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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   sad-looking everything bagel
Wednesday, April 12 2017
It was cool and drizzly this morning as I drove out to the Wall Street house, whose tenants mostly just pay their rent and don't bother us. But the strong winds and deep snow from the March blizzard had caused some outdoor issues that one of the tenants had made us aware of. So there I was, straightening up a low picket fence along the driveway of the neighbor to the north, which had been partially knocked over snow pushed by a snowplow. The eastmost four feet of that fence was so hoplessly rotten that I just threw it away. I also threw away the plastic domes covering two basement window wells on the house's south side. These had been crushed by the snow and were so brittle from years of exposure to ultraviolet light that they crumbled into little shards. Between the two window wells, hidden behind a bush, was a dead adult rabbit with a bloody neck injury. Not knowing what else to do, I dug a hole in a pile of discarded potting soil in the backyard and buried the unfortunate symbol of springtime fecundity. While there, I noticed that the beautiful house to the east (fronting on Fair Street) had a couple of very expensive-looking bicycles chained to the back fence. This suggested the tenants were no longer the marginal Section-8 folks who had been living there. Perhaps they were pickle-making hipsters in a wave of neighborhood gentrification we'd begun.
Inside the house, I went into the basement to determine why the spin cycle on the washing machine was no longer functional. The tenant thought maybe the dial had slipped loose or something. But after lots of testing, I wasn't able to get the machine to enter a spin cycle no matter what I did. At that point I heard someone walking around in the house overhead, so I went up and introduced myself. It the boyfriend of one of tenants, and he seemed nice enough as white male millennials go. I tried to act in a way that would lead him to think that I'm pretty nice as pathetic old stringy-haired landlords go. (The man and woman who'd rented from us a year ago have split up, though the woman still lives there, now with another woman as a housemate.)
Then up in one of the bedrooms, my main task was to reattach a little hinged arm designed to hold a window treatment. This required a drill, which I'd neglected to bring. But I did have a drill bit, and it was possible to turn that with a screwdriver to bore a short distance into the wood. I then made the hole deeper using a nail with the tip snipped off. (Had I not snipped off the tip, the nail would've behaved like a wedge and possibly split yet more of the window frame. With a blunt end, a nail crushes the wood without splitting it.)

In the mid afternoon the power suddenly failed, so I decided to drive into town to get to a place with both power and WiFi. I had hopes of finding such a place in Woodstock after a visit to the Tibetan Center thrift store (where the score was two dog leashes and an LED headlamp), but 4:30pm is apparently an awkward time for businesses in Woodstock because Bread Alone was closed, and so too was R&R. Actually, the door to R&R was open, but the people in there were having a company meeting. So I ended up driving all the way out to 9W and going into Panera, which I knew would have WiFi and would definitely be open. Unfortunately, Panera's menu seems specifically engineered to drive away vegans such as myself. I knew better than to get the pesto vegetable soup, which clearly contains parmesan. So I thought I'd get a bagel and hummus even though Panera bagels are terrible and their humus tastes like kindergarten paste. But then it turned out that Panera doesn't have hummus, at least that's what the woman running the cash register said. They used to have hummus, but I guess it attracted the wrong sort. So I ended up settling for peanut butter. They don't exactly stock the gourmet stuff; the little cup of it the cashier provided with my sad-looking everything bagel tasted like Jif. Panera seems to be trying to present itself as some sort of wholesome health-conscious fast-casual chain, but on the ground it's just another sociopathic corporation, somewhere on the continuum that includes Google.com, your health insurance provider, and United Airlines. It's no surprise that I see so many morbidly obsese people hanging out there.
I mnaged to write mot of a generic PHP function designed to rename columns in a CSV before Gretchen sent me a Facebook message saying that the power was back on at home. On the way there, I stopped at Miron Liquor to reup my laboratory supply of gin and single-malt scotch.


For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?170412

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