Good Morning. Hello. How are you? #1193
Real Wild Child Aug 10. Installing drip irrigation. Carpet Shampooer ASMR. Gen-X's self deprecation pays dividends. A quantum hiccup involving a Spotify artist. Daddy school.
Good morning! Hi! Hello! How are you? Monday! Woo! I am listening to the new Record Store Day picture disc version of The Cure’s The Top. Shockingly clean sounding for a picture disc. Thank you to Chris Erickson for purchasing this and sending it to me. Very hard to make it to Record Store Day with a toddler. I am hoping to return to the fray soon of this fake capitalistic holiday. Love it. Where else can you meet so many introverted vinyl nerds in person.
Thank you all for your kind words about Megan. No word on a funeral yet, but I did find this obituary, which accurately captures some of the basic facts of her life but not her magic, but that is what most obituaries do. Personally speaking, I am okay with an obituary that does not try to capture the facts, but focuses on the magic. That’s just fine.
Excellent weekend all around. Jane was lovely, the fam treated me well for Father’s Day, I got a super sweet shirt here I will give you a rare Rick photo of it:
Is that the cutest or what? A t-shirt with a drawing of daddy gardening with Jane. So great. Also I desperately needed more white, long-sleeve high-tech summer fabric gardening shirts because I am annoyed with sunscreen and need to keep my arms and neck protected from the sun. Black shirts are great but also… super hot? It was 120 in that greenhouse this weekend!
Which is a problem! I had been procrastinating getting the thermostat all hooked up, relying on the chemically-actuated wall and ceiling vents to vent the place, but it was not enough. So I finally got the giant wall fan hooked up to the thermostat and set to 90 and now the thing is a very reasonable temperature and hopefully all of the wilting plants will be happier. Also, as you can see in the top right of that photo, I got the shade cloth spread over the main growing portion of the greenhouse.
And also! As you can see in the bottom right of that photo I got the drip irrigation installed! I am so excited! This was my big project for the weekend. I need to get all the drip done before we head to Boston/Somerville late July. And now it’s done in the greenhouse!
It’s also done in about… half the outdoor garden? The hard part is done, I ran drip tubing all the way behind and around the greenhouse to the garden outside of it. I was feeling too lazy to do the use-the-hose-as-a-tunnelling-tool approach to get a 1/2” drip pipe underneath the stone walkway to the greenhouse. I will do that some day when it’s cooler out. I actually gotta do two and they are such a pain. Not for this summer. So instead I’m going around.
I bought two goth black benches and put them along the outside of the greenhouse and put my lemon, lime, orange, tomatillo, banana, and lemongrass plants on it and hooked em up to the drip, along with the three Birdie’s Beds of peppers, cukes, basil, and tomatoes. I did not bother with the spring potatoes as they are ready to be harvested and not in their final position. Anyway, looks great. Look!
Ugh I leveled them with a level and everything but that one on the left needs some adjusting.
It is slowly starting, after a year, to kinda look like my vision. That piddly little fire pit probably isn’t going to cut it, and I need some Adirondack chairs, but solid (or even plywood!) Adirondack chairs are hella expensive and I am a glutton for punishment so I am going to buy the $50 template kit from Rockler and make my own. Someday. I do not know when. The temptation is to buy shitty plastic ones as temporary ones but that is exactly what I’m trying to avoid. So, no one gets to sit around the fire for, oh, a year or so.
Oh and here is a gratuitous photo of the pollinator meadow you will recall I made by killing off the grass with cardboard, manually tilling, spreading seed and mulch on the whole thing and watering forever. I love it when a project pays off.
Important news for you all: Next Real Wild Child, the goth dance night for toddlers and kids at the legendary Cambridge, MA goth club Man Ray, is August 10. Be there or be square. We are going to have goth face makeup and a photo booth this time, and I think we’ll do slightly extended hours, by one hour earlier, so there can be more time for wee kids with the music a little quieter and more time for slightly older kids with the music a little more loud. Oh and I think the signature cocktails will be slightly smaller. Might also plus it up a bit more on the snacks. If you went and had suggestions, let me know. And Emma is whipping up a new sweet flyer as we speak.
Carpet Shampooer. I listened to Wirecutter and bought the carpet shampooer that was best for red wine stains (no reason) and it arrived and this weekend I shampooed the carpet in the theater room. We don’t have a lot of carpet left but we have it in the game room and theater. It was so fun. Shampooing carpets rules. A+ strong recommend. What ASMR fun. Takes forever to dry, but part of that was just the learning curve, because it turns out the only reason I hadn’t done this sooner is because sometimes it’s scary to try new things and learn new things and as you get older this gets worse and I am convinced that the one true secret to staying young, the one true secret to rule them all, is to keep learning new things even when it is absurd.
I am now a man in white shirts with kids drawings on them with a giant gardening hat on it, happily playing around in the garden and getting up at 7 AM and all of this is the exact opposite of me even in my 40’s and sometimes I think it is really weird. And sometimes I go to Chicago and get hammered with my friends at the James Beard Awards like yesteryear and think “yeah, no, this is still totally aweseome. It’s not that my tastes changed, it’s not that I got old, it’s that I tried new things and now I like more things. We, especially Gen X, frame this in a self-deprecating way of “getting old and boring” but nah, we’re expanding our minds, maaaan.
Also fun fact we were totally right about self deprecation because it is the only true defense to internet trolls and cancellations, real or fake. Just say “yeah, you’re right I suck hahah” and move on and it all ends. Anyone remember Ian Svenonius’ cancellation? Nope. Because he was like “yeah I was terrible, cancel me, and now I go away into the night” and it lasted one (underground indie) news cycle. Anyone ever have some aggro weirdo (or, I don’t know, a six year-old, hypothetically speaking) get up in your face and tell you you suck and you’re just like “tell me about it?” And it just deflates them? This one great party trick.
Oh also I got a blood test while I was at the doctor and it included a rheumatoid panel which was fine but part of that panel is what’s called a CK test which tests for Creatine Kinase (logical name!), which is an enzyme your body makes when your muscles are in pain and my CK readings were through the roof, just like, oh, I don’t know, 50% over the upper bound of normal. So hey! Not making it up!
Ouch!
And I tried the new migraine medicine Rizatriptan Benzoate and it seems to help stave off migraines, but the second time I used it, while I was at the playground with Emma and Jane and Jane’s friends and their parents, my fingers suddenly started feeling tingly and like they were burning and it turns out this is a side effect of the medicine and it was so weird! I couldn’t use my phone because it felt like it was on fire. Emma girl-scoutedly had some freezer packs with her and I had to keep my fingers on them.
So: Interesting conundrum. Was the headache even going to happen? Because if it was, then yes: burnign fingers is better than a migraine. But if it wasn’t, well, then, I just gave myself burning fingers for no reason. A mystery! no way to know.
And it is weird this did not happen the first time I used the drug. I’m thinking cuz the second time, I took it along with an Advil/Tylenol mix. Hrm.
I headed to the hardware store Saturday buying irrigation drip hose made from recycled tires, and as I pulled into the lot, a great song called “Like Lovers Do” came on by an artist named Ellie Rønnenfelt. I just got the intro, but I really liked it.
Parked, went inside, bought my tubing, had a long walk with the cashier about my awesome phone case, came back outside started the truck, and while I was inside I had clearly switched quantum universes, because the artist formerly known as Ellie Rønnenfelt was not a man named Elias Rønnenfelt. Everything else about the universe was, as far as I could tell, unchanged. But there it was: absolute evidence of the multiverse theories, quantum mechanics, etc. etc. Just like when you lose your keys. Or you could have sworn you already took the trash out. I wonder what kind of dark quantum magic Ellie Rønnenfelt was messing with to cause such a change. I wonder if it was even them! Maybe a jilted ex lover. And, because I happened to be listening to her on Spotify, 50,553 total plays ever, I am an innocent bystander who has been sucked up into Ellie Rønnenfelt’s ex’s psychodrama. Very disconcerting.
Whatever happened, though, Ellie is now very handsome as Elias.
Jane Daddy School last night and she was too chaotic, didn’t feel like learning about trade routes and freedom of religion and the rise of the merchant class. I think we’re gonna need to pause a bit and talk about power. Abstract concepts like power and religion are non-entities to Jane. Abstract concepts like gravity and friction? No problem. But religion? Utterly inconceivable. Feel like I should try a bit more.
Oh shit got a phone call in 14 gotta go.
New mix for you. Volume 81 of thew W Hotel Lobby in a Better, Alternate Universe mix series. Fun fact, the idea for this series originated in the lobby of the W Hotel in Chicago, when I was visiting with Doug, like 12 years ago. And Doug and I were just back in Chicago. Though we did not go to the W. We stayed at the Hilton (because of Provasic) and it did not have music in the lobby. Still had mean guys who check for a key card after like 10 PM or so, though.
All right. My Mondays start with calls at 9AM now wish me luck.
that phone case is so cool. i considered buying one on the spot until i took my current case off my phone revealing that i had purchased a white iPhone. and then i remembered being at the store and not wanting to wait a month for a titanium one and figured i would never see the color of the phone anyway….oh boy. maybe the next one 😁