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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   metric icecubes
Monday, June 16 2014
I forgot to mention that yesterday I drove into town mostly just to get AA batteries for my new gamecam. (RadioShack seems to have the best price.) I left it to run last night in the laboratory and then today I set it up along the Stick Trail just a little north of the Chamomile. It caught the following pictures:


Me with my morning tea. I'm wearing a MoveOn.org Obama teeshirt from 2008. That's Julius (aka "Stripey") in the foreground. Click for a wider shot.


Me near my main computer rig ("Woodchuck"). Click for a bigger version.


The camera caught me bringing home a 110 pound load of salvaged oak this afternoon. Note the battery-powered chainsaw.

It ended up being a hot day, but not so hot that the dogs couldn't come with us on a short-range road trip. Late this afternoon Gretchen and I drove down south of New Paltz to return the cat carriers we'd borrowed from the feral cat colony people. [REDACTED]
On the way back home, we tried to stop in New Paltz for a drink, but the one crappy bar we chose (Joe's) is apparently closed on Mondays. So we went right away to the next thing on our itinerary: dinner at the Plaza Diner, the place with the best spaghetti in the Hudson Valley. We tried to order two orders of spaghetti, but the woman got confused and only brought us one. It was just as well; a single order is huge. I thought it was absolutely divine, though Gretchen said she didn't think it was quite as good as it had been the last time we'd eaten there. Among the several things we discussed was the season finalé of Game of Thrones. Gretchen had only really watched maybe one and a half episodes, but she still wanted to know what all had happened, so I gave her a spoiler-rich synopsis.
After dinner, we let the dogs run around in the wooded margin of the plaza parking lot, where a random pedestrian (an older gentleman who appeared out of nowhere) asked if they were sisters, and Gretchen explained that they were now, but had been adopted from separate shelters. As always, he seemed delighted to hear they'd been rescued. Given that nobody ever seems to have wished we'd instead gotten the dogs from a breeder, it's a wonder there's a market in our economy for dogs produced that way.
Gretchen is always curious about the side roads that go up the Hurley Mountain escarpment westward from Hurley Mountain Road, so as we neared home, she suggested we drive up Station Road to see what mysteries lay up there. It turned out that we'd been up it only a year ago; it leads into that Gallis Hill low-income residential neighborhood whose unexpected human density is initially as shocking as was the discovery of intensive agriculture in the New Guinea highlands made from aircraft in the 1930s. We parked near the place where all the Gallis Hill mailboxes are massed and walked the dogs along a gravel road with empty fields on either side of it. In part of the lower field (41.943978N, 74.062655W) there appears to be some sort of shit pond designed to deal with the concentrated sewage produced by all the houses; oddly, though, it did not stink.
Back at the house, Gretchen and I both felt the need for alcoholic beverages, so we both poured drinks in brand new glasses that she had recently bought down in the City. They were short and wide and perfect for something like whiskey on the rocks. On the recommendation of my colleague Mike out in California, I'd recently purchased a cheap bottle of rye whiskey, (which, he'd told me, isn't as sweet as Bourbon or Irish Whiskey), so I poured that in my glass (the brand was "Old Overholt"). As for Gretchen, she had her usual Lillet. To chill our drinks, we each took a single large cube of ice from a special rubber ice tray Gretchen had recently taken delivery of. The icecubes it produces are metric, measuring six centimeters on each side.


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