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:
   something as mission-critical as a generator
Saturday, November 27 2021

location: 800 feet west of Woodworth Lake, Fulton County, NY

The wind was still blowing this morning, but it had begun to die down a bit. The constant blast of snow from the north had painted that side of all the tree trunks and branches white.
We had another cozy morning in front of the fire, and we managed to go without running the generator all day until about sundown. At some point Gretchen walked the dogs down to the lake (which, she reported, was still a long way from frozen). Meanwhile, I assembled the rest of the wood rack using the plumbing bits Gretchen and I had bought yesterday. The resulting rack looked good, but its forty-eight-inch-high end pieces seemed a bit too tall for the space.
As always when I'm working hard on things, Gretchen prepares me food. This afternoon she made me a hummus wrap with Isræli cucumber salad, and it was so good I had her make me another one.
When I went out to gather more firewood, I found conditions nearly as unpleasant as they'd been yesterday. I cut down a dead tree (I think it was a maple) and the wood was fairly dry. All this wood was starting to accumulate nicely in the wood rack, though it's not even a tenth of the way full.
As the sun dipped behind the peak it was setting upon, Gretchen tried to fire up the generator by tilting the mercury-tilt thermostat, but that had no affect. So I went out and opened the damn thing up for the first time in weeks. It was showing a 2098 "Wiring Error," which Google searches did little to explicate. I reset the error and the generator fired right up. But I was left was uncertaintly and doubt about a device that should "just work." Why did it need me to reset it for an error that required no effort other than a reset to fix? Shouldn't something as mission-critical as a generator be able to recover from such errors entirely on its own?
As I was obsessively sanding the staircase and loft rail newel caps until they were seemingly as smooth as glass, Gretchen cooked us another meal of frozen pizzas. This time she put an absurd number of mushrooms on my pizza, but, as I was quick to point out, there is no practical limit to how many mushrooms one can add to a pizza.
Later as I was doing some further caulking and baseboard installation in the first floor bathroom, Gretchen got a mysterious email. [REDACTED]

This afternoon I'd used my phone to download The Harder They Fall from my bittorrent server. This avoided eating into the fast-approaching 20 gigabyte monthly limit of the cabin's cellular hot spot. Tonight I set up my big monitor on the coffee table in the great room and used Gretchen's bluetooth speaker for audio and we watched the movie. Gretchen had seen it before, which was really helpful, because I had trouble making out much of the dialog, particularly the long passages intended as expository. There was a lot of mumbling and overall failure to enunciate, which had caused Gretchen to rewind multiple times to catch important passages. Still, I was following the plot so badly that for a time I was miserable. But at some point it clicked and started locking together as a logical whole, and by the time be big crazy reveal came at the end, I could fully appreciate it. The Harder They Fall is a fairly conventional western, though nearly all the actors and characters are Black, though in the world it built, there are apparently "black towns" and "white towns" (one of the latter featuring sets with lots of whitewash applied to nearly every wooden structure). I don't know how close such things were to the reality of the actual West, but perhaps they were.

[REDACTED]


Some of the aftermath of yesterday's snow. There's something very Adirondack about this photo.


For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?211127

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