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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   ignoring $5 on the floor
Wednesday, December 12 2018
When I arrived at the workplace this morning, there were a couple State Troopers there, presumably responding to some sort of crime in one of the businesses (not the one I work for). While walking Ramona around the building at one point, I overheard one of the troopers talking to one of the employees in one of the building's businesses and it sounded to me like someone had stolen something. This wasn't surprising to me; there's no security of any sort, nobody ever locks the external doors of the building, and there are routinely large parcels waiting to be picked up in the never-locked hallways. Someone could roll up in the dark of night and make off with dozens of these parcels without ever being noticed. True: it might be hard to find a buyer for the unknown (and probably esoteric) items in those boxes, but that's the sort of concern that can be secondary to the ease of the theft itself.
Later this afternoon, I experienced an unexpected windfall myself. On my walk back from the bathroom down an upstairs hallway, I happened to notice a crumpled five dollar bill on the floor. It had clearly fallen from the pocket of a skinny white teenage girl who had just been in the women's room on her way to an after-school program held in the building. In the past, I surely would've retrieved that $5 for myself and none would've been the wiser. But today, being in the best financial condition I've ever been in, I just kept on walking. On some level I didn't want to draw attention to myself stooping to pick something up. On the other, I figured there were other employees in the building (particularly the several Hispanic seamstresses in a large upstairs factory) who could use that $5 more than I could. I also didn't want to return the $5 to the skinny girl who had dropped it, partly because this evidence of her clumsiness would surely mortify her in front of her teenage friends.
This morning before setting off for work, I'd actually done a little firewood salvaging, bringing home some of a very dry skeletonized oak I'd felled west of the Farm Road. This evening after Ramona and I got home, I brought home the rest and bucked and split it into pieces and then brought it all inside for immediate use. While I worked, I could hear a pack of coyotes howling in the forest somewhere to the north. I hadn't heard this delightfully ominous sound in maybe ten years.
Later, I removed all the knobs and pulls from all the kitchen cabinets so we could maybe use them on the new cabinetry that is soon to be installed. Then, after she came home from her shift at the bookstore, Gretchen and I moved the table up from her library to use as a kitchen-like counterspace in the dining room over the next few weeks while our kitchen is being replaced. We'll be able to use a microwave, refrigerator, Insta-pot, toaster oven, and various food processors, though we won't have a proper oven or stove, and we'll have to wash our dishes in the mudroom.


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