Good morning. Hello. How are you? #1160
A great weekend of chores. Table saw industry paranoia. Donating blood. Turtle sunbathing platform. Deathcab and Postal Service. More garden bench planning. Daddy school.
Hey ho let’s go good morning yo. Monday AM first thing, in the immortal words of the vastly underrated Boston band Think Tree. Were they industrial? Electronica? Humor? Goth? All of it, yes. I guess they defied categorization, to their commercial detriment, despite counting Trent Reznor as a booster. Alas. You are missed.
Jane is off today, teacher workday. She is sitting on the pot right now with the Playdate. She loves that thing. I am glad it’s getting some use.
Wonderful weekend, really top notch. Where to even begin. After I left you Friday I went and got my neck shots which fucking rule. Maybe 30 shots with little doses of muscle relaxer right into the neck. It is the greatest thing. Hurts a bit for a couple days and then improvement for a month or so. A+ strong recommend if you were born with a fused neck that no one has the stones to unfuse.
Then Walmart, which is still being remodeled and I am not a fan of what they’re doing to the place, upscaling it, moving everything. It is taking forever. The app is not updated with the current location of everything. AND they have put the spray paint behind locked cabinets which, just, no. So I guess I’ll just be buying that from the Ace Hardware from here on out, which is fine, but grrr.
Oh! I also donated blood. They were at Walmart so I figured I would do my civic duty. I hadn’t donated blood in years, and that is sorta inexcusable. But definitely no excuse when it’s right there. It was in a comfy RV. My hemoglobin levels are great. They told me afterward to not do any heavy lifting so of course I went straight to Chore House and moved twenty bags of dirt. It was fine. I didn’t feel faint at all. And it was an excuse to have a snickers. A+ would do it again. Really solid software for registering, too. Even if there are a lotta dodgy questions about sex and drugs.
After that… well I don’t remember. Work, obviously. But it was a Friday and I had no meetings and no outstanding tasks so it was one of those “try to do other things while monitoring your email” kind of days. Emma did bedtime. I watched videos on table saw safety. Lotta rumors and paranoia flying around in the table saw industry, let me tell you. People freaking out that Sawstop has agreed to donate its last remaining patent around the split-second stopping of sawblades the second they contact flesh, provided the government mandates that all future saws are equipped with the technology. This would be a good thing, you would think, but a ton of people are very upset about it because it will supposedly make small jobsite saws, like mine, obsolete because they are too expensive. And it will also magically make all of our old table saws disappear. I don’t buy either of these theories, of course. Because economics. And because contractors routinely buy other tools needed on the jobsite that cost $800 and the world keeps spinning. But even if this does happen: A) 40,000 people hurt themselves on table saws every year because b) everyone is a giant tool and as soon as they buy a table saw they take the blade guard and riving knife off. I mean, seriously. Watch YouTube. No one has their blade guard on. We are a nation of immature babies and we deserve the nanny state because we’re incapable of taking care of ourselves, especially southern and pac northwest macho dudes in their man caves.
Woah. Digression. Sorry.
Anyway, Saturday was great. We had a Viridian crew over at our house and they pulled up and shredded three giant pampas grass bushes and bagged up the shredded grass and brought it to chore house so I could use it as mulch. they did the same with this sad, dying juniper hedge in our front yard. Cut it up, pulled it up, shredded, bagged, and moved it. Now it’s spread out on the driveway at chore house drying out. Meanwhile I placed and leveled the two new Birdies Beds. Then the crew loaded up all of the stuff they cut, along with all of the compost that had been brewing at our main house for years. Brought it all to Chore House and started loading up the beds hugekcultur style. Only not with this stuff, with the last batch of shrubbery that we had torn up over at Chore House that had been drying in the sun for a month or so. Confusing, I know. But now I have tons of extra mulch material, and both new beds are fully built. I also got to use up all the spare bags of vermiculite and Crab and Lobster shell that were laying around on the greenhouse.
One of the chief benefits of all of this is that all weekend Jane kept pointedly using the word “Shrubbery” and it was just the cutest.
And! I strung up my tomatoes. It was mildly terrifying being on the ladder that high up in the greenhouse, but I got it done and they look great. Look at them!
Man. The greenhouse is really coming along. Love love love it. Got a bunch done on the garden bench, too. My sink and under-cabinet pull-out trash cans have arrived, and I have chose just the exact right black bin to be under the counter to catch dirt from potting. I traced all three onto poster board and I cut out their shapes, and moved them around to various places on the cardboard countertop mockup I had previously made. I got them into places I liked, taped em down, and brought the whole thing back into the greenhouse and placed it exactly where the garden bench will go. Now I’m gonna live with it for a week or so to see if anything comes up.
Please ignore my giant belly in that reflection I am working on it. Oh god it’s all I can see body dysmorphia go away shoo.
Anyway I felt real good about all that.
Saturday night we got a babysitter (thank you, Lily) and the wife, mother-in-law and I went to Raleigh to see Deathcab for Cutie and the Postal Service. They were doing the entirety of the albums Trasatlanticism and The Postal Service. We met up with our friend Nora and her friend who is also Emma’s hairdresser.
I had not seen Deathcab since the Middle East in Cambridge, I think the last time I saw them was 2001 for The Photo Album. Used to see them all the time, but I think I have listened to Trasatlanticism once ever? I mean, I love that “The New Year” song, though. It was the first song of the set, so I waited for that and then I set out to find one of those giant ridiculous frosty beverages some people had. I found them. It was a margarita that came in a giant rocket-shaped cup. It was thirty-five dollars. It was worth every penny.
Anyway, my mini-review of the show is that Ben Gibbard’s vocals are too high in Deathcab, the guitars and synths are too low. Better in the Postal Service because they gotta match him to Jenny. Man that Postal Service album has a lot of bangers, there are like two filler songs on the whole album it really is something. Super joyous. Last time I saw the Postal Service at Coachella in 2013 I didn’t really pay much attention. And the time I saw them at the Middle East when the album came out, I didn’t really know it yet. So this time was probably my favorite of the three tours. A+ would recommend.
I am, however, peevish that the encore was not their Phil Collins cover. Come on, man. This is Phil erasure.
Sunday I got to do something even more ridiculous. I have not talked about this yet, but at my wife’s request I have been designing and building a giant Turtle sunbathing platform for our pond. It will have ramps on the side, so the turtles can climb up on it. It will be balanced so it does not flip if a big turtle climbs on a corner, and it will be anchored so that it sits in a specific part of the pond that is most visible from our dining nook window.
The platform is four feet by four feet, made from pressure-treated lumber. It will be painted on the bottom with anti-fouling marine paint formulated for fresh water, and on the top with marine top-coat paint and marine top-coat grip paint. It will be ballasted by pool noodles wrapped in the old garbage bags from the aforementioned shrubbery trimming.
It is going to be so great.
The main platform is built, BUT I needed to find the water line, and check buoyancy and stability. And I can’t really do this in the mucky pond. So I asked our neighbors if I could use their pool to check it out. And it is still cold, so they heated up the hot tup for me, not the whole pool. Emma thought this whole thing was hilarious and fun, so she and Jane came along, which proved great, because Jane made the perfect giant turtle for balance tests.
And the whole thing worked great! It floated at exactly the right level when I added to the bottom exactly the number of pool noodles that I had guessed.
Sunday night was daddy bedtime and we did daddy school and we picked up with the Egyptians, and talked about the Nile and its water bringing life to the desert. We talked about Pharaohs and gods and, or right, now we gotta explain what a god is, because she’d never heard of such a thing. We talked about the afterlife and tombs and the Pyramids. Then we started on China but to do that we had to talk about how Africa and Europe and the Middle East all kind of knew each other but China developed separately. And we talked about perspective and what ancestors were and how we’re in America but we’re of European descent, but that doesn’t mean Europe is more important than other place. Eurocentricism. In truth we didn’t really get started on China yet but rather set the stage. And how China and Egypt were two countries that were really old but still around today, unlike Catuk Hayuk and Sumer and Babylon and Cahokia and the Indus River Valley.
It was good shit and I think she got about 70% of it. Brown Bear, though, he’s really picking up what Daddy school is laying down.
Got a country playlist for you today. Mostly new, a few oldies. Excited about this Glen Campbell and Hope Sandoval, man, there is a pairing for you. I am growing to absolutely love the new Phosphorescent it is great.
Y’all take care now, y’hear?