| | Semagic 1.7.3.1U - jesuisgringoire @ livejournal.comI don't understand how I can go to bed at 2am, wake up at 8:30am, and groan and go back to sleep until 2pm...but when I go to bed at 9pm, I get the same 6.5 hours of sleep and am wide awake at 3:30am with no hope of continued slumber. oh well. I woke up with an excited drone of "grottogrottogrotto" stuck in my head and occasional melodic reminders of "south facing windows!" in falsetto. I think at some point I dreamed about singing operatically. I've always wondered if I occasionally sing in my sleep, it wouldn't surprise me. last thing I really remember was my grandmother inviting little old ladies into her family room and introducing us with "here's my grandson Nathan who is living in little rock with his parents after he tanked in school", to which they would obligingly reply "well what made you return to little rock after you tanked?" "tanked?" wtf, who uses that word? I don't know. I politely explained that hendrix was overpriced and that CBC was evangelical and that evangelicals should not be allowed to teach science, putting a very fine point on that because I wanted to offend the old bat. I don't think I'd be that rude awake. I don't think they would be either.
I just finished a bag of sun chips. I read something once about how they suspect keeping foods in plastics may do something to them that increases the risk of cancer. I think a lot that pretty much all we're going to end up keeping of modern life is medicine. I'm too fond of the internet, though. my second thought after that was "I should devote myself entirely to medical science!", and then I realized that that's pretty much nonsense and that any science is still more or less dead as far as questions of ethics and meaning come into play. I'm still intrigued enough by what we've touched on in anatomy that I want to go back and study more later. cellular metabolism seemed very interesting. the fact that the nervous system carries not electrical impulses but ionic impulses (is that even what they're called?) is downright fascinating. I don't even know what it really means, my chemistry background is very rudimentary. something about charged particles, but I don't know how its different from electricity. it also seems to imply that all that stuff about our auras being electromagnetic energy and an extension of our literal, physical bodies is probably bullshit. doesn't mean I've stopped believing in "energy" and whatnot, just that people should stop pretending to have a clue what it is. if ionic current (again, how the hell does this work? I need to take a class on the nervous system) were to somehow extend beyond the body into the air around us, wouldn't it smell like ozone all the time? what does ozone even smell like? can I speak to whoever's in charge of the new age movement, please? we have some issues.
also, before I went to bed I skimmed an ebook I got from piratebay called "55 ways to have fun with google". quite a few of them were stupid - but "design your dream house in google sketchup" was not at all a bad suggestion. it's free 3D design software that I've fucked around with before. I think it's part of the system they use on google earth to render buildings and such in 3D (check out NYC on google earth if you don't know what I mean). I don't knew enough about design principles yet, but I want to play with it anyway...it's not even wasting paper at this point. I just googled "grotto" and got very little in response. I did add one of those little "citation needed" things to the wikipedia article on them. someone was claiming it was fact that fear of the unknown prompted religious interest in grottos...the religion-from-fear argument always annoys me. especially when applied to neolithic man, who A) has a reputation for living in caves, not fearing them, and B) was probably just as interested in the unknown as we are...end of rant: "How many people do you know who aren't scared to drive a herd of angry mammoths over a cliff, but are afraid of the dark?" grr @ the eventual necessity of an anthropology degree. I'd write a fascetious analysis of prom as a fearful ritual of ignorance...but nobody would get it, and it might actually be true. oh well.
back to what I was saying...definitely a grotto shower/bath area, and a sauna. do books get ruined in saunas? because sauna reading sounds even better than bathtub reading. I wonder if I could set up a system where grey water from various places got collected and ran as a little stream as part of it? I think grey water was supposed to be used for the greenhouse, though. I'm not averse to using city water and being at least marginally wasteful...(erm, assuming the figure of an inefficient showerhead putting out 4 gallons of water per minute, and of a pound of beef requiring 2500 gallons of water to produce, I could shower wastefully for 10 hours for every few hamburgers I didn't eat and still come out even with a meat eater who never bathed...jesus christ, quoth newsweek "the water that goes into a 1,000 pound steer would float a destroyer." I'll let myself feel not-guilty for long enough to bathe). I could find some cool bits of colored glass and stuff to do mosaic with, too. mosaic strikes me as a very appropriate artform for a society drowning in its own trash. post zombie-apocalypse one thing we're sure to have in abundance is colorful chips of excess everything.
<lj-cut text="here's some ideas">
 
these two are definitely similar to what I have in mind for the shower, though I think I really want it to be ridiculous and over the top. eat your heart out, hugh hefner. except I think a pool is probably excessive. maybe a whirlpool bathtub. maybe surround sound. it will probably be further back in the earth-sheltered part of the house, too, so windows are unlikely. I'd have to figure out how to make it not freezing. definitely insulate the rock-wall from the actual earth...I might be un-romantic and use the recycled, earth-packed tires idea. fucking fantastic insulation, and in a lot of places you can actually get paid for taking the tires instead of paying for building materials. be great if most of the costs were for good location, ornamentation, and bells and whistles. I'd rather spend everything I would've spent on labor and conventional materials on making it pretty and luxurious...though environmentally friendly as much as possible. *wonders how brutally inefficient heated pools are* that's probably a bit much...but if it kept me in good shape and/or was part of a co-op and therefore public, why the hell not?
*takes shower*
while I was showering I was also worrying if I might be becoming a yuppie. then I realized most yuppies probably don't want to live underground and they probably don't daydream about having compost toilets to go with their grottoes. I was also thinking of just making the bathroom public-style with stalls and such because I'd really rather just have large numbers of people sharing most of the house with me anyway. not in the bathroom simultaneously, mind you (well...sauna/shower could be put to some interesting uses...) but sharing nonetheless. ooo, I could probably do a skylight, that would be cool. stained glass or regular...*shrug* of course you wouldn't see much through glass in a sauna anyway, so no point trying to let the moon in that way.
for the greenhouse I'm thinking I want to do some sort of wrought-iron art nouveau thing. sort of like this:
vaguely like this, as far as curved roof and supports go. easier to put glass into and less squarish...but it would be better with the organic motiff and sort of branching thing the creole ironwork has.
we'll see. it might just be a very slight embellishment - just nothing outright raw and industrial looking. art nouveau doesn't always cover that sort of thing.
the roof in this isn't awful, but the design could be a bit more symetrical, and the pillars are atrocious. I definitely want the pillars to be the same as the roof.
I'm open to materials other than iron - I don't know what works best/is least environmentally offensive. bronze? copper? copper ages green, which is attractive and appropriate for plants...but I dunno. it might be simpler to have the ornamental stuff on the inside and just have plain sheets of glass overtop. I know nothing whatsoever about making a greenhouse.
this guy has an amazing website. he talks about the grotto shower idea, as well as having a random waterfall in your house (...maybe) and doing lofts and curved stairs. his theme seems to be bypassing contractors and doing work that would otherwise cost thousands of dollars for yourself.
now I'm off to restart to see if sketchup's going to work...it was having startup issues so I just updated my graphics driver. *crosses fingers* |
| | Posted 2/14/2009 8:14 AM - 22 Views - 0 eProps - 0 comments
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