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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   Clarence eats bread
Saturday, November 10 2018
It was a cold enough morning that the ground (which was still very damp from recent rains) had a crust of frozen material at the surface. This was a little slippery in places as I went to salvage backpack loads of firewood. Today I managed to recover six backpack loads. The first of these was from a brand-new fallen mid-sized oak hung up on a small hemlock near where the Gullies Trail splits from the Stick Trail. I was able to cut it down using the brand new Kobalt-brand 80 volt battery-powered saw. With its new blade and non-funky electronics, it was like a completely different device than the older version of it that I had been using. For example, it took only five or ten seconds to cut through the trunk of the fallen tree, a thickness of about ten inches. The way the old saw had been before it died, it would've taken closer to a minute. One doesn't really notice as a saw chain slowly dulls and becomes increasingly useless. How terrible it was is only clear once the chain (and, in this case, the whole saw) is replaced.
That new tree fall end up being the source of two very heavy backpack loads, while the other four loads came from the pile just upstream (west) from where the Stick Trail crosses the Chamomile. To make room for all this new wood, I had to clear out nearly all the combustible construction debris I'd piled up in the woodshed back in the summer (when I was cleaning up after the screened-in porch project). I brought most of that debris into the living room, where I used it to stoke a very hot fire in the stove that raged for most of the day and into the evening. With the new space opened up in the woodshed, I could finally work on finishing off the second tranche. By the end of the day, I just had a small triangle of space left at the top of that tranche; this available space represented maybe a sixth of a total tranche (a tranche being about the same as a cord). Meanwhile, there is already a third of a third tranche already stacked up, and another fifth of a tranche on the woodrack in the living room. I could probably stop all my wood gathering until spring and be fine, but I'm still a bit obsessed, at least on the weekends. (I can't really gather firewood any more on weekdays, as the only free time I have in the daylight hours is just before I leave for work.)

This evening, Gretchen met up with her lady friends somewhere, they had dinner at a Japanese restaurant, and then they all saw a local production of her favorite musical of all time: Hedwig and the Angry Inch (which also played a big role in our renunion after a 12 year estrangement).

This morning during Saturday morning coffee, I'd posted a number of photos of our cats on Facebook. They were these:


Clarence with Charles at the kitchen sink. All this is about to be remodeled.


Celeste on a striped chair in the living room. She only likes to lie on firm furniture. (She doesn't like the bed.)


Charles being cute in the sunlight.


Clarence: old but still dignified.

One of my Facebook friends saw the picture of Clarence and Charles at the sink and asked whether Clarence was sick. I said that he had "elderly cat wasting syndrome," but that we'd heard of a diet for cats with kidney failure that we might want to try. Another of my Facebook friends (the wife of the father of Allison's boyfriend, actually) said that she'd had a dog with this problem and that the solution was "high-carb" dogfood. Evidently some older creatures develop problems digesting protein and begin to waste away despite voracious appetites. The solution is to give them carbohydrates, which they can continue to process. As an experiment, I gave Clarence a piece of bread and was surprised to see him eat it. Back when I was a kid, I remember cats occasionally liking bread. But those cats were barn cats, the sort who aren't too fussy about food. Most of the cats in my life these days are fussy about their food and will only eat things that are substantially comprised of dead animals.


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http://asecular.com/blog.php?181110

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