Further adventures in Waterstone
...that being the big development going in to the south of us. Really, new road construction is the best playground ever. The main roads are flattened now but there's still a lot of odd side-tracks and cut-throughs for sewer lines and such. And who needs jungle-gyms when you've got dozen of six-foot-diameter concrete pipe sections just lying around to play on? Since there's nobody at home but me this weekend, I didn't have to be home on time for dinner and spent like three hours out there. The massive engineering that goes into controlling drainage is fascinating. There was also a great 40-foot high pile of dirt.
At one point I climbed down into a dry manhole/access shaft and checked out what was at the bottom. The long, narrow pipes extending off the sides made amazing echo chambers. You know those plastic space-microphone toys that make weird zwong-pzow sounds? Yeah. Way better. I decided, after a couple feet, that if my life depended on it I could probably shimmy through a 20-inch diameter pipe, but I wouldn't really want to otherwise. The maybe 28-inch diameter one was much more tempting, but the other end looked pretty far so I didn't go for it. Good thing too: when I resurfaced and found the other end in another access hole a few dozen yards away, I discovered that it opened about three feet above a murky pool of unknown depth. No way I would've been able to reach the ladder rungs at the far side of the shaft, so I would've been forced to crawl backwards up an incline all the way to get out. I repeatedly did a pretty good job all afternoon of narrowly avoiding decisions that would've been slightly over the line into so stupid I'd really regret them. (And in case anyone is concerned, I'm not completely stupid - I did have a cell phone, identification, and water on me.)
Also! At some other point today I tried out a new oekaki (read: Japanese for clunky little javascript thing that lets you do drawings for a message board) on the one video game board I read and produced an amateurish little sketch. But it's cute. B Lunch!
Also also. This comic named "Minus" is really good.
At one point I climbed down into a dry manhole/access shaft and checked out what was at the bottom. The long, narrow pipes extending off the sides made amazing echo chambers. You know those plastic space-microphone toys that make weird zwong-pzow sounds? Yeah. Way better. I decided, after a couple feet, that if my life depended on it I could probably shimmy through a 20-inch diameter pipe, but I wouldn't really want to otherwise. The maybe 28-inch diameter one was much more tempting, but the other end looked pretty far so I didn't go for it. Good thing too: when I resurfaced and found the other end in another access hole a few dozen yards away, I discovered that it opened about three feet above a murky pool of unknown depth. No way I would've been able to reach the ladder rungs at the far side of the shaft, so I would've been forced to crawl backwards up an incline all the way to get out. I repeatedly did a pretty good job all afternoon of narrowly avoiding decisions that would've been slightly over the line into so stupid I'd really regret them. (And in case anyone is concerned, I'm not completely stupid - I did have a cell phone, identification, and water on me.)
Also! At some other point today I tried out a new oekaki (read: Japanese for clunky little javascript thing that lets you do drawings for a message board) on the one video game board I read and produced an amateurish little sketch. But it's cute. B Lunch!
Also also. This comic named "Minus" is really good.