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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got that wrong
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   healing confidence in professionals
Thursday, June 13 2024
Mary and Katie, Gretchen's two long-time friends from college, would be arriving around dinner time today, so I had to engage in a light cleaning jihad, mostly in the basement bathrooms to make sure there weren't (as there was) a grouping of short curly hairs in one of the sinks. At some point in the late afternoon, Tom, the crazy rug cleaning guy, arrived in a beat up old pickup truck with the rugs. They looked and smelled much better, though a couple were still mildly damp. I helped him wrestle the carpets to where they needed to be, and he tried to nerd out briefly on the chemistry he'd used (which he didn't really seemed to understand; it involved "enzymes" and perhaps sodium phosphate). He tried to come up with other topics to chat about, for example performing music (when he saw Gretchen's guitar) and even poetry (Gretchen had told him that she is a poet). We were standing around chatting after the carpet wrangling was done, and he's the kind of guy who might well have stood there chatting for an hour, so Gretchen gave him a copy of her poetry collection Kind and he finally went on his way. He might be crazy, but he'd really done a great job on the carpets. Between him and the roofers, my confidence in professionals was starting to heal just a little.
Before the weekend I wanted to install the replacement calipers on the Subaru Forester so, if I went to the cabin, we'd both have cars with good brakes. It turns out that replacing calipers is a pretty easy task, though it's not one I've ever done before (this was the first time in my forty years of dealing with cars I've ever known one to go bad). After you remove the wheel, there are only two bolts and hydraulic line connecting the car to the calipers. And since our cars are newer than the ancient beaters we used to drive, the bolts can be removed without resorting to esoteric tools. (The Forester is a 2015.) The only thing I wished I'd known before I started (and I probably would've learned had I just watched a YouTube video) was that you absolutely must put the copper washers on either side of the hydraulic brake line before tightening it in place, as the steel faces otherwise being pressed together do not deform enough to form a seal. It's also important to really tighten the lug nuts when you're done, something I suspect I didn't do once when fixing the brakes on Powerful's Prius, causing the wheel to fly off somewhere along the NY Thruway. He surivived and so did the car, though that car wouldn't survive being borrowed by his squirrely Albany friends.)

Katie was the first to arrive this evening, and she'd brought a bunch of stuff, including a quinoa salad, cherries, and at least one bottle of wine. She and Gretchen decided to take a short walk up the Farm Road and, somewhat surprisingly, only Charlotte went with them. Mary arrived while they were out and apologized for not having brought anything. Her excuse was that she'd planned to get something along the way, but there wasn't anywhere where she could get anything. (People experienced with visiting friends in an urban environment perhaps operate under the assumption that every corner has at least one bodega, though I think Gretchen's friend Dina has also offered such an excuse.) Somewhat surprisingly, Mary immediately said something about wanting to drink alcohol. She also offered an excuse for that, saying that during the pandemic she'd started enjoying wine. I didn't need an excuse and was happy to uncork a bottle of some sort of red (Mary said she doesn't like white wine). I don't know what all we were chatting about when Charlotte was the first arrival of the group that had been walking on the Farm Road.
We went out on the east deck for the usual vegan-cheese-and-crackers course, and it featured an amazing vegan blue cheese (that technology seems to have arrived, though we're still waiting on a convincing vegan swiss). Then, almost seamlessly, somehow the main course began, with Gretchen bringing out all the fixings for vegan tacos, including marinaded tofu, beans, hearts-of-palm salad, chopped and braised dinosaur kale, and other things (though nobody remembered to bust into an avocado). Our conversation wandered widely over many topics, with Mary at one point asking if anyone had heard of "poly," by which she meant "polyamory." Of course we had, though the only people Gretchen and I could think of were two groups of thruples, only one of which hooked up with people of suspiciously youthful age. Mary said that one of her friends (whom she refused to name) is into poly and has so much fun doing it. Mary seemed intrigued, but the rest of us couldn't imagine finding the time and mental energy for such a lifestyle.
Inevitably the mosquitoes drove us indoors, where conversation continued in the living room.


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