Your leaking thatched hut during the restoration of a pre-Enlightenment state.

 

Hello, my name is Judas Gutenberg and this is my blaag (pronounced as you would the vomit noise "hyroop-bleuach").

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Like my brownhouse:
   fixing the good scissors
Wednesday, November 2 2005
I was still working on reinforcing the floor under the laboratory today, this time with a second sister and that blocking wood as described yesterday. All of the work both yesterday and today was to bear only a quarter of the weight theoretically possible on the solar deck (assuming the kind of ice age capable of loading two tons of snow onto it). Yesterday I'd slathered epoxy between the primary joist and my first sister, but today when I took off the clamps that had been holding together I heard the bond between them snapping in multiple places. Epoxy isn't as overrated as SuperglueTM (one of the most over-hyped substances known) but it's pretty sorry in structural applications. Meanwhile, I'm constantly surprised by the strength of Gorilla GlueTM, which, though expensive, is amazing in even drop-sized applications. The other day I used it to repair a crack in one of the handles of a pair of scissors.
(This was the household "good pair" whose destruction had to be thwarted at all costs if only for domestic tranquility. In any particular family, the protocols that go with the concept of "the good scissors" are mostly unwritten, but they are common ones and I'm sure they are familiar to you, dear reader. One of these protocols is that the good scissors can only be used on paper, not cardboard, wire, sheet metal, nor the foamy jackets one puts around plumbing.)
Admittedly, I did reinforce the glue with a little clip of brass slipped into two drilled holes, but the scissors now seem to be tougher than before I broke them. They're not just good, they're Six Million Dollar Scissors.
For the past couple nights I've had a little problem with annoyingly painful bubbles spread throughout my intestines. I didn't really notice them until I sat down to write, at which point they distracted me so badly that I soon forced to quit.


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