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:
   preferring dry treated lumber
Tuesday, October 26 2021
It rained almost without relent all day today, coming down very heavy at times. It being a Tuesday, I drove the Subaru (for reasons that will be clear later) to the office to do my work there. Arriving first meant I could leave whenever I wanted to, which has always been the way I like to do things.

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At noon, I drove out to the Red Hook Hannaford to return the week's recycling, get snacks for my office desk in Red Hook, a 12 pack of beer, and peanut butter. I think I made a mistake, though, and accidentally bought peanut butter with sugar in it. Because of course; we're in the most stupid country God ever permitted to exist.

At 4:00pm, I gathered my things and headed homeward, stopping (as I have been) at Home Depot. This time I just needed a few little things and a bunch of ten foot treated two by sixes. The use I would make of these would be decking on the fixed and hinged parts of the Woodworth Lake dock. We'd selected larch for the decking of the floating part, but that was was because Gretchen didn't want to lie around on treated lumber. For the pathway to that part of the dock, cheaper, treated lumber was fine. I could've used one by sixes, which are what is usually used for decking, but two by sixes are actually cheaper ($8.98 each for ten footers vs. $9.68 for just eight footers) and are decidedly more solid. (I made the same calculation when decking Gretchen's screened-in porch.) I wanted ten foot pieces because they divide evenly into three 40 inch pieces, and the deck width of parts I would be decking with them are 40 inches across. When selecting boards, I erred on the side of old dry pieces, because I didn't want to overload the Subaru's roof rack with too much weight. (It turns out a brand new ten foot pressure-treated two by six weighs 40 pounds, but one that has been allowed to dry out only weighs 23 pounds.) It didn't matter so much how straight they were (though all of them were) because I would be cutting them into three pieces. Most of the dry ones seemed to have been returns that had accumulated dirt at job sites, which didn't matter to me at all. When I went through checkout, the guy running the cash register gave me two of them for free because of how crappy they looked.
My next stop before getting home was at the brick mansion on Downs Street, where there was a door that wasn't easy to close. At first I thought it was the bulkhead door that was the problem, but one of the tenants directed me to the conventional door at the bottom of the stairs beneath the bulkhead door. Part of the door jamb had separated from the stone and masonry of the foundation wall, making the door very difficult to close. After some dicking around, I realized I could fire long screws into the mortar between the stones, which was soft enough to actually accept a screw. This allowed me to build a little fence of screws to keep the wood of the door jamb from moving in a direction it wanted to. And then I could fire screws through the jam into places where it seemed I would find that same soft mortar. This solution probably won't last, but it will buy me time to eventually replace part of the door jamb, a chore that will likely involve mixing up some mortar and posting a sign telling tenants not to close the door for awhile.
Back at the house, I took a nice hot bath and then went directly to bed. All I had for dinner was a peanut butter sandwich. I was watching YouTube videos about Justin Ross Harris (the web developer who used a hot car to murder his baby son) when Gretchen sent a message saying she hoped I would be up when she got home because she needed moral support. She'd just been down to see Powerful at the hospital in Westchester, his first visitor since getting a heart transplant.
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