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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Wednesday, May 2 2001 [REDACTED]
It was another crazy day at work. I found myself doing fluffy front-end work one minute (yes, complete with Javascript rollovers) and then the next moment getting on the horn with the production DBA, debugging the specifics of a failing homespun database replication scheme (one I hadn't written). It sort of felt like I was the only developer in the entire company. In a way it sucked but it was also kind of cool. Nevertheless, that sort of stress isn't healthy. I could feel myself growing ever-weaker throughout the day. But it wasn't just the stress that was taking a toll.

I came home for lunch and decided to make a meal of chips and salsa. My housemate John had just hand-fabricated a big tub of salsa, comprised mostly of hot peppers and red onions. I don't think it even contained any tomatoes. It was excellent, especially eaten with corn chips and sharp Vermont cheddar cheese. The salsa seemed almost like a coleslaw, though of course it contained no cabbage and, unlike such pedestrian lunchroom salads, was fabulously hot. But it wasn't the sort of heat that hit you immediately; it was a creeping heat that you didn't notice until you stopped eating. Still, with a few swigs of water I was good to go and headed back to work.
But toward the end of my work day my guts started feeling uncomfortable. By the time I got home I had to go plant myself on the toilet and try to evacuate my bowels. I was amazed that the heat reagent in the salsa had already made it down to the end of my alimentary canal, making an end run around all the increasingly fecal traffic ahead of it. But the evidence was clear: otherwise normal-looking number-two that burned like fire as I gave birth to it.

Tonight was the second in a row during which I drank no alcoholic beverages. This might seem like a pathetic run of sobriety to some people, but to me it's a major dry spell. It's actually fairly easy not to fix myself a drink, but it's clear to me by now that I have to make a conscious decision to deny myself or I end up not being denied. Drinking has taken such a firm foothold in my personal reward system that I have trouble knowing how to pace the events of an evening without the intervention of at least one drink.
Despite this evening's self-imposed prohibition of mood-altering substances, I still managed to experience rewards: I finally got the SCSI scanner working on my NT machine. Yesterday it didn't look like that was ever going to happen.


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