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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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   near-death chipmunk
Monday, September 26 2022

location: rural Hurley Township, Ulster County, NY

There was a chipmunk wandering around in the northwest corner of the laboratory as I was trying to work today. So I set up a live-capture trap I'd gotten at a yard sale once. It's designed for rat-sized critters, which seemed about right. And I'd never used the trap before, but I liked how sensitive its trigger seemed to be. But then the chipmunk seemed to disappear.
Later down in the living room, I found an exhausted near-dead chipmunk lying on the floor next to the sliding glass doors out to the south deck. Surprisingly, there were two dogs in the same room with him and they either hadn't noticed him or had already grown bored of fucking with him. I was able to roll the chipmunk onto a piece of paper and put him out on the deck. But he seemed too beat to go anywhere any time soon, so I put him under the dog house, where cats and dogs wouldn't be able to get to him. I also put some shelled walnuts next to him in case he had been starving in the house while we were at Sound on Sound. He stayed where I'd put him for a long time, but at some point when I went back, he had vanished. Animals are amazingly resiliant, and it's not uncommon for seemingly-dead animals to recover completely.
In the bathtub tonight, I found myself researching the subject of how to transfer liquid propane from one tank to another, with the idea that I could periodically bring propane home from the cabin and use it for powering the kitchen stove, thereby benefitting from the cheaper price of propane purchased in the kind of bulk necessary for heating the cabin. It turns out that if one simply connect an empty propane tank to any tank containing liquid propane and find some way to keep the empty tank cool, gaseous propane will naturally liquify in the empty tank, filling it in a matter of minutes. So I figure if I have two portable tanks of propane, one connected to the Hurley's house's stove and the spare either waiting to be used or waiting to be filled, we can get by on our single Adirondacks-based propane plan.
I don't usually make dinner on Mondays, but Gretchen guilt-tripped me about not making dinner last Monday for some reason, so tonight I made spaghetti and a pan full of fried mushrooms, tempeh, and onions. Since we had nothing else to watch while eating it, we watched Shark Tank. Gretchen seemed to think it was an episode we'd never seen before, but I was pretty sure we had. It was the one featuring knifeaid.com, the knife sharpening service, and a bidding war broke out. But that wasn't even the only bidding war of the episode.

This evening at the end of the day, I went down to the greenhouse to sleep (as I often do). Unnervingly, I found the door wide open, though there was no evidence that a heavy rain shower we'd had earlier today had gotten in. The upstairs' doorknob is kind of terrible, so perhaps it hadn't latched after I'd last been in there. I soon found signs that something had taken advantage of the open door. There was a little toilet paper on the floor, crudely torn from the roll on the top edge of the couch (which is actually a folded futon). I don't know why inquisitive varmints focused on the toilet paper, but I was just happy they hadn't decided to defecate and urinate everywhere.


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