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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   salty flamm
Saturday, October 4 2014
My time is a bit overscheduled now that I'm having to work on the Wall Street house, so I have to be careful how I use my time. Today there was a plan to do the first Saturday of the month art opening thing in Kingston, and since that was beginning at 5:00pm, I had to get cranking, especially after the leisurely morning. It had begun raining unexpectedly last night and continued to do so for much of the day, and so there wasn't a compelling reason to get out of bed in the first place. The dogs don't want to go for a walk in the rain. So while Gretchen stayed in bed alternately reading a book or solving a crossword puzzle, I prepared our Saturday morning coffee and even made toast, all of which I served to both of us in bed.
Later, after completing some web work, I drove without the dogs into Kingston, only remembering that I'd forgotten to bring the keys to the Wall Street house as I drove through Hurley. After that six mile detour, I arrived at Wall Street and began to work. Today's main task was to use portland cement to finish the rough opening in the basement wall around the new dryer vent. The cement I had was old and full of clumps, but (as I've noted before), it never seems to go bad no matter how old it gets. I broke up the clumps as best I could, mixed up a batch, and used a putty knife to work it into the cracks around the vent pipe. On the outside, a whole corner of a concrete block had broken away, so I used the shattered remains of an old stone-and-concrete planter as filler. The work went more slowly than I expected (partly because of the lumpy hard-to-work nature of the old cement) but the results were actually better than expected. About the only other thing I managed to accomplish while there was the attachment of a makeshift plastic shroud over the exposed 220 volt terminals over the back of the dryer. By then, it was past 5:00pm and I was expected at KMOCA down on the Rondout.
I showed up wearing a sweaty teeshirt and Crocs, drinking Pabst Blue Ribbon from a travel mug. Much of the art looked like sausages (or drawings of sausages), but (as always) the occasion was more about socializing with friends than art.
Meanwhile, the new KMOCA owners had done something that had been suggested back in the days when Michæl and Deborah operated it: they'd arranged with a food truck to set up nearby as a way to provide something more substantial than corn chips, crackers, hummus, and brie. Deborah and Michæl had long resisted doing this, partly because they didn't want to anger the woman who runs the Armadillo, the southwest-style restaurant several doors down. But today the Armadillo was hosting a pig roast as a benefit for shelter dogs.
Today's food truck was the Black Forest Flammkuchen, a truck complete with a massive wood-fired oven that prepares flamm (not to be confused with flan), which is a sort of thin-breaded pizza. I'm not sure what the country of origin is, as "Black Forest" is German, though many of the menu items had Latin names. The truck was set up behind KMOCA off of Union Street up a set of wooden steps that were so wet and slippery that at one point I slipped and fell on my ass and continued bouncing all the way to the bottom. I was hungry, so I ordered the Roma (their main vegan option; one could also get "the Puerco" which contains pork). It was a perhaps a bit too salty, but I was famished and it was delicious.
Eventually five of us (Susan, David, Deborah, and Gretchen and I) drove in the four cars we'd driven in to Uptown, where there was another art opening, this time at Tech Smiths, some sort of computer shop that displays actual examples of the entire evolutionary tree of obsolete Macintoshes in its window display. The art in this case was by Jacinta (of BRAWL fame) and another artist. They'd collaborated on a bunch of collage-paintings that looked suitable for decorating the room of an eight year old metrosexual. The main thing I did while there was chat with David about the Macintoshes we'd bought (or otherwise obtained) back in the early 1990s. One of his stories concerned a Macintosh LC with so little memory that it couldn't run Microsoft Word until he'd spent $400 for four more megabytes of RAM.
Later, the five of us drove to the India Garden on Albany Avenue for a decidedly mediocre dinner. A large part of our dinner conversation was about the ongoing Ebola crisis, though even we couldn't avoid the narcissism of really only being concerned to the extent that it would affect us here in America, something we all agreed wouldn't happen (even Susan, who has is unusually full of absurd concerns).


For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?141004

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