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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   freakish wind damage
Tuesday, December 18 2018
When I made my customary sunrise walk to the brownhouse this morning, I found bits of thick plate glass next to the Prius just west of the house. Where had that come from? It looked suspiciously like the plate glass that goes on the homemade five by 12 foot solar panel I'd installed on the nearby roof, but there wasn't enough of it to have come from there. But when I looked up at the panel, I was horrified to see that one and half of the four panes had vanished. The one that was entirely missing was the westmost one, and the one next to it was only partially there. Those glass panels had been up on that roof for something like 12 years without problem, surviving several tropical storms. Evidently last night's powerful winds had attacked it from some angle where it found a weakness, lifting off the westmost one, dropping it on its neighbor, and then blowing most of it to the east side of the house. That was where I found the bulk of the glass, much of it in small lethally-sharp shards strewn among the brambles and bushes. I put some immediate work into cleaning up this mess, but I stopped once I'd sliced open the knuckle of my right pinkie finger.
This morning at work, I was trying to do something relatively simple in Angular 6.0: have data in a child component communicate data to a parent. There are supposedly three or four techniques for doing this, and I tried all of them, and yet I could get none to work. So I ended up combining the child component's functionality with its parent, precisely the sort of thing Angular is supposed to prevent. Perhaps the problem was the context (the Electron framework). I couldn't say, and Googling was not leading me to a solution. But I'd already invested three hours in getting something to work that didn't want to work (something, mind you, I've gotten to work before), and I'd had enough.
Gretchen stopped by the workplace at about 1:30pm so we could go out to Bubby's for burritos and then look at faucet and boiling water tap options at Rhinebeck Kitchen & Bath. Gretchen had brought vegan sour cream from our refrigerator so that the burritos could be made with that, and everything was going great until it turned out that Gretchen's burrito contained guacamole, a substance Gretchen cannot tolerate and which she'd specifically requested to have left out of her burrito. Initially we tried swapping burritos, but then the one I'd been eating also proved to contain guacamole. Gretchen did her best to pick the green substance out, but it was a slow and unpleasant process, and in the end she gave up and gave me the tail end of her burrito, which, it turned out, was mostly sour cream.
I needed some old work electrical boxes, so before driving to our next destination, I got three boxes from the hardware store near the center of Red Hook. While there, I overheard a woman talking to someone who was clearly asking her to pick up an old work electrical box. So when she came to the counter with a new work box, I showed her what I was buying and said she needed to get that kind instead.
Gretchen had brought both dogs and they were farting horrendous farts on the drive down to the kitchen place. Initially we thought they just had to poop. But then Gretchen remembered that they'd eaten some of Clarence's nasty wet food, the stuff to which Gretchen had added that pig pancreatic powder. I tried walking them around the back at the kitchen place, but neither of them actually needed to poop.
After being amazed by how expensive boiling water taps are, Gretchen dropped me off at work so I could continue with what little of my day remained.

Back at the house this evening, I used a metal-cutting blade on my oscillating tool to remove what fasteners I could find in the studs I needed to remove in the kitchen's north wall. A great many of them couldn't be found, but that didn't matter much; when I removed the studs, they just tore little divots out of the back of the drywall that was to remain (the drywall on the far side of the wall). I could then patch these divots with mesh tape and drywall compound, exactly the way I would've had these been divots on the front of the drywall.
Next I turned to the task of installing an electrical outlet under the kitchen sink for use by something like the heater for a boiling water tap. The obvious candidate to supply power to such an outlet was the one that used to go to the dishwasher. That wire now just came out of a hole in the wall with some wire nuts on the ends of its wires. To move it, I was going to have to cut open the wall around that hole. When I did that, I was alarmed to discover that mice had set up a nest in the wall behind that hole. Furthermore, they'd enlarged the hole in the wall's two-by-four floor plate where the wire disappeared. The intention of the mice had clearly been to get easy access to the void between the floor joists, but in enlarging the hole around the romex cable, they'd also chewed the sheath off the cable and then chewed insulation off the individual copper wires. The least-chewed of the wires was the black hot wire, but even it had been chewed enough to expose copper in two places. If, after doing this, the mice had then used the cable as a ladder for climbing up and down out of the hole through the wall plate, there were some grabs that would've definitely been "spicy" if not lethal. I didn't see any evidence of dead mice, so either mice aren't especially conductive or they're good at avoiding electrocution.
Given that wires go through holes in many places throughout the house, such wire damage is probably common, though this was the first evidence of it that I'd ever seen. This might be because most of the holes drilled for electrical cables are plenty big and mice haven't had the need to enlarge them.
To repair such damage, the only method tolerated by code would be to tear open the ceiling of the room downstairs, follow the chewed cable back to the electrical box it came from (which might be as far away as the boiler room), and then replace the cable. But that would've been a lot of work and the new wire would've soon been chewed just like the old one. An easier and more-lasting fix would be to put shrink-tube insulation over all the exposed copper on the hot wire, wrap all the damaged wire in electrical tape, run the whole thing through a new romex sheath (one removed from a three-conductor cable so as to have enough room), cover that sheath with a mix of Gorilla Glue and cayenne pepper (which all non-human mammals hate), run that whole thing through a metal pipe as it passes through that mouse hole in the floor plate, surround that pipe with bits of random metal, and then spray-foam the whole thing.


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