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:
   DINO: Joementum
Tuesday, August 8 2006
I would have never thought to actually put a sink in the shop area of the garage had I not been recycling a set of kitchen counters that already included a sink. At first I had the idea that the twin-basins of the sink would only be there as storage bins (this was an idea Gretchen came up with independently). But really, of what use is a sink-shaped storage bin? A shelf makes sense, but not a vertically-loaded one! So today, on a whim, I began drilling holes in the floor with a three quarter inch masonry bit. I wanted to tear through the slab to whatever lay underneath so that I could then venture out through the garage's foundation wall to the daylight on the other side (the foundation wall rises four to six feet above the existing grade on the downhill side of the garage). I actually built a drilling rig to hold a hand drill in place so it could bore unattended, a novelty that didn't actually prove too useful. In the end it was a simple matter to smash through the slab with a cold chisel and a sledge hammer.
Drilling through the foundation wall horizontally proved more difficult than expected. I had a 12 inch masonry bit, and I knew from measurements and simple arithmetic that the wall was only 6.75 inches wide. The house blueprints suggested that this wall would be made out of stacked concrete masonry units (concrete blocks), but boring through it I discovered it was actually poured concrete, the kind containing marble-sized sandstone pebbles. I bored through it eventually, but there was no way to easily enlarge a .75 inch hole through such tough material. I'd be needing a hole of at least 1.5 inches in diameter for a proper drain. (In the basement of the house itself I've had to occasionally bore through 12 inches of masonry and, on one occasion, enlarge the resulting hole to four inches in diameter. But that was always through those punky blocks made of Portland cement mixed with styrofoam beads.) The only solution was to order a 1.5 inch masonry bit online (because nothing of that size can be obtained at local hardware stores). A 1.5 inch bit on an 18 inch shaft can be had for a little over $30. I don't know what I would have done to solve my quandary without the internet.

This evening I paid close attention to the returns from polling stations in Connecticut as US Senator Joementum Lieberman, well, went down to defeat against Ned Lamont in the Democratic primary. I've grown so accustomed to things not going my way on election day that it was like an oasis in the Sahara. Joementum, a Democrat-in-name-only (DINO) had been replaced with someone who might well be a real progressive. That's the way it should be. What business did an ultra-blue state like Connecticut have with a senator whose politics are more like those of an Alabama Democrat?


For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?060808

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