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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   pseudoephedrine napping
Wednesday, March 5 2014
I had a meeting at noon with my Lightroom plugin guy, so I'd been up late last night working on another project so that wouldn't get in the way of my morning. Still, though, there was one fairly important feature I wanted to add to last night's project, and I surprised myself by implementing it completely in less than a half hour. The thing about programming, particularly in novel environments (this one was Angular on Javascript on HTML on Laravel on PHP with MySQL) is that it's difficult to predict how long any one thing will take.

Gretchen would be returning from her week in the Pacific Northwest today, so I did the usual things that I do just before she returns: clean the kitchen, scoop all the cat litter boxes (none of which were too bad even after a week of neglect), and put away the laundry Gretchen had folded and stacked for me just prior to her departure. It also seemed fair to eat the second half of my second eggplant, which I worked into a second stir fry that this time contained more cauliflower and just a trace of green pepper from the previous stir fry. And when I'd eaten the last of the basmati rice, I cooked up a bag of one of the pre-made Indian chickpea curries and used the rest of the stir fry as chunky agent to "hearty" it up. When I was a kid I used to hate big chunks of vegetable, but in an Indian curry a big chunk of something savory is always a delight. And an absence of rice wasn't a problem; I ate it Ethiopian style, using pieces of whole wheat burrito wrap (toasted, as always, directly upon an open gas burner) in place of injera).

When I went to the woodshed this evening to fetch yet another armload of firewood, I almost stepped on a dead rabbit. It was perfectly intact aside from a six-inch by one-inch hole in the side of its abdomen, the contents of which appeared to have been completely removed. I wondered if this was the fat little bunny I'd been watching nibble blackberry canes down among the pines just east of the the house. Probably. Aside from not wanting to tell Gretchen about its tragic demise (I'd recently pointed out that bunny to Gretchen from our bedroom window), I didn't think much more about it. But later I found the remains of a small dead mammal strewn all over the first floor office. Initially I assumed this was the same rabbit, only in a greater state of entropy. But when I went outside to throw its pieces into the snow, I nearly tripped on that first rabbit I'd found, which now lay directly outside our front door. It was cold and stiff and no further disassembled than it had been before. Ramona had evidently tried and failed to get it through the dog door. This meant that there were two small dead mammals in our yard, though I can't be sure what species that second one was. To prevent Gretchen having to step over that dead rabbit as her first act upon returning home, I threw it up into the snow on the roof of the woodshed, where only owls and crows can get to it.

After over twelve hours of traveling (including three separate airline legs, all in first class), Gretchen returned from Portland, Oregon at a little before midnight. I was jacked up from the pseudoephedrine I'd taken to combat my nascent cold, so I didn't get to bed until around 2:00am. Oddly, though (and this has happened to me before) in the late afternoon that same pseudoephedrine had given me a sudden bout of extreme sleepiness and I'd been forced to take a nap. But because I was on pseudoephedrine, the sleep that I experienced had been very shallow.


For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?140305

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