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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   tiny taco in Woodstock
Sunday, August 16 2015
My firewood gathering today continued at the fallen skeletal oak where I'd gathered wood for the previous two days. Today's load came to 111 lbs, though my GreenWorks saw started mysteriously overheating and acting unreliably towards the end of today's use of it. I'm gradually coming to the conclusion that GreenWorks as a brand is a bit too shoddy for my needs. Sure, I can usually find ways to repair my equipment, but there's always something else just around the corner. What I want is for my battery-powered chainsaw to work as reliably as my Hitachi hammer drill, which continued to work without interruption even after the Subaru fell on it.

At around 1:00 this afternoon, I called for the dogs because I was about to go run an errand. But Eleanor was asleep and her bad hearing failed to wake her up, so I just let her sleep and ran my errand with just Ramona. The errand involved driving out to Susan & David's house just east of Woodstock and letting their dogs Olive and Darla out for a bathroom break. They don't have a dog door and rely on people being there at regular intervals. Since Darla and Olive have developed a hostile relationship with Ramona and Eleanor, I had to leave Ramona in the car while attending to them. As always, Olive was initially barky, but Darla was sweet and unreservedly delighted to see me. After some initial bewilderment and urinations, they ran around the yard at high speed. I attempted to let Ramona out in the driveway area, since it is separated from the dog area by a fence, but when Darla and Olive started barking at her, she retreated into the Subaru. At some point Olive escaped through a mysterious hole in the fence, but, after taking the opportunity to roll in something, she was good about coming back. While there, I built a bluestone cairn using small flat pieces scattered beneath the trees in a little patch of forest between the yard and Chesnut Hill Road.
While in the Woodstock area, I decided to drop in on Gretchen unannounced at her workplace, a little bookstore on Tinker Street. Woodstock was crowded with slow-moving car-oblivious pedestrians, and all the legal parking spaces were taken. But I knew something all these out-of-towners did not: there is no parking enforcement in Woodstock (well, Gretchen got a ticket once, but it was after hundreds of hours of illegal parking). So I parked right in front of the bookstore in a place where the yellow curb kept the pavement free of tourist automobiles. I saw Gretchen talking to the co-owner of the bookstore when I walked in, so I turned Ramona loose. Gretchen is always happy to see a dog in the bookstore, and initially she thought it was some other delightful black Pit mix. But then she realized it was her very own Ramona. It turned out that Gretchen could take a little break (the co-owner would cover for her), so we went out to stroll through Woodstock and get a bite to eat. The options at the spanakopita tent were limited and would take 15 minutes to prepare (I know, right?), so we decided to try a brand new taco place called Tinker TacoLab. Unfortunately, they hadn't put much consideration into a meat-free menu, and they'd put even less consideration into a animal-product-free menu, but Gretchen was able to order me some kind of miserable little taco that cried out for some source of umami. You would think in the absence of cheese, someone behind the counter would have thought to throw some refried beans in there, but alas, the idea occurred to nobody. Fortunately, Gretchen had ordered refried beans as a side. It looked disgusting, but it tasted pretty good, and definitely improved my tiny taco after I transplanted some into it. Meanwhile, Gretchen was also eating a tamale, which seemed pretty good. But all we talked about was the well-established fact that delicious vegan tacos are not exactly the stuff of rocket science. Meanwhile, Ramona was making various friends, all of them human. One of her new human friends looked to be about five years old. It was a hot day, and the umbrella provided for our outdoor picnic table in front of Tinker TacoLab cast a decidedly weak shade.
I said goodbye to Gretchen at the store and then checked both Woodstock hardware stores for a rubber-wheeled roller for use in installing all the new faux wood vinyl flooring in the basement, but neither place had such a tool. (Indeed, I might have to make my own from a caster.)

Since first noticing its climbing behaviour, I've been trying off and on to identify that vigorously-growing cucurbit sprawling out of the garden. Today I used a research strategy that has occasionally worked in the past: I did a Google image search for a search phrase (in this case, "tiny hairy cucumbers") and then visually scanned the resulting images. In an instant, I found what I was looking for. It turns out that the plant is a native North American weed called the Bur Cucumber, Sicyos angulatus. It is indeed a member of the gourd family, though its fruits never get bigger than 3/4 of an inch across and contain only one seed each. The claim is that the fruit is inedible, but if they're harvested early enough they seem like they'd be tasty. In any case, no, to my disappointment, this plant won't be producing anything resembling a garden vegetable. In the meantime, though, at least it is making the local bee population very happy.

On my weather station project, today I further refined the behavior of the client when displaying temperature data so as to filter out bad records on the SD card resulting from spurious communications with the barometric windvane. I've slso successfully migrated my graphing code so that it looks at the SD card data, but I still have some glitches to debug in that code. When I'm not actively working on it, I let the weather station client log data so I can catch any reliability issues that crop up.


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http://asecular.com/blog.php?150816

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