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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   Gretchen kind of thing
Thursday, March 13 2014
We experienced yet another blast of arctic air today, though this time it was predicted to be mercifully brief. Indeed, though the temperature fell quickly and dramatically enough to freeze a solid waterfall of ice going down the topmost bluestone steps down to the greenhouse, it didn't linger long enough to disable my laboratory urinal system.
In the big thaw that had been happening over the past few days, I'd been experimenting with filling and purging the big blue rain barrel atop its small wooden tower at the northwest corner of the house. I'd close its ball valve, let it fill up, and then suddenly open the valve up. This resulted in an impressively powerful stream of water, one that seemed to be sucking some lingering organic matter (all of it blackened by anærobic conditions) from the bottom of the barrel. Unfortunately, I'd left the valve closed overnight, and by this morning it had frozen up. With temperatures in the mid-teens, I was concerned there was a danger of rupturing the barrel. To give myself peace of mind, I poured a kettle of boiling water over the valve and adjacent pipe, thawing it out enough to open. Then I used a Mapp-gas torch to heat the blunt end of 24 inch spade bit and plunged it into the ice upstream from the valve. After doing this a dozen times or so, I'd melted back to unfrozen water in the tank, whereupon it came gushing out. I hadn't been sure that this technique would actually work, so I was delighted.
I took advantage of the day to buckle down and get some web development done. For the first time in a long time, I came to a point of actually feeling caught up, which is something I almost never feel. This feeling coincided with dinner time, and, since initial plans to maybe go out for pizza and then a drink with friends had fallen apart, I did most of the work of dolling up two Trader Joes frozen pizzas.
Later Gretchen and I watched the first episode of the HBO series True Detective, which I'd downloaded on the urging of my colleague Mike out in Los Angeles. It's a gorgeous show cinematically, but so far I'm having trouble surrendering to whatever it is trying to do. It's much more a Gretchen kind of thing than it is a me kind of thing.


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