Good Morning. Hello. How are you? #1354
Morning internet outage, woodworking, gardening, elbow doctor, 30 Rock, Rings of Power, a nice thing Chase did waaaat, weird dude at the hardware store, Jane twirls, spray foam mess, His name is Alive
Hey what’ sup. Happy Monday woo woo. I am already irked cuz I just had a 30 minute outage on my internet, thus fucking up my over-scheduled Monday schedule at 8:30 AM. Woo hoo. Off to a great start. Was it the wi fi routers? The switch? The Modem? Who knows! Restart it all and eventually it worked again. But you gotta restart it all in just the right order. It’s comical how brittle the Internet is still. It will survive a nuclear blast, but not, like, a sneeze.
Lovely weekend, though. Let’s see… since I last talked to you…
I went to the arm doctor and got another shut into my elbow, second of three, supposedly going to help my 2-year-old tennis elbow go away. Doctor didn’t keep me waiting 30 minutes this time so I didn’t have to walk out. No one discussed that prior incident. Very weird. But the shot is in the elbow, hurt a lot for a day, now it’s back to its normal hurt amount.
Saturday Jane and I did our Bojangles/Dunkin/Hardware store run. Jane had donated a bunch of toys to a charity for Western NC, so I was buying her a new car from the car stand at Lowe’s. She was, as ever, taking forever to decide, like kids do. An old man in a wheelchair being pushed by a young lady came up and stopped and kept saying “she’s just so cute” and, like… I know? But also… awkward? We were stuck there because Jane was lost in car choosing and the dude just kept saying it over and over and it was real weird. But finally we got away and looked at sub floors and soffit vent sealers and cement boards and all the things i will need for the next phase of the attic now that the spray foam is in…
…except then we went to Chore House and it was.. I mean, the spray foam was done but the project was not done. Mess everywhere. Hole in my ceiling still — the one they put in the ceiling, the one I put in the ceiling was conveniently patched up. The attic itself is a mess. And — not that I’m surprised by this — there was foam everywhere. As in not a lot of attention was paid to my meticulous instructions to leave me room in each roof bay to get the hardwood paneling in and the beams exposed. I mean I am not really sure why I bought four inches of spray foam when I got six? Does this always happen? Probably. Dudes doing the foam think they’re helping.
So now I gotta clean the whole thing up. I mean. They are coming back today, supposedly, to clean up the attic and the mess in general and patch the ceiling, but I doubt they’re gonna grind away two inches of spray foam from every bay. And in any case, I’m not exactly 100% sure yet excactly how much I want to grind away, so this is going to be a me job, I can just tell. It’s gonna be a mess. Basically they make these attachments for pneumatics that are like eight wire brushes attached to each other on a pole, on a rake-like device, and you go through each bay and gring the foam back. Not gonna suck at all, nope. Not adding two, three weeks to my project at all, nope, and since I get one, maybe two days a week tops on this project, we’re talking like, oh, ten to fifteen extra weeks added to this project. Doesn’t suck at all nope nope nope.
I suppose I could tell them to either fix it or give me $2k off so I can buy that dumb tool. Gah.
Anyway I consoled myself the rest of Saturday in the garden and greenhouse, and it was lovely. Got a little herb garden going in the greenhouse. Planted some broccoli starts and started some more broccoli seeds. Filled in the carrots where the seeds didn’t take. Fixed some drip irrigation. Planted another row of succession planting lettuce. Planted some celery. Pulled up two giant thai basil plants that were going to seed. Cleaned some spider webs. Vacuumed. Did some organizing. Very satisfying day!
Sunday did some playground time with Jane and got super despondent about living in suburbia and the whole tedium of the thing. Got it under control, though. In the immortal words of His Name is Alive, this world is not my home I’m just passing through. Saw a (very young, too young) dad wearing a Datadog shirt. Datadog being our third largest expense at work after people and AWS, thought about asking for a discount.
And he would have to give it, too.
That’s playground law.
Oh hey reader Mike sent me this photo. My new enemy.
Though apparently his song selection was pretty solid!
Was going to try and fix my Plex server this weekend but some light Googling made me realize it’s a much taller order than I had hoped. Will require all these skills I have, but haven’t used in, like, ten, twenty years, so I will have to remember how to do each and every one of them. And it’s all in Linux so, you know, more opportunity to fuck up. And it’s not a 100% given any of them will actually fix it. It’s all messed up and I am sad. I miss my Plex.
After the suburban existential angst and the Plex trauma, I decided I needed a comfort day so I did some woodworking and started building my miter saw stand, for which I bought the wood like six months ago. But it is happening now. I mean, I didn’t get very far. Had to clear out that entire side of the garage, that took forever. Set the miter saw up somewhere else on a temporary basis. Plan the thing. But I did get the tabletop for the saw part done, and I got my cut list done for the whole thing, then got the nine legs assembled, and the frame for the left counter assembled. Baby steps. When will I have time to work on it again? Who knows. But it healed the soul this weekend, and I am thankful.
I am learning to be more patient as a woodworker. Take the time you need. Measure twice. Go slow. It’s not a rush. I just have to accept that I have like two years, three years of projects, and trying to rush through them will not help things. Enjoy the process. Insert bestselling selfhelp book here. There probably is one, right? Zen and the art of wordworking or some shit? Anyway, it’s true, all of it.
I am listening to the last disc in the His Name is Alive box set right now, the bonus material from Home is in your Head. Warren/HNIA is on tour right now, touring for this box set, playing the songs from these albums he never deigned to play on those actual tours. A friend of a friend said he is “doing the His Name is Alive show I always wanted to see,” and I am so jealous. Seen the dude like ten times but never a, like, solid 4AD bliss-out gothy set. He is a relentless experimentor, creator, and his mind and artistic zeitgeist is always a year or two past his fans. By the time you see him tour an album, his thoughts are two albums ahead, so by and large, seeing His Name is Alive has, historically, been an exercise in feeling disoriented and excited. Which is great! But you never get “the hits.” Until now. In, like, four cities. Chapel Hill is not, quelle surprise, one of them. Alas.
Emma and I finished a re-watch of 30 Rock this weekend. Sad to see it go. Great show. A shocking number of the jokes still work, a few are problematic but the ratio is decent. There are like five jokes across the seasons about Weinstein’s lechery, which is really something. Regarding the last episode, I just realized there is a solid GE burn in it — now that Jack Welch is discredited, it’s so easy to get CEOship of GE that Jack can just waltz right into it. And I think Kenneth might be Jesus, huh. Or an Istari. And Rural Jurer is the greatest thing ever. Anyway it’s shocking how well the show holds up, and seven seasons is a good run and they ended at the right time.
Finished Rings of Power and boy did they stick the landing. That show is getting better. Of course I’m all immersed in Tolkien now so maybe I’m biased, but it seems like there are plenty of Tolkien trainspotters out there who are butthurt about the canon adjustments. Not I! I was slightly confused about the beginning though: like… Arondir mentions Beleriand at one point, but in Galadrien’s narration at the beginning, no mention. Morgoth gets overthrown, they keep the fight going. No mention of, oh, I don’t know, the gods completely rearranging the continents. And Sauraon killed her brother but everyone thinks he’s gone? So I started a re-watch of Season one and, yeah, it works. Her narration and the events — Morgoth’s defeat, Sauron overthrown by Adar and the orcs, Finrod’s death, Sauron’s return. It all works and it works with canon, you just couldn’t have known that at the time. Which, you know, is my point: maybe give a show a chance before you whine about no canon.
Or you could watch it knowing none of this stuff and it works pretty well. Dude who plays Celebrimbor really delivers in the end. Great actor.
I would like to shout out, god help me, Chase for telling me that they will be calling me about some security confirmation thing, but also that they told me the last four digits of the number from which they are calling, so I don’t have to answer every damn spam call for a few days. That is very considerate.
All right Ima letchoo go we are running late much to do today. We went to get pizza Saturday at the dying mall and inside the dying mall, there were these girls doing twirls, so Jane decided she needed to do twirls too. Got real obsessed with it. So Emma and I had to sit on this bench in a dead mall watching our daughter and two teenage girls all inexplicably do ballerina twirls and.. it was kind of a lovely American pastiche. Very True Stories.
I wonder if that film holds up.
Anyway here is a picture of it.
All right Justa Mix for you I swear I am done with Mike Kroll. Love julie. Liking a lot of the songs on the new Wolfgang Press, this is one that sticks with me. Got some weird stuff toward the end cuz I am listening to those weird sort-of Jazz albums my friend Graydon recommended. Second and third tracks released from the upcoming new Primal Scream are a lot more my speed than the first one. And I am a sap, I admit, but I love the new Snow Patrol.
Talk to you tomorrow, peace out, bruh.