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:
   into carpet from below
Saturday, February 28 2009
There is a mechanic who works out of his house at the bottom of the hill, just south of the intersection with Dug Hill Road on Hurley Mountain Road. We've taken one of our cars there once before, but for the most part fixing the car has been my job. Today, though, we began seriously considering the purchase of an all-wheel-drive Subaru from a friend-of-a-friend, and this meant we'd be selling the piece-of-shit Honda Civic hatchback we unfortunately bought on eBay for $2600 a little less than a year ago. To sell that car would require some fixes, particularly to the brakes (which have made a click-click-click sound ever since I tried to fix them last summer). So today we dropped the car off at our local mechanic, the guy at the bottom of the hill.

Later we met up with our friend Dorothy and her friend Josh at the Subaru dealer on 9W in Kingston and took his '98 Subaru for a test drive. It seemed to drive okay and was in much better shape than either of our cars (both also '98s). I was a little embarrassed when I went to drive it because I'd somehow mothballed all my muscle-memory of how to drive a car with a stick shift (which this car had). I had to be reminded of the existence of a clutch pedal, wondering at first why I couldn't put the damn thing in gear.

While we were in town, we bought an oxygen sensor for the hatchback and, for the ongoing hydronic zone project, three eight foot lengths of half inch copper pipe (now less than six dollars each!). Continuing on our way up 9W, we stopped at Five Guys Burgers to see if they had a veggie burger. Even vegans can be in the mood for burgers and fries. The place was mobbed with people, an indication of the kinds of restaurants that do well in a recession. The place had the bustling bright-white-with-red-accents atmosphere of an In & Out Burger franchise (which I remember from California), but (unlike an In & Out) the employees didn't look to be college-educated. Five Guys mentioned a veggie option on their menu, but when we talked to the woman at the register about it, she said that a "veggie" was a burger without the all-beef patty (I also doubt the presence of special sauce.). In other words, they had no vegetarian patty substitute. In 2009. This woman at the register turned out to be the manager, and she promptly passed the buck, saying the issue had come up before and that she was as disappointed as we were, but the absence of veggie patties was an issue with the franchise. She suggested we go to their website and register our opinions there. We got an order of fries, which unfortunately hadn't been prepared in the manner we prefer. (They'd been done in that semi-gourmet style that preserves a measure of the earthy potatoey flavor.)

When I wasn't dealing with car issues, I focused like a laser beam on the hydronic zone project. In the morning, I soldered together all the attachments on the boiler-room side of the loop. Later in the evening I cut a series of holes into the drywalled underside of the stairway in the under-the-stairs closet in Gretchen's libary (which has a total of three closets). In the course of clearing a route for two parallel half-inch runs of copper pipe, I miscalculated the spatial relationships and ended up sending two bore holes through the steps, coming out the carpeting on the other side. The carpet piling immediately got tangled in the three-quarter-inch spade bit and came spooling off the carpet like Rivers Cuomo's sweater. This was how I ruined a patch of carpet measuring about eight by three inches.

This work was tedious and back-breaking. At the top (ceiling-end) of both under-stair pipe routes, I found myself having to drill holes standing on a ladder with my left (weaker) arm fully-extended into the side of a intra-joist ceiling bay, holding the drill and applying as much pressure as this awkward position would allow.
But by the time I went to bed, I'd managed to wrestle those half-inch copper pipes in place, meaning the worst of the copper routing was complete. I still had plenty to do, including the soldering of a tricky series of elbows within the tight confines of an overhead intra-joist ceiling bay.


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