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:
   maybe I wore out the hinge on my glasses
Sunday, December 16 2018
I really like the glasses I wear right now (and have worn for a little over two years). I'd actually bought them back in December 2013, but wasn't comfortable with their progressive lenses until I forced myself to wear them after a conversation with Jeff and Alana back in the summer of 2016. They'd only cost $56.06 on EyeBuyDirect.com. Recently, though, one of the hinges had become very loose, so this morning I tried tightening the tiny screw holding the joint together. But I couldn't get the screw to go into the second prong of a fork-shaped structure forming half the hinge's "knuckle." So I ended up threading a piece of wire through the hinge as a makeshift pin. Unfortunately, this made the joint even looser, and for the rest of the day the glasses kept slipping off my face. Fortunately, I'd already anticipated the need to replace the glasses. After "mending" my glasses this morning, I'd gone on EyeBuyDirect.com to buy a pair of glasses as identical to my existing pair as possible (this included both the astigmatism correction and the 1.5 diopter reading section in the lower fraction of the lenses). The old frames were no longer being sold, so I found a similar pair. Unfortunately, the total price of my new glasses came to just over $100, and that was after a 30% discount. Clearly prices have gone up at EyeBDuyDirect.com since the last time I used them. Their initial prices were probably set unsustainably low so they could build a customer base, since that is the formula used by all direct to consumer dotcom disrupters.
Gretchen accidentally overslept this morning, so it fell to me to walk the dogs. It had been sleeting and raining last night and into the morning, though it had tapered off enough by noon for me to get the dogs to follow me into the forest (something Neville will not do if it is raining). I didn't bring any of my firewood salvaging gear, though I took advantage of my free arms to bring home a few pre-cut pieces of firewood from one of the many small firewood depots I've set up. Later this afternoon as gloom started descending, I would go out for a single backpack load of firewood, taking some imperfectly-dry pieces of chestnut oak from about 150 feet southeast of where the Stick Trail crosses the Chamomile. Since I've managed to fill the woodshed (that's three tranches), I no longer have room to put extra firewood I've gathered. So all the wood gathered this weekend is for use in the next week. For now, it overflows the massive pile in the living room firewood rack, forming a number of subsidiary piles in addition to all the piece of firewood leaning against three sides of the stove itself. The hope is that by the end of the week, I won't have eaten into the pile in the firewood rack much at all and can replenish is again, continuing to do so week by week and saving the firewood in the woodshed for next burning season.
Early this afternoon, I started on my kitchen remodeling chores. The first of these was to install a ball-valve cutoff on the place where a piece of thin copper pipe supplying water to the refrigerator attaches beneath the slop sink in the laundry room. That took longer than expected, though fortunately all my solders held on their first test (and there are now better ways available to drain the nearby plumbing should the need arise).
Next I turned my attention to moving one of the can lights in the kitchen ceiling. The light was too close to the north wall in a place where it would be occluded by shelving and so had to move southward several inches. I've never installed in-ceiling can lights before, so I didn't know much about them. After getting the can out of the way, I reached up through the existing hole to feel around and then used a USB-based endoscope to have a look around (watching the picture on a laptop I'd placed on top of the refrigerator). The can's mount seemed to be running on some sort of sliding rail that ran between the ceiling joists (which run east-west). Eventually I determined that if I pushed a little can-support ring up out of the 6.5-inch-wide drywall hole, I could then slide it southward along the rail to some arbitrary new position. All I had to do was make a new 6.5-inch-wide hole in the drywall several inches south of the existing hole, slide the can mount into it, and then re-attach the can (which had enough cable slack to reach the new position). To get the hole in the correct place, I took some measurements to get a general idea where its center would be, then I drilled through the drywall from above at just inside the rail so I would know precisely where the west edge of the hole needed to be. Then I used a divider (the compass-like device) to scribe the hole itself. After cutting out the hole with a key saw and installing the can, I turned the circuit breaker back on, and the light worked perfectly. To close up the old hole, I glued some plywood to the top of the drywall to have a surface against which I could press in the 6.5-inch-wide disk of drywall removed from the new hole. From there, it was just a simple drywall spackle job.
Another chore was to take a switch activated from one side of the wall and turn it around so that it stuck out the opposite side of the wall (to be activated from the first floor office instead of the kitchen). This required cutting out a new hole and installing an old-work box on the first-floor-office side, pulling in the wires, and attaching them correctly to the SPDT switch. Then I had to make the old hole disappear using my spackling skills.

This evening, after taking a much-needed shower (I was covered with drywall dust, among other things), I drove to Woodstock to meet Gretchen, Juliana, and Lee at R&R, the quirky beer and wine drinking place on the east end of the village. Gretchen wasn't there yet, but J&L were. They still weren't quite over the entertainment value of the fact that R&R used to be a doctor's office for a oddball doctor who had worked in Woodstock until being busted for prescription fraud. (He'd apparently been caught due to the fact that his practice was second in the state in per-capita narcotic prescriptions.) In addition to being a bit free-wheeling with the prescriptions, he was famous for his cheap services and obvious habit of making up prices on the spot.
I forget what it was exactly, but R&R had an excellent IPA on tap that was so much to my liking that I eventually ordered a second pint of it. Food at R&R is a bit of a mixed bag. Two of us ordered veggie burgers, which surprised everyone by how delicious it was. I made the mistake of ordering the veggie bowl, which contained avocado, back beans, and tempeh (I told them to leave the sweet potato out of mine). It was pretty bland and unexciting, though I managed to save it with some refrigerated pro-biotic hot sauce that R&R had on hand. That hot sauce was amazing.


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http://asecular.com/blog.php?181216

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