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:
   48 cubic feet of sand
Monday, September 23 2024

location: 940 feet west of Woodworth Lake, Fulton County, NY

At some point last evening, our neighbor Ibrahim sent Gretchen an email in which he said that he'd seen our dogs at our place and that, for the "safety" of his children and also because he has traps sent up to catch ground hogs (they're supposedly destroying his foundation and septic system) could we please in future keep them on leashes? This was a big surprise, because the last time we'd socialized with Ibrahim, he and his wife had been fine with letting their kids play with our dogs in the yard unsupervised while they gave us a tour of the A-frame. But since then, there was the incident where Neville killed a deer fawn near the public dock, and since then rumors must've spread that Neville is a vicious killer dog. My guess is that Ibrahim and his family know as little about dogs as they do about ground hogs, and don't know there is a huge difference between a dogs's prey response and how they act around human children. (I don't know any dogs of sufficient size who wouldn't try to kill a baby fawn if one was encountered.) Someone obviously got to Ibrahim and spun a scare story Neville, and now he's making the request (which seems perfectly reasonable to him) that we completely alter the way we parent our dogs because, well, you can never be too safe. (That bit about the ground hog trap was thrown in on the chance that we wouldn't take his concerns about his children seriously, which we don't. But it sounds like it might be a fabrication.) Later in the day Gretchen sent me the email Ibrahim had sent, and it was clearly taken at about 7:00pm last night at the time I'd walked the dogs out to Woodworth Lake Road. The dog had decided to run down to Ibrahim's house. They like Ibrahim and his family, so why not? And then Ibrahim's Ring doorbell camera had snapped a picture, because Ibrahim has his house wired up like Fort Knox. It's all pretty ridiculous, but the sad thing is that it marks the end of a modest friendship with Ibrahim, our nearest neighbor. Maybe we'll get through this and be friends again some day, but now there's an injury to our relationship that is unlikely to ever fully heal. [REDACTED]

After I'd drunk my morning coffee, I turned my attention to the sand under the screened-in porch. I'd removed enough of it yesterday that it was now feasible to dig a hole down to the depth of the cabin's footings in a two-foot-wide and eight-foot-long swath running out from the east foundation wall. This would allow me to further expand a styrofoam insulating layer at footing-depth near the cabin's northeast corner, which would help keep frost from finding its way beneath the footings there, which (after sand removal) are only buried at a depth of about three (or perhaps four) feet. The swath I dug today is in the next tranche of that layer southward (that is, further under the porch). It didn't take long to get down to the level of the footings, though I was once again plagues with several collapses of the trench wall, one of which actually fell on top of me while I was refining the bottom edges of the excavation. Once I had a nice level bottom to the hole, I lay down a sheet of Pink Panther styrofoam measuring two feet by eight feet by one inch. (In the past I'd used two inch styrofoam, but it doesn't matter too much when buried three feet from the surface.) After that, I I started feeling like I was going into ketosis. (I had, after all, shoveled out 48 cubic feet of sand, which is more than two cubic yards). So I had a second breakfast and then took the dogs on a walk to Lake Edward and back. (No, I did not put them on fucking leashes.)
Back at the cabin, I filled the hole back in on top of the styrofoam, returning the appearance of the site largely to how it had been when I'd started this morning, though the styrofoam I'd used (which ended up including some additional scrap) had probably displaced about two cubic feet of sand.

After that, I took a hot shower to remove all the sand from my body. Then I cleaned up the cabin and began my two hour drive for home. (I started with 206 miles of range in the Bolt and still had over 100 when I got home.) Along the way, I passed the first Harris-Walz yard sign I'd ever seen that hadn't been posted by either us or our neighbor Andrea. It was in front of a house in a fairly dense residential neighborhood of Johnstown. Later, as I drove into the north end of Scoharie, I saw my second-ever Cybertruck, which I immediately recognized in the distance from the long narrow segment of lighting on its front bumper.

Back home in Hurley, I saw that our friend Fern had parked her pickup for an indeterminate amount of time in our driveway, though at first I thought she might be visiting. Gretchen had cooked up a meal of green beans and polenta, which we ate while watching another episode of Kaos (which I'm not loving).


For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?240923

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