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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   glass cutting roulette
Monday, June 8 2015
Gretchen drove down to the Upper East Side of Manhattan today to do some organizational work for her WASPy older friend Wendy. She'd been in a hurry and hadn't been able to walk the dogs properly, so I took them a second time. Eleanor split from us early, and when I next saw her, she was back at the house chewing on a new bone she'd found.

Down at the greenhouse, I undertook another long-procrastinated project. I'd been wanting to make as much of the south-facing structure as possible optically non-absorbant (that is, either allowing light in directly or reflecting it to some place where it could enter). Most of the south-facing wall of the upstairs lets light in, though there of course are partitions between windows and one opaque wall on the west side of the cantilevered "cat box" in the upper east part of the the window array. Since building it, I'd intended to cover the outside of the west-facing wall of the cat box with a mirror so that any light coming from the sun in the western sky would be reflected into the greenhouse instead of being absorbed by the wall. Today I climbed up on a ladder and installed a little plastic ledge at the bottom of that wall to support a slab of mirror while adhesive gooped onto its back would have a chance to dry.
My next task was to cut a piece of mirror (I had several of the long, narrow kind designed to attach to a bedroom or bathroom door) to the proper shape. I've been using glass cutters for over 25 years, but the truth of the matter is that I rarely get the results I want. I score the glass and often it breaks along the score. But just as often it will veer off the score, either into the piece I am trying to make or into the piece I am trying to remove. It's infuriatingly random, and nothing I do improves my odds. My first attempt to cut a piece failed miserably, producing a jumble of useless pieces. So then I brought out a little diamond wheel and attached it to a Dremel and used that to make truly deep scores that the glass would reliably break along. The result wasn't perfect, but it was good enough to use.

While I was up there on the outside of the greenhouse at the cat box, I examined the wedge-shaped space directly above it, where the roof of box forms a flat, protected floor beneath the projecting eve of the greenhouse roof. There were two bird nests in that space, though one had apparently been abandoned before its nestlings had fledged; there was at least one mumified chick in it. I couldn't identify the species.

[REDACTED]


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