PR's First Failure

(mE+mOTH)

Today was trying. First, it was raining, which makes things slippery. Also, mosquitoes tend to stay away from the sun but love an overcast wet day. So I had a mosquito problem. But then I thought about it and it's not a mosquito problem, it's a bat deficiency. So I will try my darndest to cultivate a bat colony within 1/4 mile of PR. Bats are spectacular. The night I slept under the rock they were broadcasting supsersonic lullabies as they ate their fill of bugs (or maybe they were screaming at me to get out from under their rock). A bat-house is in the works, check back soon and help me name them all...

Anyway, I mostly finished the walls and set up all the rafters in position -

 And then I ran a piece of nylon line through a hole I cut in each and also set up some scaffolding to hold the center ring in place so I could start installing the rafters -

Resemble anything? -

I thought that was pretty awesome. (For an excellent paper on the content of the word 'anarchy' see: 'Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology', David Graeber)

As I began to install rafters I saw that things were not working. I almost slipped off the ladder and I did not have enough hands to hold everything in place and affix it simultaneously. Slowly and silently (When you're in the middle of the woods you start to realize there's no logical reason to express frustration, either audibly or mentally. Certainly the chemical sensation that is frustration or anger comes up, but when there is only silence around it is quite easily observed and dispensed with as it is utterly irrelevant and most likely degenerative.) I stepped off the ladder, packed my things and headed back, thinking there was nothing left to do - I snapped some pictures before I left as the Beech trees just got leaves and even on a dark day lit up the forest a bright green - 

 Here are the leaves in bud form -

I got back to the farm and began to brainstorm about how to fix my situation. I found some thin metal lying around and formed a bunch of 'u brackets' (for lack of a better word) with a hammer and a square piece of iron that I found in a junk pile amongst a pile of leaf springs from a 1940s Ford pickup truck.  Here's an impromptu self portrait mid-hammering -

After a few hours I had a solution -

The idea here is that the rafters will slip into the 'u' bits and I can cross-screw them. They might not line up perfectly but as a very good architect friend of mine who lost most of his left brain in a bicycle-meets-truck-type accident and who now arranges odd items in eerie harmony once told me, 

-Nothing is perfect. Nothing has to be perfect. You're just living.-*

We'll see if this works tomorrow - any ideas on how to attract what can only be called a significant quantity of bats (and also a nearby fox) do let me know. 

*I've come to see this two ways: Whereas the state of nothing is perfect, and, as a result, any material thing cannot be. It figures that someone who only has a right brain would say this. I have learned much from him and two short conversations have led me to question the relevance of thought in certain areas (The tricky thing about questioning thought is that to come up with an answer, thought must get involved, and then you get caught in that circle and thought runs around trying to define itself. So for this to have any significance, I've observed that it helps to not attempt to conclude, but rather remain in a state of question, perception, and examination - and you can then go beyond the structure of knowledge and thought, which is limited, and dare to come upon something completely different. (If thought is a cow, then the limits of knowledge are the fence of its pasture) -