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:
   blizzard, 2020
Thursday, December 17 2020
About eighteen inches of snow had fallen overnight. It was deep enough on the ground that when I opened the front door (it swings inward), there was a six-inch wall of snow at the bottom of the door. There was a fair amount of wind associated with the snow, so it was stuck to many vertical surfaces such as windows. The snow was fine enough that a lot of it had found its way through the screen into Gretchen's screened-in porch, covering a number of books she'd forgotten about out there.
Powerful was the first of us to start digging out the driveway. I joined him about a fifteen minutes later, starting the first path out to the road. When I told Powerful that we normally do all the digging by hand, he was amazed. He'd thought he would just be digging out around the cars and making a path back to the house. But he soldiered on. After I'd dug out to the road and cut a driveway-wide swath through the ridge created by the snowplow, things accelerated and within an hour the whole driveway was dug out, allowing any of our three cars to come and go.

Gretchen spent the day snuggling with the dogs in front of the fire in the living room, but at around 4:00pm she suddenly wanted to run errands. So I joined her on a run to Herzogs to get anti-slip mats for the Downs Street rental. I had a tiny chip of paint from the Brewster Street house in a candy wrapper, but when I pulled that wrapper out of my pocket, it no longer contained that chip. But after going through my pocket contents (which included a trace of sand as well as a crumpled napkin), I miraculously found the chip. It was no larger than an eighth the size of my pinkie fingernail. We'd thought Gretchen had originally gotten the paint for the Brewster Street house at Herzogs, but none of the comparison cards we found were a perfect match. We ended up with a compromise that was perhaps a bit too dark and a bit too green.
After installing the mat at the Downs Street house, we drove over to the Brewster Street house. As with much of Kingston, Brewster Street didn't seem like it had been plowed so much as repeatedly driven through, and there were pockets of snow here and there that a car might get stuck in. The son of the woman who rents the house was feeling ill (hopefully not from coronavirus), so he sent his super hot girlfriend to open the door for me. She wasn't wearing a mask, which freaked Gretchen out, but nobody in that house ever wears a mask. On the chance there was coronavirus in the house, I thought Gretchen should stay out in the car while I painted the patches on the wall. Unfortunately, the paint was different enough from the existing paint that once could see clear transition from one to the other. I grabbed the caulking gun I'd left in the basement and left, hoping nobody would notice the paint mismatch.
Out in the street, Gretchen had gotten the Leaf stuck in some snow in the middle of the street when moving the car so someone could get by. It didn't take much to unstick the car, but I considered it a warning to avoid all patches of snow on the way home. Once I got out to I-587, the road was perfectly clear, and it remained that way for the rest of the drive home.
Gretchen and Powerful cobbled together a delicious curry this evening using mushrooms, carrots, and leftover Chinese food.


The aftermath of last night's blizzard in the early afternoon. That's about all we get of the winter sun. Click to enlarge.


For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?201217

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