Hugh! I'm out of the loop. How'd you get so many fumes in you?

He was hanging around the skateboard factory sniffing the wheel molds again. I told you to cut that out, hugh.

Hugh's goo-goo for the glue?

It's a good thing you're not a big name in the entertainment industry (I assume) Hugh

Variety: Hugh's Glue Spew leaves Crew Askew!

Right, I was using polyurethane sealant over the weekend to caulk up some gaps in a double door that doubles as the wall between my apartment and my neighbor's. Hence the fumes.

I got some good reading done, though. Check this out, from Patrick Leigh Fermor's Between the Woods and the Water:

Ötvenes was the last of this particular concatenation of friends and houses and, like all the others, I had met the inhabitants that first evening at Tibor's. The family were Swabians who had settled here when these territories were regained from the Turks, and the spread of their acres had soon enrolled them into the dominant stratum. Can the preceding centuries of conflict be compared to the long process of Reconquista in Spain, with Ottomans instead of Moors? The earlier campaigns, with the victories of Hunyadi and Báthory and Zrinyi, bear a distinct affinity: but the energies of later Transylvanian heroes were spent in making the Principality, for a time at least, and under Turkish vassaldom, a bastion of Magyar liberties against the Habsburgs. Shrewd connubial skill in marrying the Hungarian royal heiress, and then declaring the crown hereditary instead of elective, had enabled the dynasty to swallow up Hungary; and when the emperor's armies at last advanced downstream, the Imperialists had come to look upon the liberated Hungarians as a conquered race. Hence the foreign settlements and the quantities of non-Hungarian names that suddenly scattered the redeemed lands. Strangers were summoned from abroad; during the last three centuries the Holy Roman Empire and the Kingdom of Hungary became cosmopolitan, and in nothing so much as the commanders of their armies; but their offspring had been assimilated long ago. As though to illustrate this, two brothers who came over from a nearby estate bore the famous Genoese name of Pallavicini. Were they descended from the margrave who murdered Cardinal Martinuzzi, the saviour of Transylvania, half-Venetian himself? I had just been reading about him, but didn't dare to ask. Another guest, a tall princess, married to an erudite naturalist landowner called Béla Lipthay, from Lovrin in the Banat, was a descendant (not direct, I hope) of Pope Innocent IX of the famous house of Odescalchi, lords of Bracciano.

Georgina, the daughter of the house, looked like a fair-haired Englishwoman on safari, and she was as good a horsewoman as Clara. Separated from a long-absent Czech husband, she was striving without much hope for an annulment in order to marry an even better horseman than either. He was sun-scorched, lean, delightful and stone deaf. Full of misgivings, her kind-hearted parents, and especially her mother, took the hazards of my journey very seriously. A son of hers had been in Brazil for fifteen years and if I had let her, she would have stuffed the whole of his wardrobe in my rucksack.

I can remember every detail of this house, and all the others; and the inhabitants, the servants, the dogs and the horses and the scenery are all intact. Perhaps being a stranger in this remote society knocked down some of the customary barriers, for I became an intimate of their lives, and feelings ran deeper and lasted much longer than anything warranted by the swift flight of these weeks in the marches of Transylvania. This particularly joyful sojourn was made even more so by the arrival of Ria for the last few days. We watched the building of an enormous rick and cantered through the woods on a paper-chase; and on my last day we discovered some rockets in a woodshed and sent them all up after dinner.

Every part of Europe I had crossed so far was to be shattered by the war; indeed, except for the last stage before the Turkish frontier, all the countries traversed by this journey were fought over a few years later by two mercilessly destructive powers; and when war broke out, all of these friends vanished into sudden darkness. Afterwards the uprooting and destruction were on so tremendous a scale that it was sometimes years after the end of it all that the cloud became less dense and I could pick up a clue here and there and piece together what had happened in the interim. Nearly all of them had been dragged into the conflict in the teeth of their true feelings and disaster overtook them all. But in this charming and cheerful household, the tragedy that smote in the middle of that grim time had nothing to do with conflict: a fire sprang up in the night and the whole family and the combustible manor house that contained it were turned to ashes.

Wow. That's wonderful, Hugh. I would love to read that book, I think. [after following links, amended to say, "that series of books"] I'm always mad about excellent, fact-based historical novels... but clearly I haven't encountered enough excellent historical documentary. At any rate, I'd be delighted to read anything as alive as this.

Yeah, I'ma have to get this off you. I have something in return.

Yeah, Fermor's fantastic.

Next on my shelf is Lawrence Durrell's Reflections on a Marine Venus, a recommendation from my father. I figure you've read/heard of it, taz, it being about Greece and all. If not, though, I'll prolly throw a little review up here once I'm immersed in it.

I haven't read it, and please do talk about it here!

Inhalation
This product is harmful if inhaled. This product may cause irritation to the respiratory system. Excessive inhalation of vapors from uncured product may cause wheezing, difficulty in breathing, tightness in the chest, headache, insomnia, fever, malaise, nausea, sore throat, and diarrhea. Other symptoms may include signs of CNS depression involving weakness, dizziness,
giddiness, loss of coordination and judgment, coma, respiratory arrest, and death. Symptoms may be delayed. This product may also cause allergic respiratory sensitization reactions.

Material Name: JM TPO Polyurethane Caulk Material Safety Data
Sheet ID: 3232 (PDF)

That's the ticket! TPO polyurethane caulk (grey) is some grody stuff.

Fermor sounds like a very cool dude. Irish Guards, SOE, behind the lines, etc.