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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   no more Zanzibar
Wednesday, October 12 2011

This morning I drove out to the Door Jamb to pick up another set of louvered closet doors. On the way, I stopped at Catskill Mountain Coffee on Route 28 to see what had become of their formerly ongoing concern. A couple weeks or so ago I'd tried to order another three pounds of Zanzibar, but all I could get was a message telling me their voicemail was overflowing. What I found was that their space is now for rent. It's a shame; I don't know if I'll ever find a better bean than Zanzibar. Not only was it good, it was also cheap ($6/lb.) and fair trade. Oh well. Mind you, I'm still on my caffeine fast, which is now going to be a lot easier to maintain.
At least the beer store next door is still an ongoing concern, and I gave them a little high end beer business.
I took the dogs on a walk to nearby Onteora Lake, where I ran across a sketchy-looking guy with a fawn-colored dog. The dog had testicles and expressed the usual male dog interest in Eleanor's wombless loins. We didn't chat long before the guy asked me if I "smoked," and I told him that I didn't. At the time I thought he meant marijuana, but in retrospect I think he might have just been trying to bum a cigarette.
I'm having more and more misgivings about our having bought such a new car, even if it was the best solution to our particular car problem. I've already discussed how Honda has leveraged its proprietary control over its fleet to charge exorbitant fees for things (such as map DVDs and door keys) that have, in other markets, become commodity items. More recently I've realized that the difference between our old 1998 Honda Civic and a 2006 Honda Civic Hybrid are so enormous that there are very few parts from one that can be used on the other. I'd hoped that at least the wheels would be interchangeable, but they differ even in the number of lug nuts per wheel. Indeed, even the fuses in the fuse box are different. So suddenly it's making less sense for us to hoard all the old Honda Civic parts from the totalled car.
Of course, not all of the car parts I'd been hoarding were things I ever expected to use. So recently Gretchen put the old engine/transmission on FreeCycle hoping someone would come and haul it way and open up more space in our garage. That person arrived today in the form of a muscular teenage boy in a ratty old pickup truck with a bumper sticker reading "Work is for people who don't know how to fish." I already had the engine loaded on a red cart that I could pull around, but the challenge was to lift it up and put it in his truck bed. Somehow he and I were able to do this, but just barely. It definitely helped that he was a good bit stronger than average, probably from splitting wood (something he'd told Gretchen he was going to have to do before he came out to get the engine).


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