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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   early enough to see a skunk
Wednesday, May 8 2019
I left for work so early this morning (at around 7:00am) that there were still nocturnal animals out and about doing there thing. As I approached the hairpin turn at the bottom of Dug Hill Road (where it curves around the knoll occupied by that 17th Century stone house) I saw something white bopping around in the road in front of me. Was it a dog? It was moving too chaotically to be a cat. As I drew closer, I saw it was a skunk with an unusual amount of white on its back (the white was actually a bit yellowed). I'd seen skunks in the past. but they were always old or otherwise unhealthy and not too energetic. This guy was acting more like his weasel relatives. He didn't seem to consider me at all, though he was moving too much for me to get a good picture. It being Wednesday, Ramona was with me, and of course she saw the skunk too. She started barking ferociously and wanted nothing more than for me to pull over to let her out. After all, who among us doesn't want to take a freshly-skunked dog to work?
I was so early that I stopped at Hannford on the way to get provisions such as orange juice, pupusas, diphenhydramine, and crackers. Unfortunately, it's hard to get a vegan cracker with any gluten in it, at least at the Red Hook Hannaford.
It was a pretty low-stress day, with me debugging a minor data import annoyance, adding bells and whistles to my Electron app, and then, at the very end of the day, debugging and fixing an edge case that needed to be solved quickly (I love that sort of work).
On the way home, I went out of my way to Woodstock (via Sawkill Road) so I could pick up Neville at the Golden Notebook. Gretchen would be going to dinner and a movie, and, while Neville gets VIP treatment at the Garden Café, he is discriminated against at the theatre. I stopped to get a sixer of Ballast Point Sculpin IPA (now only $13!), limeaid, and vegan sushi at the Hurley Ridge Hannaford. Then of course it was on to the Tibetan Center thrift store, where, for only $3.50, I got an old Canon PowerShot S50 5 megapixel digital camera, a number of different USB cables (including a very long one suitable for charging Android phones with micro-USB connectors), a CapitalOne-branded USB battery (complete with cable), a battery-powered audio amplifier with a case, and a strange mousepad with a built-in calculator and radio carrying branding by the Department of Homeland Security Customs and Border Protection Container Security Initiative. That branding and the presence of a radio with no tuner knob had me thinking perhaps it had a built-in radiation detector, but alas that now seems unlikely.
Back at the house, I had some booze and pot fueled me time. At some point I heard the pileated woodpeckers again, and this time I managed to get a picture of the male in the hollow tree. I could tell it was the male because of the additional red splotch on his cheek and more red on top of his head than is present on the female.


Males evidently have some role in the building and maintenance of pileated woodpecker nests.


For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?190508

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