Good morning. Hello. How are you? #1013
Jane still sick, Hulu login misery mystery, Please Elon charge for Twitter and spare us all, Substack's app is still ignoring creators, record collecting problems, dirty stove neurosis
Good morning, friend. 7:09 AM. Been up for a little under an hour. Watching Jane on the monitor. Made a game time decision to not send her again. These last few days have been rough, getting up at 6:20 for no reason just to decide she’s not going to go to school. It’s a tough decision, though ironically probably absolutely no one cares about it but me. Jane doesn’t care. She says she wants to go back to school and misses it, but only when prodded, and most of the time she’s completely content. Emma doesn’t care. Doubt the school cares. I suppose, on balance, the school would prefer me to not send a kid back who most likely has infectious conjunctivitis, but honestly, one does not get the sense they care much one way or the other. But she’s taking these eye drops six times a day and I’d have to go into the office and give them my only vial and explain the process and hope they do it right, and hope Jane lets them, and boy that whole process would pretty much call into question her levels of infectiousness. Not that they’d care. And, of course, this school gave it to her in the first place, so, you know, symmetrical bio warfare, I guess.
But no. I will be the one to break the wheel. Papa Picard says the line must be drawn here. Remember when Dani was gonna break the wheel? Before she was like “eh, it’s fine, I’ll be the wheel.”
Bedtime was fine (Emma and I are back on a 2:1 bedtime ratio as I make up my absence to her). Jane played a lot of lego on her own, then we did bed party which is becoming a fairly choreographed routine of the same games: The game where the wall is sticky. The game where my arm almost lands on her and she has to kick it away and I judge her kicks from 1-10. The game where she hides under the covers. The game where she flying jumps from the bed to the chair and back. That one is really impressive. She is unafraid of flying jumps, she just looks like a flying squirrel it is so funny. The tug-of-war on a rag game, where she used to have a chance of winning because of my trigger fingers on one hand and tennis elbow on the others but modern medicine has now given me a fighting chance. That game is called “pully dada” which is just too cute. Then Daddy Jane Dance Party where we did the silly-run-back-and-forth game, and the run-while-doing-spinny-winnie game, and meatball, and this kinda crazy new thing where she stands on the couch, does a flying jump, I catch her hands, and swing her between my legs, then back up on to the couch. Some full-on acrobat shit it is pretty crazy.
Hulu is either down for just me or it has decided we are sharing passwords because it won’t let us log in, won’t let us reset our password, the AppleTV App won’t even launch. If I go to the web version and type in my credentials they say they are invalid, and if I say “forgot password” for my email it does not send me a password reset email. It has done this once or twice in the past, we’ve reset it and it’s been fine. But this time… nada. I don’t know what’s going on. Do I need to make an all new Hulu account? Is this some sort of secret password sharing crack down? We share it with Jane, but she is our relative and she lives on the same property! Does she have a separate IP address? Well, sure, but… we’re not breaking the rules! Do I need to run fiber to Janet’s house don’t make me. It’s been like three days of this. I am very confused. I do have to admit, though, this obfuscated way of doing it would be really clever if it is a password crackdown effort. Like… Netflix made this big brouhaha about it and people got all annoyed with them and they had to partially, temporarily slow their roll and the investor class loved it but it was a brand nightmare. But it didn’t have to be that way. They coulda just…. done it, and then reported the results later to the investors. Of course they wouldn’t have gotten the bump in consensus next quarter stock prices, but it a secret way definitely has its advantages. I would not be all surprised if that were it, but I can’t find any mention of such a thing on the internet, so color me mystified.
Elon says he is gonna charge for Twitter and oh my god yes please yes I cannot wait no one is gonna pay for this and it will accelerate its demise and all of those journalists who insist on staying over there and validating it and all of those national weather service accounts and non-profits and all of that can just move to Threads and I will be so much happier. Please let this happen it really would be the greatest gift he could possibly give me.
Excuse me gotta go flip the record.
The stack of record packages when I got home from a week of travel really was somewhat embarrassing and I have been consciously trying to buy fewer records this week I think I have only bought three so far. I have 24 crates of these things, plus box sets and 7”s and a crate of 10”s and I have about 3 crates of LPs-without-crates on the floor and the only good thing about any of this is that I am going to build some record crates soon and that will be super fun. But I worry that once I can build my own crates, and I move most of my studio equipment to the new studio in a year or two, that if I’m not careful, this whole office will be completely overrun. I really gotta get it under control.
Jane just coughed a couple bad sounding coughs in her sleep so I feel like my decision was validated.
Substack released a new app this week and it looks pretty cool but related to our conversation last week it is still a consumption app, and offers us writers absolutely no tools and I feel like Substack is in that place from whence most olds start, where they think that no one writes serious, long-form essays on their phones but they are so, so wrong about this. Or maybe they’re gonna surprise me and come out with an iOS creators app soon which would be pretty sweet, actually. Why not. I would like that very much. You know, when I travel. Which is aspirationally never, though I apparently have to leave the house again in three weeks which is just a nightmare, I swear, I have only now gotten back on my schedule, five days after I got home.
And actually that’s not even true because remember my brilliant new keeping-the-stove-clean system where I clean the stove every day, immediately upon using it? Out the freakin window when Emma was operating as a single parent for a week. Pancake batter caked on the thing, salt everywhere, etc. I tried to wipe off the pancake batter but it’s gonna take some deep cleaning. Probably this weekend. Also I left my watch in Somerville and Jussi mailed it back but it’s not here yet so, no, still not back to normal.
Uh oh Jane calls. Back in an hour or so.
Hello I have returned. Jane is dressed, her bladder relieved, teeth brushed, fed, and I even got her drops in her eyes (thank you Ashley for giving my wife that hot tip) and a cold medicine in her. She did not like the Grape one. She likes the generic CVS one. We had 4 ml left. She is supposed to take 5. Close enough. I will go buy more.
Oh and you’ll be happy to know the stove is clean again.
Nature is healing.
Shoegaze for you today. Mostly new. New Veldt excited for that. New Medicine is pretty bonkers, barely shoegaze, almost industrial but melodic. New Slowdive is great, of course, and pretty into this Bedroom Eyes band they just keep delivering. I don’t know much about this Les Big Byrd but this song is great I wonder whats the deal with him/them must investigate.
Have tomorrow off, so I may or may not write. I gotta go to this training thing for the pool company so I can learn how to bill one of our clients. But I will do my best, fair reader, because you mean so much to me. Hugs.