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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   failed picket hunt
Wednesday, January 4 2017
Given that I went to bed at close to 2:00am last night after several stressful hours of battling zombie emails, it's no surprise that my sleep was of low quality and most (but not all) of my dreams were troubling. The reason I remembered so many dreams (which I've since forgotten) probably had more to do with the fact that I kept waking up than with the number of dreams being unusual.
I'd actually spent the night on the couch, and when I finally got up it was already 10:30am. I checked my usual sources of communication, and nobody was calling for my resignation or (for that matter) communicating with me at all. This was a good sign that perhaps last night's catastrophe hadn't been as bad as I'd feared. Though it was late, I decided to do something about the broken fence at the Brick Mansion.
So I loaded up my tools and headed off, stopping (as always) for coffee at Stewart's on the way. At that point I realized I'd forgotten to bring my one example picket. This meant I would have to swing by the mansion on the way to the hardware store for measurements. I was only there for a moment, but while I was, the troublesome woman from #2 appeared out of nowhere dressed only in an oversized teeshirt to ask if I had a key to let her in because she had locked herself out. I didn't. Before I could maybe launch into an effort to shame her for only paying half of this month's rent, she'd already vanished. By then I'd discovered that pickets for all the yard's fencing were slats 70 inches in height and 3.5 inches in width, each topped with a stockade point. It's a very common kind of picket in Kingston, so I assumed there would be replacements ready to go at Home Depot.
But they were not. There were 5.5 inch-wide pickets that were six inches high and had dog-eared tops, and there were lots of ugly short pickets of zero utility, and that was it. I asked one of the guys there what the deal was and he said Home Depot typically doesn't even stock pickets at this time of year because it's a seasonal item. Evidently in the universe that Home Depot lives in, we're not in the season where people get drunk and back into fences that then must be repaired or else dogs escape into the neighborhood. The Home Depot guy suggested I try William's Lumber. I tried Lowe's instead, but (not surprisingly) their product line was identical to the one at Home Depot. I then called Herzog's (my first ever use of the "call" hyperlink on a Google result page) only to discover they had no pickets either. Evidently replacing broken pickets is a less common chore than I'd assumed.
There was nothing I wanted at the Tibetan Center thrift store when I inevitably took a detour there on the way home, though I made use of their bathroom for the first time ever. I hadn't even been aware they had one available to the public, though it's right there next to the corner I prefer (the northeast one). I'd had to hear another customer mention its existence to the nice skinny guy who works there.

Surprisingly, there were no ramifications from last night's email server disaster, which was enough to make this a very good day indeed.


For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?170104

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