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Hello, my name is Judas Gutenberg and this is my blaag (pronounced as you would the vomit noise "hyroop-bleuach").



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   chemical warfare at the Garden
Sunday, August 4 2019
Gretchen says she likes how snappy my brain is when we first wake up in the morning and start talking to one another. But because of my work schedule, these days we don't usually wake up together except on the weekend. First thing this morning, she was telling me about the mass shooting that had happened yesterday in El Paso, where a deranged Trump supporter killed 20 people in a Walmart because of his concerns about the presence of so many Mexicans. Gretchen had read the article and the whole scene just sounded like a summary of all that is horrible about America. The Walmart, it seems, contained a McDonalds as well as a gun-toting lunatic, and an employee at the McDonalds was interviewed. "Sounds like a real turducken of America!" I said. Gretchen burst into laughter, saying this was precisely the kind of thing she misses now that we rarely wake up together.
Out housesitters left us a lot of something they called "three-bean soup." It doesn't have much flavor, but it's made of beans, so it has potential. I find that if I add some hot "carrot" pepper and diced tomatoes (both fresh from the garden) and salt, it's pretty good as a dip (though I have to use toasted taco shells as corn chips, as there are no actual corn chips left in the house). This morning I made the mistake of tipping some nutritional yeast into the beans and, well, way more than I wanted fell in. I was able to remove most of this excessive yeast, but there was far more of it in the beans than I would have ever deliberately added. This ended up being something of a happy accident, though, because all that nutritional yeast made the beans delicious.
In the late morning I took a recreational 150 milligram dose of pseudoephedrine to help me complete some of my post-vacation tasks. I was fairly good at sticking to those tasks, though I still found ways to procrastinate. This accounts for the following two pictures.


Monarch butterfly on some volunteer sunflowers that spontaneously started growing in one of my pots. Click to enlarge.


Celeste was cold chilling in the yard when Linda the deer walked through. Linda isn't particularly concerned about humans or dogs. And Ramona (at least) has pretty much given up on chasing deer. Click to enlarge.

Gretchen's high school friends Carrie and Aaron (whom we visited in Hood River, Oregon some years back) had flown to the east coast and would be coming to visit us today. I remember Aaron liking beer, so I thought I should pick up a sixer from the Stewart's. While there, I also got bag of their best corn chip (which was Tostitos, a crappy brand I would never normally buy) for possible use with the three-bean soup mentioned earlier. I fully expected the checkout guy to insist on putting my Lagunitas into a plastic bag, since that has always been the required protocol for alcoholic beverages (I think it was a requirement of state law). But today he didn't even offer. I know that New York State recently passed a law mandating that plastic bags could no longer be offered for free with retail sales; evidently this law completely supplants the older law. It's a welcome change, but it's so oddly dramatic that it feels a little alien. But little jumps like this is how culture changes.

Just before Carrie and Aaron arrived, I did a quick mow of the lawn, which I'd last mowed just before the Baltic adventure.
Once Carrie and Aaron showed up, we (including Ramona) went in their rental vehicle directly to Woodstock to meet Gretchen and Neville (who had been working at the bookstore) for dinner at the Garden Café. It being a beautiful evening, we sat at a table in the outdoor garden area.
At the Garden this evening, there were a fair number of dogs. As always, I did what I could to keep Ramona away from any dog not named Neville. But then someone showed up with a tiny Dachshund, and Ramona took advantage of our distraction to pounce on the little sausage-shaped canid. She didn't actually injure the dog, though that might only be because I immediately pulled her off. It's possible she thought it was some sort of non-canine varmint. In any case, she was (or me) in the dog house for the rest of the meal. My Beyond Burger and Abbey Ale were excellent, though. I would say something about dinner conversation, but it wasn't memorable and I was distracted by Ramona's bad behavior and annoyed by how long it took everyone at my table to order.
We stayed at the Garden until after dark. There weren't many people nearby when this guy nearby began spraying a mind-alteringly pungent insect repellent. It smelled a little like citronella, but could sear the sinuses from 20 feet away. Had we actually ordered dessert, it wouldn't've tasted like anything but that chemical. What kind of person does this in a public restaurant? In any case, this idiot heard us talking about his stink bomb and must've been clueless that anyone would find it objectionable, and actually came over to offer us some. Perhaps this was the beginning of some sort of multilevel marketing pitch. "No, that okay, thanks man," Aaron said politely. Gretchen, the person in our entourage most likely to manifest umbrage, was in the bathroom at the time.
On the drive back home, I could still smell that insect-repelling chemical. Perhaps it had imprinted itself on the olfactory receptors in my nostrils. That experience required further debriefing, and later Gretchen had me tell the story about that brunch at Penny and David's house when David's father politely cut a bagel in half for me, imprinting it with the musky smell of his nasty old-man cologne.


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http://asecular.com/blog.php?190804

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