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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Like my brownhouse:
   bad place for an ice slick
Monday, January 15 2018
Ever since our house was built in 1994, the natural runoff on the south side of Dug Hill Road has been problematic. Our driveway enters the road with a shallow dip to allow water in the roadside ditch to continue on its way. But the dip is too shallow if there is much water or if that water has frozen. The driveway should really enter the roadway across a culvert and the roadside ditch should be significantly deeper. This wouldn't take much work; the ditch only has to go about twenty or thirty feet downhill before it arrives at an escarpment to dump the water off of. But without that culvert and without that ditch, the flow frequently gets blocked by ice dams that then divert the water out into Dug Hill Road, where it can flow some distance before arriving at the ditch along its north side. And along the way it can produce great sheets of ice in the middle of one of the tightest curves on the road's entire length, a curve that also corresponds to a steep grade. All of this can make that short stretch of roadway very dangerous. Before a guard rail was installed, cars would regularly slide off the south edge and down an embankment. Today I didn't hear anybody slam into the guard rail, but I could hear them slowing frantically down before entering the curve (particularly when coming from the northwest, as the curve marks the beginning of a steep downhill plunge down into the Esopus Valley). And then there was the crunchy sound of the ice sheet cracking beneath their wheels. Cars coming from the opposite direction had the opposite problem, occasionally spinning their wheels as they tried to find some traction. This evening one vehicle somehow ended up stuck in the road's puny north-side ditch for the better part of an hour as its occupant tried various things to unstick himself. I might've helped out, but I theorized that the guy had probably voted for Donald J. Trump. How else to explain the stupidity of somehow getting stuck in a shallow ditch while climbing a hill?

It being a national holiday (in celebration of Martin Luther King Jr.), Gretchen made a holiday french press of real caffeinated coffee, which we drank in the recuperation fort with the dogs. That lump in Neville's cheek wasn't any smaller, and of course Gretchen was assuming it was cancer. I was heartened by the fact that its surface was smooth even if in general shape it was unsettlingly complicated. But we won't know anything until we get the lab results back.

[REDACTED]

Partly out of a need to do some birthday shopping for Gretchen and parly to combat my cabin fever, I ran some errands this afternoon. I started with a drive out to the Tibetan Center thrift store, where I bought some old extension cords (can't have too many of those), some straight metal brackets (the kind used for stiffening carpentry joints), and a Securifi Almond internet router. That last item doesn't have great specs for a router and ism't the sort one can easily install an open source firmware on, but it includes a little touch screen. I thought perhaps someone might someday find a hack for that screen, or else Securifi itself will release more apps. Right now there actually are two apps for it, though all they do is either show the time or the weather.
Outside the thrift store are the boxes and bags of various unsorted goodies that people have dropped off. Most of it is under tarps, though a good bit of it (including electronic gear) just sits out in the rain and snow. I found a box near the dumpster full of interesting oldish telecommunications gear and cables. Those are the sorts of boxes I like to rifle through when they're in the store. When they're outside, some of it stuck inside blocks of ice, it feels a bit more like dumpster diving.

My next destination was the Target at the Hudson Valley Mall. I was hoping to find some kitchen supplies that Gretchen might want for her birthday. Unfortunately, though, Gretchen has pretty much everything she could want, and Target had fewer of the kinds of products that produce impulse buys than I was expecting. Not that I didn't find things to add to cart; somehow I blew over $30 bucks on things like alphabetic refrigerator magnets, a pack of douchey-themed Bic cigarette lighters, AA batteries, and a little plastic shelving unit.
My final destination of the day was the 9W Hannaford, a store that sells stand-and-stuff taco shells, but only in "taco kit" form. I do not want to buy the damn kit because my vision for taco dinner only has use for the tacos.

This evening, Gretchen wanted to watch teevee as usual. But with me in the laboratory, Neville was going to be lonely if left by himself in the recuperation fort. So I carried him up to the teevee room and put him on a bean bag. He was perfectly fine with that, and it allowed Gretchen to snuggle with him for hours while doing what she loves. Yesterday I'd had Neville in the laboratory for a time while I worked out some complicated web development timing issues related to AJAX calls being fired by mouseover events. That sort of work requires mental focus, which is hard to have when there is a possibly-whimpering dog possibly trying to break out of his makeshift prison 60 or 80 feet away.


For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?180115

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