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:
   months between February and March
Thursday, February 27 2014
I heard a beeping early this morning and knew right away it was a Ulster Fuel tanker truck arriving to deliver another tank of oil, the second of this season. For at least the past five years, we've managed to (more or less) get by on just one fuel delivery per year, but, as I've frequently complained, this is has been an unusually cold winter. I'd neglected to shovel a path through a mountain of snow that had fallen off the roof, so I immediately went out there and started shoveling away as the oil delivery guy dragged his hose toward me, walking gingerly across a frozen ice pond in the driveway. "I hate the ice," he said. The mountain of snow was so solid that all I needed to do was cut a mountain pass through it, allowing the delivery guy to do his thing. He ended up pumping 178 gallons into our tank, and, in compensation, I wrote him a check for a little over 700 dollars. That's the most I've ever paid for an oil delivery.
Gretchen finally managed to depart for Seattle today, leaving me to the semi-savage existence to which I quickly revert when not in the company of others. I was smart about it, though, choosing (for example) to eat the leftovers before breaking into new packaged foods (such as those Indian curries). Yesterday Gretchen had brought home vegan food from a Jamaican restaurant in New Paltz, and, truth be told, the it hadn't been that remarkable when it was fresh. But the next day as a leftover it was delicious. That was my lunch. For dinner, I made a pot of spaghetti, sauteed mushrooms and vegan sausage, and, using leftover red sauce, put together an excellent (though not particularly healthy) spaghetti dinner.
Meanwhile outside, the temperature had begun to drop dramatically and occasionally-howling winds blew around a light dusting of fresh snow. The other day Gretchen and I had been talking about adjacent months that seem so different that, intuitively, it seems there should be additional transitional months between them. For Gretchen, the two months matching this description are February and March. I don't know if those two are quite that for me or not, but I do know that it seems to me like there should be a lot more days between January and April than there actually are.
Under such conditions, it was hard to keep the laboratory sufficiently warm. So I brought in an electric oil radiator to supplement the hyrdronic system (using the one outlet in the laboratory that is on a separate circuit so as not to risk tripping a circuit breaker and killing the work on my computer). Later I took a hot bath so as to raise my core body temperature. I think I need some sort of heating pad for my socked feet.

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