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:
   liking a Subaru in Tillson
Tuesday, December 7 2021
I worked from home today because my work-issued laptop continues to languish in the cabin up in the Adirondacks. I ended up having a fairly good day, mostly because I finally figured out how to style a mat-table (a "Material Table") in Angular, something that had been frustrated by a nested data structure in a .scss file (who knew that was even possible; it must be a SASS thing).
After Gretchen got home from looking at tile for the cabin's upstairs bathroom, she and I drove down to All Motors Car Ltd., a small auto dealership in Tillson (the hamlet just south of Rosendale) to look at a replacement for our 2004 Subaru Legacy Outback. That car is still driveable, so, despite its failing exhaust system and lack of power steering, I drove us there in that so we could see what the trade-in value would be. (We normally don't do trade-ins, but avoiding the bother of selling a car on Craigslist is worth money.) Amusingly, the Subaru, which hadn't been driven in weeks, didn't initially want to start and had to be jumped off the Chevy Bolt.
All Motors is a scrappy little place specializing in Subarus, though it apparently has a garage as well, and there were a couple totalled cars visible in the back. Sean, the guy who would be our dealer, was a thin casually-dressed black guy with a Caribbean (or perhaps African) accent. He quickly told us that one of the cars we wanted to see was gone for the day, on loan to one of the employees, but the other car was there. Gretchen was dubious about that one, because it had been advertised as having leather seats, but Sean assured us that the leather was fake, and that was why the price (about $11,000 for a 2015 Forester). This delighted Gretchen, because she'd been otherwise preferring this Subaru over the one that wasn't there. We took it for a test drive, and it sounded and drove like one would expect. It also had fancy features like a backup camera and heated seats with motorized adjustments (much like our existing Subaru, though the heated seats on it never worked).
I don't know if it was wise or not, but after that drive, we told Sean that sure, we'd take it. What, Gretchen wanted to know, would he give us for our old Subaru. Sean said "two hundred..." and it sounded like he was offering that, though he was just talking about the mileage. In the end he offered us $500, which was good enough for us. Unfortunately, the 2015 Forester couldn't be taken today; it needed some sort of "module" and something had tripped its check engine light, so we'd be getting it Thursday at the earliest. While Gretchen was filling out some paperwork and leaving a $5000 deposit, we chatted with an older woman in the waiting area. She told us about living on a sailboat until her husband died. Before that, they'd run a restaurant in Manhattan.
This evening, I joined Gretchen when she drove to the Kingston Yum Yum to meet up with Sarah the Vegan and Nancy. It was Sarah's birthday, and I wanted to help her celebrate partly because I hadn't sat down in a restaurant in months. Nancy ordered a glass of prosecco and a bento box of noodles and things, while the rest of us ordered the Korean tacos with tofu. There was also kale salad on the table, but I don't eat that; I ordered dumplings and a Belgian ale instead. Most of what we talked about was Sarah's irritation with a woman who hires her to do editing work and, of course, the Adirondack cabin. After dinner, the others all went to see House of Gucci (a movie Gretchen would later compare to a local production of Waiting for Godot).
Meanwhile, I'd been tracking the temperature at the cabin since we'd left on Sunday. From the look of things, the generator hadn't turned on since then even as temperatures fell into the low 40s. I'd set the mercury-tilt thermostat a little on the low side, but not that low. If the cabin continued growing cold without any heat tonight, I'd be having to make an unscheduled trip to the Adirondacks.


For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?211207

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