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:
   momentary switches at Radio Shack
Saturday, November 14 2009
It was a rainy day but fairly warm, and in anticipation of still warmer weather to come, I began resurfacing the oriented-strand-board interior walls of the brownhouse using joint compound. I spackled it on and smoothed it out, hoping to conceal some of its cheap flaky texture. It seemed to be working initially, but later I saw that the moisture from the joint compound had caused some of the chips of the board to delaminate.
Later I went into town for more supplies for the brownhouse. I'm down to small details at this point, so the things I needed were also small: tiny pieces of PVC, strips of finishing wood too tricky to mill, an outlet box to replace one I'd installed provisionally, and a momentary switch for the shit stack fan. The only source I could find for momentary switches was Radio Shack, but my brain wasn't thinking clearly and I bought a package of normally on switches when the species I needed was the normally off kind.
I went to the Radio Shack in the Hudson Valley Mall and at first the nerdy guy ringing me up seemed like he might be vaguely hip, like maybe he plays bass for an alternative rock band on the weekends, but by the end of the transaction, I don't know what it was, perhaps that he offered to wrap my tiny purchase in a big stupid Radio Shack bag, but I found myself thinking, "No, he's the kind of waste-of-protoplasm nerd that Radio Shack always hires." I've been shopping at Radio Shack since before their 1982 catalog came out ("New for '82!"), and it's amazing how consistent their personnel have been across such a large swath of both time and space even as the retail electronics market, as well as the status of nerds, have completely transformed.


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