put it alongside “cellar door”…[update: almost. I suppose it is not as transcendent, really.])
I digress. I just thought I’d share with you a picture of the things I went to the hardware store to get last night1 (Click for larger view):
- Several feet of chicken wire (it really is called that on the labeling, but better: Poultry netting. Excellent. I like the idea of going home to construct an enclosure for my wayward happy fat chickens), 3ft high.
- A collection of bricks (I chose some nice miniature ones… they called out to me while I was trying to find the regular bricks).
- Large black plastic bags. Heavy duty.
- Steel wire.
- A 25 inch machete. Annoyingly, it comes from the store so (deliberately) blunt I’d be better off using a wet fish to perform the tasks intended for it2. Going to have to put an edge on it later.
Yes, you guessed right, I’m going to be constructing something. Any idea what the project is?
But I won’t start now. Just got back from a hike over at Runyon Canyon among the beautiful people, and then some Hollywood Farmer’s Market shopping3, and I was brutally waylaid by Amoeba Music and coerced to buy seven CDs…so now I am going to sit for a bit and relax and have a listen to them. Well ok, “…do some paperwork” (grant review, letter of recommendation, reply to referee report, etc. Yay). I think I’ll do it lying down, as a compromise….
-cvj
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- Is it a sign that I’m getting old that when presented with having to choose between the hardware store and going to see a movie – on a Saturday night! – I chose the hardware store? Or is it a sign that the Hollywood Home Depot at night can be full of its own entertainments – from the bizarre people on upwards? [return]
- In the Caribbean (where I spent some of my childhood), we’d use the term “cutlass” more than “machete”. The two things are somewhat distinct, if you want to be strict about blade shape and history, but they’ve been all mixed up together in the context of sugar cane farming, trade, pirates (no, really: Pirates of the Caribbean, right?) and so forth. I’ll admit that the instrument I bought really has very little to do with the project, and a lot to do with the fact that as a gardener with my background, one’s home simply feels incomplete without a cutlass. [return]
- Someone saw me there and said “It’s the physicist!”, which was a bit of a shock, since I did not know her. I then recovered and guessed that it was someone from USC. I was wrong. Turns out she’s a regular at Categorically Not! events. Good to see these different circles – these various parts of the community – linking up like that. [return]
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Mary, I believe you’re referring to the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster (click on the Open Letter to the Kansas School Board). RAmen!
Ha! Excellent question.
As a string theorist, I come with a pitch fork as standard (as you’ve seen from other comment threads), so did not need to buy one… 😀
-cvj
It wasn’t that difficult because i had the opportunity this summer to rebuild and “stir up” a number of such piles while on tour. I have lots of friends and family (esp in California) who garden extensively, growing their own vegetables, fruit, etc. And they, by now thankfully, have figured out the best composting solutions for their lives. Some are fancier than others, but the one you are building seems to be, not only practical, but also quite effective and easier to work. The only thing i didn’t notice in your image, and you didn’t mention in your shopping list was the absolutely necessary pitch fork!!!
But radio 2 is now playing what was basically all on radio 1 fifteen – twenty years ago….So I am confused about whether that would make me more or less likely to listen to it given that I never listened to radio 1 (or stations of that type) back at the age I was “supposed” to.
I’ll work on that later… 🙂
-cvj
Regarding your footnotes;
1) I realized that I had crossed the Rubicon into middle age when I found myself sitting in my car with a flask of coffee listening to Radio 2. (Worryingly, this happened about eight years ago!)
2) Pirates… I read somewhere recently a really funny piece linking global warming to the decreasing number of pirates in the world. (It was basically sending up the creationists and their ‘evidence’). I’ll try and find the link.
Good luck with the compost box. I had rather hoped you were building a sculpture of a lesser spotted quark!
Given the list of ingredients, I was figuring on some horrible sex crime. (If figured you already had duct tape at home.) And the reason you went to the hardware store rather than the movies is because no one can afford the movies any more. A hardware project is much cheaper entertainment, at least until you have to hire a plumber or electrician to put things back.
Meanwhile, in my hardware business, my buddy and I have been having trouble refinancing our ethanol plant in Moses Lake, Washington. Our buyer gave up the ghost a month ago, and then the price of ethanol on the CBOT futures market inconveniently nose dived. So now we’re facing selling the thing off as scrap even though we could easily have financed it even two months ago.
Well, it was purchased at scrap prices so we’ll probably survive, but still, it’s a bit of a crime when people are paying $3.25 a gallon for gasoline, that the CBOT futures on ethanol got below $1.60 per gallon. It appears that the gasoline blenders were unprepared for the increased production of ethanol (despite it being well known that it was happening) and are unable to get it to the consumers.
Since spyder blew it for the rest of us, let me share another use of chickenwire that I am familiar with. In a lot of down and out honkytonks in the south they’d have chickenwire in front of the stage to protect the band from rowdy patrons throwing beer bottles at them.
Although I never played in one of them, I’ve got friends that did.
Cheers,
e.
…and there was I thinking I could get an afternoon of discussion going out of this, or at least get some readers thinking…. 🙂
oh well.
-cvj
Wow. Spyder’s back (welcome -missed you), and he’s right on the money. Wow!
-cvj
Any idea what the project is?
I’ll take a shot at it, or i suppose i should say “stab” at it. I actually own a cutlass from the late 1800’s, and i have kept it quite sharp, along with my machete and but not my navy saber. But i digress as well:
I am guessing that you are building a compost box, using the mesh as the sides, cutting some bamboo or other treelike branches for posts, plastic bags for coverage, and bricks to hold it in place presuming that there will be some form of blustery winter weather???????