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:
   french fries and IPA celebration
Thursday, December 22 2011
It was an unusually warm day, with temperatures up in the mid-50s Fahrenheit. I kept the fire burning all day, but just barely, with the air supply choked back to practically nothing. I've been seeing how long I can go without having to relight the fire with a match. This morning I actually managed to take five gallons of ashes out of the fire box while leaving enough active coals to coax the fire back to life. The fire is a "culture" like any other. It's similar to Gretchen's sour dough (still alive) and my Oyster Mushrooms (just getting started). It's a delightful challenge to keep such things alive.

It had been several days and nobody had gotten back in touch with me from the recruiter or the typography firm I'd interviewed with on Monday down in the City. So I sent my recruiter an email asking what was up, that I needed to know to "plan accordingly." By this point my feelings about my prospects were being bolstered by the continued trickle of emails from recruiters and articles such as one sent me by an old colleague claiming that Web Developer positions are amongst the hardest to fill. My email must have worked some magic, because within an hour or so I got a call from the recruiter saying the job was mine and could I start tomorrow? I felt elated; this was the best professional news I'd gotten since I was hired by Launch.com back in 2000. Somehow it felt like I should be eating french fries and drinking topshelf IPAs tonight (though the two don't go together at all).

So this evening I went with Gretchen to Rosendale to see a documentary about Sholem_Aleichem, the seminal Yiddish writer and satirist. The documentary was chock full of incredible photography chronicling not just Sholem_Aleichem as he aged, but also shtetl life in the Russian Empire, complete with the many bodies generated by pogroms (anti-Semitic killing sprees that moved across the land like hurricanes). Still, I mostly found the documentary dull and overlong. The quips selected for English translation had all apparently been curated by someone with a Bob Hope sense of humor and weren't very funny. I'd been drinking a can of lime seltzer, and once that was finished, I refilled it from a flask in my pocket. The flask contained an unfortunate combination of gin and tequila with a flavor similar to the one you get from licking the terminals of a weak nine volt battery. I was being all sneaky about the liquor, which drew Gretchen's attention, and she eventually figured out what I was up to.

After the movie, we ran the dogs around in the parking lot, noting that a tract of quartzite cliffs is now for sale immediately to the north of town. Then we put the dogs away and went to the Bywater Bistro for dinner.
It being a Thursday night, the Bywater was by no means crowded. But there were a good number of young people (those in their 20s) who seemed to be noticeably drunk. Call me old fashioned, but I like seeing drunk people in bar; how they get home is their problem.
We ordered a veggie burger, a tofu appetizer, and a tempeh entree. It was all very good; the tofu and tempeh having been drizzled in a delicious "Mongolian barbecue sauce." For drinks, Gretchen got some sort of grapefruit cocktail and I ordered a similarly-flavored Dogfish Head 90 Minute IPA, one of a very small number of beers I consider "super premier" (it's orders of magnitude better than their 60 Minute IPA).


For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?111222

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