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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   being a neighborly handyman
Thursday, January 23 2025
When our neighbor Andrea was at our party on Sunday, she asked me if I had a job yet and I said that no, I hadn't been able to find one. So then she asked me if I wanted to do a little electrical job for her, that she had a guy who was supposed to do it who hadn't shown up. Andrea is old at this point, in her late 70s at least, and Gretchen says she has Parkinson's disease, so I felt like it was my neighborly duty to do what I could for her, since she lives alone and her daughter is off in Massachussetts. So I said sure, I'd come do it. We arranged for me to come over to her place at 2:00pm this afternoon, and I walked over there at about that time with a multimeter and my my impact driver. She had two ceiling lights for me to install, one of which to replace an old ceiling fan. For that one, Andrea wanted to install a fat ornate ceiling medallion, one in keeping with her baroquely ornate English garden æsthetic. I soon realized that I had no bolts long enough to secure a ceiling lamp to a junction box through the 1.5 inch thickness of the medallion, and this caused me to return home to look for suitable bolts. While there, I also got better wire nuts, a pair of needle-nosed pliers, and the remains of the quart of glossy white latex I'd been using the paint the white color patches on the laboratory floor, since the medallion needed to be painted.
Somehow it took me nearly three hours to install both lights. I worked competently, I thought, though the thickness of the medallion forced me to improvise a bit. I couldn't find any screws long enough to reach through the thickness of the medallion that had threads compatible with the little threaded "ears" on the corners of the electrical box that everything was hanging from, so I used long lath screws. Their threads were a bit too coarse and their diameters too small for the holes in those ears. So to make them work, I put a paperclip into the holes to slightly reduce their diameter and give the threads on the lath screws something to bite into. This wouldn't be enough to support a ceiling fan, but it should work well enough for a ceiling lamp.
Andrea is down to just one cat, a bruiser named Storm, who resembles a beefier version of our old cat Lulu. Storm was fairly friendly, allowing me to pet her on the head.
Before I left, Andrea had me do a couple other little things that are difficult for a woman her age to do, such as replacing a water filter and an air filter in the basement and a couple bulbs in other light fixtures. Andrea said her water tested very high for lead, something that might've led to an increase in risk for Parkinson's. She now has a whole-house filter in the basement and another filter just for drinking water. (That second filter is probably essential, since the it's doubtful the lead is coming from some place other than her plumbing system.) Before I left, Andrea insisted on paying me at least $50 an hour, so I walked home with a $150 check.

Back at the house, I spent at least an hour and a half looking for the quart of white paint (with the paint-filled brush, which I had in a plastic bag) that I'd taken over to Andrea's house. I'd remembered to bring it home with me, and Gretchen was sure she'd seen it on the dining room table. But no matter where I looked, it could not be found. [The next day I would entertain a vision I had of having perhaps put something on a bench outside Andrea's door, and I would walk over to her house, where I would find that quart of paint and the paint brush, both frozen solid.]


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