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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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   silver maple salvage in the Forester
Wednesday, December 14 2022
It was sunny today and not as cold as yesterday, so at noon I drove down to Ray & Nancy's place to salvage a couple large silver maple limbs that a tree pruning company had cut down behind their garage. (Ray and Nancy have a number of large silver maples that are nearing the end of their relatively short lives, and their huge but brittle limbs keep threatening to fall on their buildings.) I brought my chainsaw, but them it turned out that most of the wood had already been bucked into stove-compatible lengths. There was also more than expected, likely more than half the amount required to get through a heating season. Some of the pieces were too enormous to carry, though when Nancy came out to see how it was going, she got me a tiny handtruck that was capable of moving fairly large pieces. The biggest problem was that I had to carry or otherwise transport the pieces more than fifty feet from where the pieces were, but when Ray came out to check on me, he said I could probably drive my Forester back there if I moved a few things out of the way. But for now, the Forester was full and my lunch hour was nearing its end.
Back at the house, I didn't bother unloading the silver maple until later, though I parked under the long-unused basketball net (where Powerful used to park his Prius) so that later in the day, I could toss the pieces out onto the grass nearby, to be dealt with in the spring. The wood is far too green to be burned in this heating season.

At the end of the workday, I climbed in the tub and took a bath. We still don't have our boiler turned on, depending as we do on the woodstove and splits for heating. This means that our household water is still heated by some combination of the sun and the tankless electric hot water heater. But, since there aren't many hours of sun even on a sunny day at this time of year, we're mostly reliant on electricity to heat the water. I'm finding the brand new tankless hot water heater is a bit erratic when heating water, oscillating between producing extremely hot water and water that is only tepid at best. Perhaps this has to do with fluctuations in water pressure, but it's definitely disappointing. I can still coax a good bath out of it by regulating the flow rate, though that option isn't available on the shower. Gretchen reported unpleasant temperature fluctuations during her last shower, but the washing machine was running at the same time, so I was able to blame that. I'm wondering how it will perform when that's not providing an excuse.

This evening when Gretchen returned from the bookstore, she cooked up a pot of spaghetti and sauteed a pan of chonks in keeping with her vision: spinach and onions (the latter cut on meridians instead of lines of latitude, which is the way I do it). Then we watched a Jeopardy! and a couple episodes of the third season of Barry


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