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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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   oat milk Pepsi challenge
Tuesday, April 16 2024

location: rural Hurley Township, Ulster County, NY

Usually when Oscar starts annoying us at 5:45am, if Gretchen wakes up, she gives in and feeds him in hopes that she'll be able to go back to sleep (which she often doesn't). If I wake up, though, I'll carry him into the laboratory and confine him in there, where it's possible for me to put a pillow over my head and fall back to sleep on the beanbag no matter what he does. This morning, though, I found the dogs on the beanbag, meaning there wasn't enough room for me. So I was forced to give him food at that time like Gretchen does, thereby reinforcing that annoying habit.

This afternoon Ray drove up from Old Hurley and, after chatting a little with me and Gretchen, he and I drove out to Home Depot to get some supplies for a minisplit he'd bought online that we would be installing in his studio (the room adjacent to his garage). He'd ordered a wall mounting bracket that had arrived there, but we also needed electrical wire, conduit, conduit fittings, a quick disconnect, and various odds and ends. On the drive there, Ray mentioned something about an attractive young woman marrying a pasty white sixty five year old, and I said that it actually made less sense for young women to be with young deadbeats of the sort I used to be. But yet, and here's what I can't put my head around it now that I think about it, young deadbeats have no trouble getting even fairly high-value girlfriends. They don't even have to be all that attractive, though it certainly helps (unless they have a truly amazing personality).
Back at Ray's place, we spent a couple hours running wire from the garage circuit breaker box out to the back (southeast) corner of the studio. For all of the wire that would be outside, I ran it inside PVC conduit. It's hard to pull outdoor romex through the special corner fittings, and we struggled with it for awhile before we found a technique that seemed to work. I joked as we were doing it that anyone seeing us together struggling to pull the wire through the fittings back behind his studio would probably think we were performing some sort of secretive sex act.
I wasn't home long when Gretchen returned early from her first night of a brand new semester of teaching poetry to prisoners in Coxsackie. Only one student had shown up, and he'd left early to attend Eid al-Fitr, a Muslim festival related to the end of Ramadan. So she herself got to leave early. On the way home, she'd stopped at the the Ghettoford Hannaford to buy oat milk, among other things. On seeing that a Hannaford-brand oat milk was considerably cheaper than Chobani (the premium oat milk we normally buy) she got a two quart carton of that as well. We then did the "Pepsi challenge" (a double blind taste test) to decide if Chobani's expense is really worth it. We both clearly detected the difference between the two oat milks and agreed that one was markedly better. And the markedly better one for both of us was Chobani. The Hannaford-brand oat milk tasted watery and sweet by comparison. It seems to contain much less creamy fat.


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