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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   rainy hangover
Sunday, January 18 2015
As often happens after an evening spent drinking booze while jacked up on pseudoephedrine, I awoke this morning with a mid-grade hangover. It wasn't anything I couldn't power through, although it didn't make me the most delightful socializer. Ray and Nancy came over this morning to wish Gretchen an early happy birthday (and to give her a set of seemingly-vintage champagne glasses as a present). They'd also brought their dog Jack and Ray's brother's dog Bruce, and so the four of us humans and the four of us dogs went for a short walk down the Farm Road and back. Temperatures were above freezing and rain had been falling on the snow, covering surfaces with a slurry of mush.
The weather didn't seem that bad when Gretchen left for a bookstore shift in Woodstock, though she later reported that she'd nearly fishtailed into a guard rail on Dug Hill Road. Originally the plan had been for us to have a little party tonight in which our friends would all bring different pasta dishes, but in the end the party had to be canceled due to the ongoing ice storm (which is always a risk when, like Gretchen and me, you celebrate your birthday in the winter).
After Gretchen left, Ray and Nancy hung out with me for awhile in the living room as the woodstove gradually raised the temperature there to one that might be considered comfortable. As we talked about various things, Jack chewed on the remains of the deer femur from which Ramona had extracted most (but not all) of the marrow.
Once out guests were gone, I went back to bed and slept for a couple hours with a very snuggly Clarence the Cat. That's the best thing to do on a rainy hangover day.
Most of the food I ate today contained large amounts of seitan that Gretchen had prepared as a task for her online cooking class. She'd made a vegan brisket, which looked pretty good when the choicer selections were sliced. But most it consisted of unconsolidated lumps that had more in common with hamburger. I used the messier stuff to fill sandwiches whose bread consisted of pieces of bagel, creating food items comprised of large amounts of gluten and almost nothing else. Indeed, if my fate it to acquire late-onset celiac disease, it would be a day like this one that would precipitate it.
Later this evening, Gretchen and I brainstormed on how best to celebrate her actual birthday (which would be tomorrow). The first idea was for dinner at Rick's Woodfired Pizza, but then it turned out that Rick's is closed for a nearly two-week winter break. That's a common thing for Upstate restaurants to do at this time of year, and it's foiled more than one of our birthday plans. But then I had a great idea: why not go to a nearby dog-friendly hotel, one with a pool? That would almost be like being back in Belize, but without all the educational value and dry glops of beans. It soon turned out that the old Uptown Holiday Inn (which is now a Best Western) has a pool and is dog-friendly. But when Gretchen went to make a reservation, she learned that the pool will be closed for rennovation until February 1st. Further research revealed that at least one of those hotels out on 9W has a pool, but none of them are dog-friendly. So in the end we had to settle for just a simple restaurant date, this time at Boitson's in Uptown.


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