Good morning. Hello. How are you? #1203
Assorted appendage doctors and bench buildings, revamped recycling system, gardening, the gardening hat, induction cooker update, stir fry update. Daddy School: Colonization edition.
Good morning. Hello. How are you? Good weekend? I do hope so. I, myself, have had a busy few days. Friday I went to two different appendage doctors and they have both done great work! My sexy finger doctor (only works on sexy fingers) gave me another shot to make my trigger fingers go away, but she told me this is it, this is the end of the road. After these shots wear off, probably 3-4 months, it is time for surgery, assuming these shots won’t magically fix things, which they won’t. I am okay with this. I am sick of trigger finger, sick of not being able to make a fist, sick of two fingers always, always hurting. I wish every doctor was like “let’s just get this fixed once and for all with surgery.” I wish all my doctors could say with any confidence whatsoever what the problem is and that it can, in fact, definitively be fixed. Just a joy, just a joy.
The sexy foot doctor was not quite as satisfying but he still ranks up there in quality doctor visits. First off, when you come in complaining about pain, they just fucking take an X-ray of the pain area. I love this. I hate when you have to go through three, four rounds of just dumb stuff before they finally say “oh maybe we should look inside and see if anything is broken,” which they are finally scheduled to do, on my head, this Friday, after, oh, I don’t know, years. Anyway, in this case, there was nothing broken in my foot, so it was probably unnecessary but so what. I like the certainty. Also, foot x-ray machines are cool. Also the doctor blessed my On Cloud shoes as the best I should be wearing for this foot issue.
He sent me off with steroids (yes!) and a boot. I have never worn “the boot” before. Been wearing it for three days now. Getting used to it. Biggest problem is the indoor-outdoor thing, because we take our shoes off at the door, and I don’t want to be tracking all sorts of shit into our house we live in a society. He had me sign a document when he gave me the boot, which said it was $411, but they are for sale on Amazon for $69. So even though I’m only wearing this thing for three weeks, I bought a second one. I was originally just using giant painter booties, and those work great for the indoor-outdoor problem, but also, the thing gets sweaty when you spend all weekend in 90+ degree weather, outside, gardening n shit. So I needed a second inner sleeve, which you can not buy on Amazon and don’t seem to be able to buy anywhere unless you’re a foot doctor. Weird.
So, yeah. I am in a boot for a month, which is fine. I wish they did this with my elbow — just fix it. I will take the sure, difficult way over the easy, no-guarantee way every time.
Despite two doctor’s visits, Friday was a work day and boy oh boy did I get a lot of shit done. I just want to say that. It was great. Also the team killed it with the Tumblr sitch (yep, still monetizing Tumblr over here, a decade-plus later) and the throttling/filtering/machine learning stuff. We are old school. It is not AI. It is machine learning. Viva la 2020.
Saturday morning Jane and I did the Bojangles, Lowe’s Hardware, Dunkin-for-Munchkins weekend routine. Jane got a toy car. Bojangles has installed a UV anti-covid system, but it is not turned on, weirdly. It has a lot of bugs inside of the light bays. Hrm maybe it’s not for covid at all maybe it’s just for flies. We ran into Jane’s kindergarten assistant teacher at Dunkin’ and they were both so happy see each other, and hugged, and man, it really warms the heart.
At Lowe’s I bought small recycling bins to revamp our recycling system based on the information provided to me on that county recycling MRF tour a month or so ago. Small plastic will get caught up with the paper, so I am going to self-recycle that stuff in the style of Brother’s Make. The small metal needs to go to the scrap metal bin. The solo cups need to go to the park in Cary that mysteriously, somehow, recycles Solo cups. The to-go containers that can’t be recycled will be used for transporting and storing garden produce. Need one more bin for light bulbs. The styrofoam goes to the monthly styrofoam recycling day at the county dump.
Except no one calls them dumps anymore.
I am very excited about my new recycling paradigm and you will probably hear way, way too much about it. One small trash bag a week. That is the goal.
Whoops just had to do an unscheduled field trip to follow Emma and Jane to the dentist in a separate car, because Jane was resisting and Emma is sick of carrying Jane screaming into medical establishments, so I was there to do that part in case of need. But it seems the mere presence of that possibility got Jane to come round go inside.
While driving there and back my music played “I’m too Sexy” by Right Said Fred backed into a song by the freak-folk-turned-crooner musician Entrance, whom I spent a good weekend with drinking in 2005 or so after he played the Slint ATP. Excellent week, that was.
I am confident no one else in the history of time has heard Right Said Friend segue into Entrance. I am alone.
Since we’re on the topic of music, I am listening to a softer focus by claire rousay. It is mellow and haunting and beautiful, A+.
Rest of the weekend was spent gardening and working on the gardening bench. And a small pink workbench for Jane so she can keep me company in the garage while I’m working. I harvested a ton of cucumbers, lots of basil. Greenhouse is not proving great for the tomatoes, I think it is too hot and I did not self-pollinate them, that is a thing I am going to have to research. The carrots, beets, and beans are doing great. Peppers in the greenhouse kill. It is too hot for leafy greens or onions in there probably a winter planting. The strawberries have mostly given up the ghost for summer.
The garden bench is so complicated. This really is the moment where all the problems for Future Rick come home to roost. In theory, the garden bench is only medium complicated — holes in the countertop for a sink and a potting screen, and a pull out for trash and compost bins underneath. I thought once I had gotten the countertop done it would be smooth sailing, but I was kidding myself. Every service comes into the greenhouse right where the bench goes — the water, the data, the electric. So the walls are covered with conduit, pipes, cables. Which means you can’t just build a tabletop and put legs on it. Every leg has to be in a specific place. It is a nightmare. After three solid days (I started last weekend) of framing the base, planing all the lumber, cutting, marking, and completely re-working twice, I think I’ve gotten to a place that works. Now I just need to sand it, paint it, put it back in the greenhouse, then build the shelf underneath, paint that, attach the base to the top, then attach the shelf to the base. It is taking forever.
But it is gonna be so, so cool.
And along with it, man, you just wait. Jane’s workbench is gonna be so cute.
Bought a giant fold-out spray booth to paint this stuff. Very excited to try that out.
A few other weekend items:
The Hat that everyone says is “the hat I was looking for” was probably right. I have now obtained the hat (thank you, Pool Partners) and it is just great. I love it. Here is the hat. The Hemlock Hat company is sold out. So is Amazon. But it is on REI. Enjoy (this is for you, Gavin). Also, I don’t know why I never thought of this, but I love just flipping the hat back and letting it hang down my back, round my neck, when I’m in the garage. Then I just flip it back on before I go out in the glaring, glaring sun. This hat rules. A+ hat. Rick recommends.
I have finally abandoned the stalwart email-myself app Captio, which has had a spot on my phone homescreen for maybe ten years. It’s amazing. You tap it, you make a note, hit send, it emails to you. That’s it. I love it. I live for it. BUT, it is essentially abandonware, so it is not keeping with the times, which means no widgets, siri support, Apple Watch support, etc. So I couldn’t use it in the shower, while driving, all the places you most have brilliant inspirations and need to capture them. So I have replaced it with app the cleverly-named app Quick Notes: Email Me. And now it works on my watch when my phone is not in reach, and it works while driving. I love it so much. It’s been three days and I am already so much more productive, remembering stupid chores and getting them added to the appropriate lists, etc. Just the best. Rick rcommends.
My stir fries are back up to 20+ ingredients it is getting out of control. No meat anymore, though. I have been using peanuts or Quorn faux-chicken nuggest. I used these in the past, and I liked them so-so. Thought I’d try them again. Quorn changed the cooking directions, no longer recommends microwaving, only frying and sauteeing, and, man, they are so right. I fry them in an Asian sauce on the weekend, then toss some into my famed 21-gun stir fry, and they are just fantastic. Ricks recommends.
OH. And I accidentally burned out the bottom of that amazing induction cooker I bought (Rick recommends). Which sucked cuz the thing was not cheap, and it filled the house with acrid burning plastic smell. I turned on the burner below it. I did this about a month ago. And pretty quickly, I just sucked it up and bought another one. And I removed the actual burner knobs for the burner underneath the induction cooker. And, in the intervening month, I have reached for that knob maybe four times. I just reached for it again this weekend. How long will my brain keep trying to burn the induction cooker, I wonder. A year? Two years? Poor Emma. Every time she has to use that burner, she has to put the knob back on.
Emma is taking care of Janet’s shoulder replacement recovery, which is slooow. And through a quirk in Janet’s schedule, it’s been easier for Emma to do Jane bedtime the last two days, so no Daddy School for a few days now. BUT we did Daddy School on Friday, we finally got to Colonization. She does not think Colonization was very nice. We didn’t do slavery yet. But we did do Christopher Columbus who is not a very kind man, Jane says. It’s interesting, I explained to her colonized land, stealing the land, and how the land we live on was probably stolen. She understands that was wrong but does not feel any personal guilt over it. I explained to her how when I was a kid they taught me that Columbus was just ducky and she didn’t think that was very interesting: just that I had bad teachers. It went better than I thought.
While at Walmart we started talking about Surveillance Capitalism and she said we should do a Daddy Bedtime about it, lol, Shoshana Zuboff at age six sure why not.
She does not like learning from me not at Daddy School. She needs the plushies and the role of teaching assistant to pretend she already knows the things. She loves learning but hates not knowing, hates someone teaching her, so in a way the whole thing is theater. But boy, it gets the trick done.
I think maybe it is probably better to get all these dire concepts into their head when they’re still fundamentally happy and optimistic, so they never have to have the trauma of finding out a dark truth.
Maybe.
Just a mix today. Almost all new, from the last few weeks, except for the Waterboys (no one answered my query about the college girl’s shirt, btw. Except maybe she was an actual sports waterboy, which, yeah, okay) and A-Ha, because I miss that record so much. Enjoy.
Talk tomorrow!