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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decay & ruin
Biosphere II
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dead malls
Detroit
Irving housing

got that wrong
Paleofuture.com

appropriate tech
Arduino μcontrollers
Backwoods Home
Fractal antenna

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Saturday, January 20 2018
As he usually does, Neville woke me up in the night to have me take him on a piss walk. I'm not fully awake on such walks, but on this one I took careful note of how Neville was walking. This was, after all, his first real walk since his disasterous escape last night. I was relieved to see him seeming to walk normally. He might've been a little extra tender with each step, but nothing was obviously wrong. And there was no corner of dislocated titanium emerging from his skin. It was looking like we'd dodged yet another bullet.
It's become unseasonably warm (with temperatures in the 40s), so overnight I'd let the fire go out. This morning it gave me the opportunity to remove the ashes from the firebox. I removed about 2/3s of a five gallon can's worth of ashes, a good bit of which had been fused by some unknown process or binder into a crumbly aggregate.

After Saturday morning coffee, I jumpt-started the Subaru and drove it to the Advance Autoparts near Herzogs (and the Ghettoford Hannaford) with the mission to replace the battery, which is only a couple months old and will not hold a charge. The woman at the counter had some weird thing going on with her teeth which seemed in keeping with her sublimated nastiness (that, in fairness, seemed to be coming from a place of workplace stress). I said that my newish battery wasn't holding a charge and that I would like to have it replaced. She said something to the effect that, easy cowboy, not so fast, such a battery would have to be tested and... "So what do I have to do?" I asked, politely (but directly). She said she would have one of her technicians look at it. So there I was, sitting in the seat of my car doing things that the guy with the bulky battery tester asked of me. He wanted the lights turned on and off, the blower turned on and off, and the car started and shut off while his device presumably took voltage measurements, all of which it would eventually print out (the device included a printer). Tester dude chided me for the corrosion on the battery connections, suggesting perhaps that was my problem, though that just sounded like an attempt to buffalo me into shrugging and saying "oh, okay, cool!" and driving off. But no, I referred to the warranty and to my problem with the battery failing to hold its charge over night, and so he said okay and took the case back to his manager, the cranky woman with the funny teeth. She acted like the problem most likely wasn't my battery, but I wasn't buying it. I politely explained that I had to go to the airport and the battery needed to work. She responded as if I'd been shouting at her, briefly seeming like she was going to explode. But then she said, "okay, I'll replace the battery, but only for customer satisfaction." She acted like keeping to the terms of the battery's warranty was a huge favor. She also added that she would not be able to replace the battery a second time, which seemed like an odd thing to say. What if the replacement is defective? But no matter, the guy who had operated the testing device got me a replacement battery and did the swap out in the parking lot.

To clear my retail pallet, my next destination was, as you probably have already guessed, the Tibetan Center thrift store. Today I had a specific purchase in mind; two days ago while doing prep work for her fancy crepe-layer birthday cake, Gretchen had stripped the jar attachment on her expensive VitaMix blender. It was still under warranty, so she would be packing it up for a two-week absence. In the meantime, my goal at the Tibetan Center was to buy a cheap blender. Sure enough, there was just such a blender (manufactured by Hamilton Beach) for $5. For another $5, I bought a high-end small laptop case being dropped off by grey-haired guy with a fondness for Phish (I would later find a boxed set of live Phish CDs in the case). This new case has actual padding and rubberized corners, so the next time I drop my laptop onto a marble floor in a fancy hotel, it should survive without damage.

Later this evening, after first scrubbing the "new" blender free of strangers' cooties (who knows, perhaps it had been used to prepare booger smoothies), Gretchen used the blender to make tahini. Being used to a VitaMix, at first she didn't think the blender was even working. But it was; it just took five times longer to do anything. Put on some vegan shawarma substitute with flatbread and lettuce, it made for a delightful Middle Eastern meal.
Later Gretchen and I drank cream sherry and watched Shark Tank while the dogs lounged on beanbags behind a metal fence in the teevee room. [REDACTED]
Tonight before falling asleep in the recuperation fort, I watched several episodes of Ozark, a teevee drama that tries to be for money laundering what Breaking Bad was for meth cooking. Gretchen had tried to watch it some months ago and then given up; it's just not as good. Its humor mostly takes the form of lingering scenes of yelling, and it portrays rednecks in cartoonishly simplified terms not in keeping with the complexity I've come to expect from golden age television. All that said, I still enjoyed watching, if only to have a better sense of what exactly money laundering is. [REDACTED]


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