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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   real estate mogul on the Palisades
Saturday, February 11 2017

location: Room 1105, Hotel Indigo, Downtown Brooklyn, NY

I made myself two cups of coffee on our in-room coffee robot as I surfed the web on my laptop reading about the latest Donald Trump outrages. At first, this administration seemed to be all about bullheaded malevolence. But this picture has been replaced over the last few weeks with one mostly of incompetence, and his has made the news more entertaining and less menacing.
Meanwhile Gretchen had gone out to feed the meter and found there were no meters on the street where we'd parked. In a nearby store, she learned that parking cops don't really even bother with this street on Saturdays. Something about it being under intense construction had made it into something of a lawless.
Our first destination after checking out of Hotel Indigo was a vegan bakery called Clementine in the Fort Greene neighborhood. After parking the car, Gretchen fussed over a young woman's rescue mutt for a good minute or two before telling that woman that the coyote fur on her jacket came from a dog much like this one. "I know," the woman said sheepishly.
Clementine Bakery seemed like a fun place to go for a morning coffee and low-commitment edibles. Gretchen bought a number of such edibles for later, but we were saving room for our ultimate destination: Champ's Diner in Williamsburg. It's the ultimate trashy vegan hipster dining experience, complete with surly waitresses (today mostly decked-out in blue lipstick) and greasy gut-busting diner food. I got the "grinder," a seitan-rich sub (or hoagie or, indeed, "grinder") and Gretchen got something yellow that was trying to be faux scrambled eggs. There were also perogies, but they weren't actually all that good. Just as we were leaving Champs, a large group of black-clad hipsters appeared; it was a little before noon and this must've been the Saturday brunch crowd.
Somewhere along the Brooklyn-Queens "Expressway" (BQE), I heard something rubbing under the car, so I had Gretchen pull over. The thing about Priuses is that the plastic bits in their undercarriage are fragile and imperfectly tacked in place. A curb or just a crusty lump of snow is enough to tear something loose. In this case, a part of the front passenger-side wheel compartment was flapping against the wheel. I tied it back with the only cordage I could, a hemp handle from a high-end paper grocery bag.
That proved to be only a temporary fix. The rubbing resumed just after we'd crossed the George Washington Bridge. So at the bottom of the Palisades Parkway, Gretchen drove into the gas station and I engineered a more perfect fix using the other handle from that same paper bag. While I was doing this, Gretchen was gushing over a rescue pit bull in a passing car. The car was an Audi and its driver was an older gentleman who took a shine to Gretchen (he told her she had a beautiful face, so it was that kind of shine). It turned out that he owns a good part of the Rondout in Kingston and he now lives in that auspicious stone house on Abeel where our friend Peter the Lawyer used to live.

Back at the house, our just-in-time housesitters (Quentin from the bookstore, his wife Natasha, and their dog Coach Eric Taylor) had apparently been successful in their housesitting. Our cats, though, were still skeeved out by the presence of a strange and rambunctious dog. Only Celeste (aka "the Baby") and Sylvia were immediately visible in the house. Clarence was outside and seemed reluctant to come inside. And Julius (aka "Stripey") and Oscar were holed up in the basement. Oscar was the last cat I found. He was down in the Gunther room. When I found him, I also found a wet spot on the carpet (the last trace of non-staircase wall-to-wall carpet in the entire house). I smelled it and it smelled like dog piss. Shit! So I dumped water on it, vacuumed up the water with a wet vac, dumped more water on it, vacuumed that up, dump on some vinegar, vacuumed that up, and then finally dumped on that stuff that is supposed to keep cats and dogs from pissing on things. Finally, I dumped some red pepper on it too. Anyone who even sniffs it is in for a rude awakening.
As I cleaned up the piss, I kind of freaked out about it, because it wasn't what I wanted to be doing. [REDACTED]

[REDACTED] I drove out to 9W to get more supplies for the basement door installation project. These supplies consisted mostly of lumber of three different sizes as well as some one by twos for making long, skinny triangular fillers. I wasn't sure yet how to proceed when it came time to building the surround necessary for the door (due to the fact that it lies in a somewhat different plane than the out-of-plumb wall that it penetrates).
As I often do, I also bought groceries at ShopRite (including melatonin, beer, soy milk, and beans), got some booze [REDACTED] at the liquor store, and went out of my way to visit the Tibetan Center thrift store out on Route 28. The only thing there for me today was a K'Nex kit (this one for little tiny cars), and of course I bought it ($6); now I have two such kits to somehow build the ultimate Rube Goldberg device. If I ever find the time.
As I approached the Reservoir Inn on Basin Road, I saw a deer crossing in front of me maybe 100 feet away. So I slowed way down. It was good that I did, because soon thereafter another deer jumped out into the road directly in front of me only 20 feet away. I was only going maybe 20 miles per hour at the time, but even so I would've hit that deer had I not jammed on my brakes (sending Neville's chassis-like head crashing into the dashboard).


For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?170211

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