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:
   porch-length inch-wide gap
Sunday, December 2 2018
Among other things today, I brought home two truly massive backpack loads from the firewood salvaging project 100 feet below where the Stick Trail crosses the Chamomile. (For those who don't remember or who came late, that's pronounced "Cham-OH-mee-lay," that is, not like the tea.) The reason the loads were so huge was that I was down to carrying the very largest pieces of the tree, which came from the very bottom of the trunk, though I was still able to combine each one with somewhat smaller pieces from higher up. These were nearly the last of the whole salvaging operation and required more use of my battery-powered chainsaw. Even after today's salvaging, there are still two pieces of trunk left to bring home, and one of those is from the very bottom and will probably have to be split before it can be loaded onto the backpack. The first load of the day was so heavy that I actually had to set it down about 50 feet behind the woodshed on the mountain goat path after I felt myself losing my footing. I gathered the second load of the day after first doing today's landlording chores. By that point, I was scouting for a new tree for salvaging, and this led me to check the slope below our septic field. I was disappointed by the quality of a fallen skeletonized oak that, from a distance, looked like it would be sound and dry but which turned out to be punky and wet. Happily, though, I found a fairly massive fallen chestnut oak nearby, and I cut a few chunks out of its trunk that I will haul home on some future day.

My landlording task took me and Ramona back to the rental on Brewster Street. Last week I'd overlooked some subtasks related to the back door fix. Today, helpfully, the tenant was there, and she pointed things out to me directly. One of the biggest issues was a gap that had opened up between the back porch roof and the backporch wall. It ran the entire length of the porch and was as much as an inch wide, indicating that the middle of the porch was sagging. More troubling was the apparent reality that the wall was continuing to fall slowly away from the roof above, as the gap had grown since we'd bought the house a year and a half ago. This was also affecting the distortion of the hole around the door, which was become less like a rectangle and more like a parallelogram with every week.
To fix the gap beneath the roof, I drove out to Herzog's and bought a can of spray foam as well as a few other supplies. Filling that one-inch gap wasn't easy and required a technique I might not have tried had not seen 3D printers do it. It turns out that the adhesion between multiple passes of spray foam is good and can be used to gradually build up a wall.
To account of the triangular air gap that had opened above the back door, I had to cut a narrow triangle out of some scrap wood I'd brought. I added this to the narrow triangle that had already been nailed to the top of the door by the contractor we'd had bring the house back from a state of abandonment in the Spring of 2017. Even this wasn't quite enough, so I added some cloth draft gasket (or whatever that is called).
Happily, I didn't have to fix the interior door, as the tenant's son had cobbled something together. He came out at one point and said something good about the Ryobi brand of battery-powered tools when he saw my pile of lime-green equipment. But I think the main reason he did this was so I wouldn't accidentally take his Ryob powerdrill (which was on a nearby shelf) when I left.

On the way back home, I went out of my way to visit the Tibetan Center thrift store, where my big find was a vintage cardiograph logger (model FJC-7110, made in Japan). It came with a roll of cash-register-sized graph paper onto which it could plot data. I imagine such a device could be hacked to plot any sort of analog data. It's a satisfying piece of equipment, with a knurbled knob that gives satisfying haptics as it rotatse through detents. Whenever I find stuff like that, I'm going to buy it, especially when the price is only $5. The woman working the cash register (who has taken interest in my purchases in the past) was curious how I might use such a thing and how I would power it. I said I could use it for plotting various things and that powering it wouldn't be difficult (it can use either high voltage AC power or low voltage DC).


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http://asecular.com/blog.php?181202

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