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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   winter digging
Friday, December 26 2008
For most of the sunlit hours (and some of them were indeed sunlit), I was putting together a roof for the odd part of the greenhouse near the door. Meanwhile, though, I'd been wondering if perhaps I'd waited too long to dig a proper door well in front of the greenhouse's door. The door will swing outward, but because its bottom is two feet underground, there will need to be a corresponding well outside the greenhouse to receive the arc of its outward swing. Now, though, the ground had frozen and I wondered what I was going to do about a door in the absence of a well. So today I went and got the iron post hole bar (last used to pry up the massive downed Red Oak) to see if it could break through the frozen ground. It did so without difficulty. I found that the ground was frozen only to a depth of about four inches, and below that it had the consistency of birthday cake (albeit birthday cake heavily laced with round random-sized pebbles). It didn't take me too long to dig down to the level of the bottom of the door and outward to include the entire volume of a swinging door's arc. There were a few sleepy earthworms in the soil and I felt terrible for disturbing them, but getting a proper door on the greenhouse is a priority as we enter the coldest part of the year.

There was another holiday party obligation this evening, this time at the house on Eagle's Nest where slide shows are the principle entertainment. That might sound dreary to most people, but these slide shows are well-curated and feature nothing but the most exceptional photography from professional photographers. Most of it is nature photography, and more often than not the focus is on creatures near Antarctica. Today, though, there was also a series of photos taken by autistic children (gathered and presented by our friend Deborah) and also some amazing photos from off the coast of Papua New Guinea. Near the end my stomach started behaving strangely and I had to tell Gretchen we should probably leave, something she'd originally planned to do at least a half hour before. Those slide shows make it difficult to just drop in and duck out like one would be able to do at any conventional holiday party.


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