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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   lost in the pile
Sunday, March 28 2010
When Gretchen is around, we're good hosts. There's often a lavish brunch out on the deck and a chamber orchestra is hired to entertain. Not uncommonly there's a fireworks display, a basket of ecstasy tablets is passed around, and then we all go for vegan pony rides. But when it's just me acting as host, all a guest can count on his a French press full of Zanzibar coffee. But this morning I even dropped the ball on that (I'd gotten up at 7am and had coffee then), and so Nancy actually had to ask me to do the one thing I normally volunteer to do. But unlike yesterday morning, today was cloudy and grey, so at least I'd preemptively made a fire to beat back the living room's morning chill.
After Ray and Nancy headed back to the city, I loaded up the dogs and drove to the Hannaford in Uptown Kingston for provisions. Our house was lousy with carbohydrates, so I was mostly there for vegetables and vegan luncheon "meats." I also took advantage of the opportunity to return the many cans and bottles generated by Ray's beer drinking. Some of those cans and bottles were mine, of course, though most of them were Ray's. In the grand scheme of things, these days my drinking doesn't seem all that excessive.
The machine at Hannaford that takes the cans and crumples them in real time (crediting you with five cents per can) expects them to be non-crushed to begin with. This allows the machine to scan their barcode to determine if perhaps they came from out of state (or are of a brand not sold at that store). The problem, though, is that it is very tempting to crush cans soon after the beer in them has been drunk, rendering them unscannable weeks later when you take them to the Hannaford can crushing cash creditor. Today, though, I found I could usually uncrush the cans enough for their barcodes to be read. Sometimes, though, I'd get an error message saying that the can that was soon to be crushed was "too badly damaged." I wonder if any of the cars traded in as part of the "cash for clunkers" program were "too badly damaged" to be accepted for crushing.


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