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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   foam seat
Tuesday, December 16 2008
I've heard friends disparage those foam-filled toilet seats that feel as if they're made of wet feces as you lower your ass cheeks down upon them, but the truth of the matter is that they are much more pleasant to sit on than any of the alternatives, particularly when household temperatures average less than sixty degrees (as they do in this household). At Gretchen's parents' house, four of the five toilet seats are made of foam (and the one that isn't belongs to the high tech robotic toilet that can accurately blast your asshole with a thin jet of warm water). When our friend Penny stayed at Gretchen's parents' house Thanksgiving night, her experience with the toilets there made her, she said, a "foamy toilet seat convert."
The use of the term "convert" suggests a pre-existing skepticism, one I can safely say I shared. Indeed, I still have something of an æsthetic bias against mushy toilet seats even though the one toilet in our house where I am mostly likely to drop my logs is the one with a foam toilet seat. None of the other toilets are so equipped, including the two toilets most likely to be sat upon by Gretchen. Recently she's begun raising a stink about the discomfort of their hard plastic seats, so today when I was out trying to buy more roofing nails, I picked up a foam toilet seat as something of a Chaunnukah present for Gretchen.

This evening Gretchen and I went across the Hudson to attend WKZE's annual Holiday party. The only thing we were expected to bring was toy to be given to some worthy children's charity. On the way we'd had to hand off some things to one of Gretchen's colleagues in the Staples parking lot, so we thought we could get our toy in one of the nearby megafranchises. First we went to Linens and Things which was having a massive going out of business sale, with 60% off savings store wide. Many of the shelves were already picked clean (an in turn the shelves themselves were now on sale), though there were still a great many deals to be had. Back in the bed clothes section, the only sheets left were king-sized (evidently a rarity), but that was great for us because our bed happens to be king-sized (what with all the critters sleeping in it, it has to be). As we were checking out, the soon-to-be-unemployed cashier (a youngish woman) remarked favorably on the two buttons Gretchen was wearing. One read "I {heart} vegan boys" and the other read "I {heart} vegan girls."
In pursuit of a toy, we ended up at Toys 'R' Us, trying to find a toy unbesmirched by corporate brand marketing of the sort that affixes Mickey Mouse ears to a multi-level race track. (I kid you not, such a product exists.) In the end we went with a board game based on the book The Very Hungry Caterpillar, although we also considered a classic Etch-a-Sketch (anachronistic though it seems in a post-MacPaint world).
The WKZE party in Rhinecliff was being held in the seemingly-swanky upstairs of the Rhinecliff Hotel, with a commanding view of the Hudson and (beyond that) the Kingston waterfront. The party was packed with people. Food, which tended to be things like fried chicken and macaroni and cheese, was free, but drinks were not. We hadn't brought much cash and we didn't know that many people there, but Gretchen managed to have a good time talking to the few people she did know. This included Andy the Vegan, who shows up at these things more reliably even than Dave Dowd, and that takes some doing. (One of the things we learned tonight was that Dave Dowd was recently married.)
The lack of vegan food was a minor setback; we'd been planning to eat across the street at China Rose, our favorite Chinese restaurant in the area. But then someone suggested it might be closed (because some restaurants don't bother to open on Tuesdays). Sure enough, when we looked across the street the place was dark and forlorn. So we made plans to cross the river and eat in Kingston. Gretchen turned this phase of the evening into a seemingly interminable series of goodbyes to the handful of people she knew, and I had to threaten to eat a chicken drumstick to get us the fuck out of there.
We stopped for dinner at the recently-renovated Kingston Chinese Wok restaurant on Ulster Avenue. Following a trend common in the area, this restaurant also offers a sushi bar, though we stuck with the native cuisine of the staff. The portions were big but the food didn't have a whole lot of, well, flavor. Also, things were subtly off; the dumplings were excessively thick-skinned as were the fried lumps of sesame bean curd. Furthermore, the service was surprisingly slow given that, at the end there, we were the only customers. I wondered briefly if they were pulling a Cracker Barrel on us, leaving us to stew in our hunger in overly-decorated dining room where every tacky knick knack and notion was, the signs said, for sale.
A snow had begun falling during dinner, and there was a good half inch on the ground as I drove us home up Dug Hill Road. There were no tracks on the road, indicating that perhaps people were chickening out from attempting a climb up such a steep grade in those conditions. But somehow we lucked out and never lost traction, making it home to our dogs and cats and fire that needed to be fed yet more wood.


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http://asecular.com/blog.php?081216

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