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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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   vegan shibboleth
Friday, June 21 2024

location: rural Hurley Township, Ulster County, NY

Late this morning, Gretchen and I loaded up the dogs and various provisions and started driving to our Adirondack cabin via the scenic route (which goes through East Durham, Middleburgh, and Schoharie). Last night Gretchen had done some research about our eating options in Schoharie and found a place that looked promising called Love Shine Tea. The name implied a retro-hippie worldview, and the food items looked promising. Gretchen noted that at least one of the sandwiches was made with "cheeze," a spelling often used to indicate (to those in the know) that the "cheese" is non-dairy and suitable for vegans.
When we arrived in Schoharie, we had trouble finding a shady place to park the car, so I ended up parking it on a side street under a tree with the windows rolled up and the car running so the AC could continue cooling the dogs. But then I squirrely young man on a bicycle and wondered if someone like that would be willing to brave two pit bulls to steal an electric car. That was what I was thinking about as we stood in Love Shine Tea while Gretchen swooned over how awesome it was. There were signs about hate having no home there, and the two employees had tattoos and at least one of them looked like she might not necessarily be interested in dating men, especially the kind one is likely to encounter in the Schoharie Valley. There was no sign anywhere about the food being vegan, though it turned out that everything in the shop except the honey was vegan. They proprietors had apparently sensed that an explicitly vegan place wouldn't do well with the locals, who would assume all the food was bad and that the employees were strident activists. ("Guilty as charged!" Gretchen interjected.) But yes, the use of the term "cheeze" had been deliberately used to communicate veganness as a shibboleth. By then I'd gone back up the street and driven the car to the nearby Stewarts, where there was no shade at all. But by then clouds were blocking the sun.
There was a bit of a rush while we were waiting for our overstuffed bagel sandwiches to be prepared. One of the customers looked to me like the stereotype of a homeschooling Christian mother. One of her kids liked the vegan croissants so much that Gretchen only bought one of the two remaining so the kid's mother could buy the other.
Gretchen ended up doing what she always does when she discovers a new vegan retailer: she bought a bunch of thing, including a weird bean pizza for me, various pastries, bags of unusual vegan junk food, and those bagels, which we ate as I continued driving us north out of Schoharie. They're pretty messy, but somehow I didn't get much dribbled on me while eating mine one-handed.

After letting Gretchen and Charlotte off at the Woodworth Lake entrance gate, I drove the rest of the way with Neville and unloaded the car as I always do. I then walked around the building site, marveling at the plant succession (noting the many places accented by beautiful flowers from those seed packs Gretchen had broadcast a couple years ago).
At some point I took a beer down to the lake and drank it while puttering around on the innertube not far from shore both south and north of the dock. Meanwhile the dogs were snuffling like truffle-hunting pigs along the shoreline. I saw Charlotte appear a couple times on Ibrahim's dock (which is about 600 feet south of ours).

Gretchen liked the little stool I'd started on last weekend, though she actually liked the huge lump of wood at the top (all I'd done was cut out the negative space around the legs, leaving cutting out the upper shelf for later). But that would make the stool top heavy and also, well, heavy. It needed wood removed from the top. So what I ended up doing was cutting out a single rectangular block from the top to make a shelf with solid sides. That way, the stool can be seen from some angles as having what looks like a huge mass at the top. I wanted to do more work on it this evening, but it started raining. (Since removing material from a block of wood tends to be messy, it's something best done outside.)
For dinner, Gretchen made a sort of soul-food meal of mac and cheeze with a side of red beans with collard greens. Gretchen recently discovered that the key to good kale and collard greens is cooking the hell out of them. It's something that makes me a lot more likely to not only put them on my plate, but to actually go back for seconds.

I stayed up later than Gretchen, continuing to tinker with my version of Spelling Bee. By then I was adding features to somewhat randomize the error messages you get when you've either typed a word you've already found or typed a non-existent word. I was collaborating a bit with ChatGPT to flag error messages specifically for letter combinations that do not occur in English (such as any occurrence of three of the same letter in a row).


Woodworth Lake this afternoon. Click to enlarge.


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