Taking things a bit easier today, after the crash. Pottering around the house and looking the Eleventy docs right from the beginning (rather than trying to reverse engineer). This was helpful.
One of the things we did yesterday that I forgot to mention was chop up a parachute.
Last year someone offered most of a parachute on my sister’s street chat. It’s the real deal, ex-army designed for dropping vehicles from planes (apparently), and quite large. She took it and then realised she had a massive parachute, so offered it to me. I took it with the idea of using it to cover the geodesic dome, which it easily did but to no useful purpose. We don’t want the dome to be completely covered and dark inside.
So I had most of a parachute and no real use for it. I offered it around to some of the usual suspects with no joy and eventually Fi found a sewing group who could use the material.
And then I found a use for it. During the heatwaves we’ve been hanging our old sail shade over the rabbit’s outdoor run and it’s worked really well to keep their ground temperature survivable. But this shade is old and ripping and not going to last another summer. The parachute, while probably not UV safe, is pretty tough and is easily large enough to cover their run.
So we spread it out over the garden, measured a five meter square (to be safe) and got to work cutting it. Or at least Fi did. I was starting to get the old fatigue at this point. At some point over the winter we can tidy it up and add some eyelets ready for next year. There’s plenty left, probably the same again, and it’ll go to the sewing club this week.
Wally was horrified by all this. Not only had we moved everything from its normal place, we’d taken away the grass!
Six and a half years ago I helped my friend Andy and my wife Fiona start Walkspace, a collective of walking artist and artists who walk in the West Midlands. I stepped away after a year or so and it’s been slowly and organically growing ever since. With this autumn programme I’m really chuffed to see they’ve put together a proper arts organisation from the ground up, run as a co-operative by artists for everyone. If you’re in the West Midlands please check it out.
Some links:
- Art Spiegelman: ‘The US needs a counter-revolution’
- UK groundwater levels in ‘remarkable’ health despite drought, scientists find
- It’s difficult to get an interesting photograph of a wombat
- Sam Kriss: The carrion-eaters - What we did to Jason Arday
- Shadow Library Uptime Monitor (SLUM)
- We tracked a shipment of rare books. It ended at an Amazon AI training facility — The logo of the scanning company is just… wow.