Mud Soup

I’ve been here 6 weeks now; Tom left just over 5 weeks ago, and the founder Jenny (who was here visiting, living in a beautiful new little casita) left almost 2 weeks ago. So far, no huge disastrous explosions or fireballs or catastrophes in their absence. Touch wood.

The horse drama resolved itself: after breaking the pipe, the horse continued to live happily in Cloudbridge for about 14 more hours, and was then chased off quite dramatically by my wonderful employee Victor who happened to be up here picking potatoes from his garden last Sunday, and helped me not only to fix the broken pipe, but also to terrorize the horse to the point where it will probably never return again. I just wanted to tie it up & lead it down to town, possibly sell it back to the owner at an obscenely inflated price; however when we saw it just as we were leaving to drive down to town, Victor leapt out of the car and grabbed quite a large log that had been lying at the side of the road, hurled the log at the horse, and proceeded to run after it while yelling and throwing more things, until we had reached a suitably far distance from Cloudbridge and he decided to get back into the car. Victor: hero. Here’s a picture of him:



The hydroelectric system has been behaving very well (until the last hour, at least): it rained today for approximately 8 hours, very heavily, which fills the filters with mud and leaf particles, and causes the pipes to suck in air rather than water. Once an air bubble is in the pipes, the water can’t get through, and the pipes make a sound somewhere between a car crash and the howl of a dying banshee. It sounds significantly worse than it is. At any rate, after today’s rain the pipes began to rumble with some banshee whisperings, so I turned off the water feeding the hydroelectric system and will go up in the morning to clean off the filters and give those pipes a chance to breathe some water again. Here’s the head of the system, where the water (both for drinking and hydro-electric) enters the pipes:



Probably the most exciting recent development has been my accidental new puppy, which Rose (Tom’s old dog) has not taken to very well at all. Maeby (the puppy) wandered up here after following one of my researchers from her house up to Cloudbridge, and it was raining too heavily to take her home. She’s curled up asleep on a blanket now, till morning. Rose is curled up on a separate blanket, wide awake, watching Maeby mistrustfully. Here is Maeby:



Always some sort of excitement going on here!