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



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   titanium and nettles
Friday, April 13 2012
On the walk this morning I took the dogs on yet another off-trail walk, this time to a wooded knoll on Catskill State Park property below our downhill neighbors (and just above Dug Hill Road). On the way over there as I was crossing the lower Chamomile, I found myself in need of my brownhouse. The problem with shitting in the woods in the presence of dogs is, well, they eat just about anything containing concentrated calories. There's a strategy to it, and it involves immediately covering your contribution to nature. Burying would not suffice (and would be a waste of effort). The best strategy is to cover it with a large flat rock. Even then Ramona (who had to be held off the whole time) was trying to dig under that rock. Though the view was surprisingly good, the woods atop the knoll were unremarkable, though the landscape there was wonderfully flat and, due to the proximity to Dug Hill Road, it probably would have a house on it by now if it weren't protected "perpetually" by the New York State Constitution. We found a number of bones in the woods, including a sawed-off cow femur (our downhill neighbor used to be a butcher) and a scapula with a few morsels of non-bone adhering to it. Ramona carried that scapula all the way home. You can see the path we took in the satellite photo below. Where our path differed from Wednesday's (in orange) I've drawn it in hot pink. The place where I had to make like a pope in the forest is designated with the international symbol for "water closet."

Today temperatures climbed to 65, but by sundown it was so cold that Gretchen had me build a fire in the woodstove. It really wasn't that uncomfortable, but her illness was making her sensitive to cold. Luckily our hot water tank was full of solar-heated water, allowing her to take a scalding hot bath.
Today I took delivery of the world's cheapest guillotine-style paper cutter. Its body had been made of thin sheet metal folded into a shallow box and its packing had been so skimpy that one of its rubber feet had fallen off in transit (and a few dents had ended up in that thin sheet metal). But the damn thing had a 21 inch blade, allowing it to make amazingly-long cuts. I'd bought it to precisely trim a sheet of titanium to make a better belt for my Makerbot, and it had no problem cutting that.
Though the size was right, that titanium belt refused to move smoothly when driven by the Makerbot's gear motor. Most of the problem seemed to come from the fact that I'd allowed the titanium to be two-sheets thick for part of the belt, and it was too stiff along that section. Still, the titanium platform proved to be a much better surface than the old plastic one had been. The titanium has promise, but as with everything else Makerbot-related, it needs tweaking.

This evening when I asked a semi-bedridden Gretchen what she wanted for dinner, she said "sick soup." She makes a delicious "sick soup" (a soup for sick people, sort of like chicken noodle, but vegan) based on tofu, rice noodles, and cookable greens, and I sort of didn't want to know the recipe so as not to spoil the magic. I assumed it would be difficult, but it turned out to be really easy to make. The only ingredient besides those mentioned is eight cups of water and four cubes of vegan bouillon. I added mushrooms to the mix and, because I didn't have any greens, I harvested eatible wild plants from the yard. We have several clumps of Stinging Nettle that had arrived with loads of mushroom dirt, and our yard is also full of Garlic Mustard. While the former is covered with painful stingers, Gretchen finds that latter unpleasantly bitter. From the internet, I learned I could solve both problems by bathing the plants for a couple minutes in boiling salt water (I'd vaguely known about this, but I was sure to confirm that this was possible before starting. I also tasted both to make certain they were palatable after the scalding bath.) I thought the resulting soup was delicious, though Gretchen later admitted she found the greens tasted a bit "off" and she wished the leaf-to-stem ratio had been higher. Fair enough.


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