Good morning. Hello. How are you? #1014
This one is so boring there is literally a section about paint drying. Plus some bitching about Justworks.
Good morning, friend. How are you? I am in rough shape. Tough morning. One of those mornings where Jane doesn’t have school, and I have work. She knows she’s supposed to come get me out of bed at 7:30 on the mornings she has no school, and I had a hunch that this was going to be an issue, so even though my alarm was at 6:40 on a non-school day, I stayed in bed, catching up on emails and whatnot, waiting for her. By 7:45 she had not come, and so I got up and brushed my teeth and got dressed. At 7:50 I heard some sounds outside my door, so I opened the door, and she was laying on the ground already, and immediately burst out in a blood curdling scream the minute she saw me. Which obviously woke up Emma. Which then lead to 45 minutes of absolute insistence that I go back to bed, only when I did she just stayed out there screaming, etc., etc., all through breakfast, eventually after breakfast we all got back in the bed and cuddled and she started to calm down. We got through breakfast and she was now in a good mood, and we were about to go downstairs and so she kicked back in her counter stool to get out, and she tipped the stool backwards and fell on the ground before I could catch her. Not really hurt but screaming again, had to be calmed down again. it is now 9 AM and all I’ve done on this very busy workday is calm my daughter down for an hour and a half.
The rest of the weekend was productive, though. Let’s see… Walmart run, productive. Second Walmart run with Jane on Saturday morning, to find clear allergy medicine and clear cough medicine because she doesn’t like colors? Mildly productive. Turns out you cannot trust the little drawings on the front of the Equate brand boxes of children’s medications. I mean WTF man what is the point of the drawing except to tell me the color of the friggin medicine. Anyway I have gotten her into a good routine with the medicines and Emma got her into one with the drops so we have our daughter nice and drugged but she is still like, oh, 12 days into this nightmare, this time, her second since school started three weeks ago god school sucks. She’s going back tomorrow, though, a week off is enough and she “misses her teacher.”
On the chore front I got so much done. I will confess this is because I commandeered one of the contracting company crews to help out. I got my four giant Iron Plant Apidistras transplanted away from the sunny spot outside my garage human door, and into a nice shady spot that can be seen from the walkway to the pediatric speech thereapy office. They also tore out all the rocks from that area and prepped it for a concrete pad. I built some forms for them on my nifty woodworking equipment, and got to use my big nailing gun for the first time. We didn’t get the concrete poured, though. Next weekend. I got my table saw assembled and up and running, and the new stand for the thicknesss planer built, the planer on the stand, and it’s a perfect height so the outflow from the planer can go right onto my workbench works great. I hung my handy-dandy Harbor Freight ceiling-mounted extension cord reel so I could get power to the planer. I spent a lot of time fussing with shop vac adaptors to get the dust collection working on everything.
I spent an insane amount of time taking all the old paint from the crawlspace and looking at it, seeing if it was paint for parts of the house that I had not repainted, then seeing if it was good or bad, and sorting it all, keeping just two cans out of about twenty. Pried the rest of them open, and lugged them back to the crawlspace where they will now spend a year drying because our county only takes paint cans empty, or with the paint dried, or on special hazardous waste collection days that I am never prepared for. My god I cannot tell you how long that took.
I got these special new Liftmaster universal garage remotes, four buttons, that you can use to program any era of Liftmaster product, whether it has the yellow button, the purple button or the red button or whatever. Because every one of our Liftmaster products is from a different era and the whole thing is a nightmare of identical-looking remotes that do different things but soon Emma and I will each have one remote to rule them all. And it will be great. I won’t use mine much because I also got those nifty buttons built into my truck programmed, because I am now a master of this arcane and opaque topic that is confusing AF and up until, oh, a month ago was a complete mystery to me and I would just route around the problem but then I faced it head on and learned that shit — and this time I did it without Youtube. Mostly.
Now I am watching a ton of furniture restoration Youtube and wood trim restoration. If anyone has ever used this Howard Restore & Refinish miracle product that the internet loves, let me know? I want to refinish the wood trim in the Somerville apartment, but I would prefer to not, you know, lug my sanders up there and sawhorses and trim pullers and pull each piece off and sand and finish, so I am thinking a light sanding in place, a washdown with denatured alcohol via steel wool, and then Howard Restore & Refinish. My god I am so excited to spend a weekend in Somerville restoring trim I can’t even tell you. Maybe over Christmas.
Let’s see… what else. I made great progress on the lunatic caddy I am building for my wood chipper it is just great it’s gonna be awesome.
Oh on Friday I went to this class in a product called BuilderTrend that one of our clients uses at the pool company. It was actually pretty good stuff, I am impressed. Seems decent for SaaS software. AND, as far as I can tell, vendors a) don’t have to pay for their own logins, and b) don’t have to have a separate login for every single client that uses Buildertrend, like they do for Justworks which sucks so hard and I have six different Justworks logins from my days as a consultant and I hate it so much. Do, hey, props to BuilderTrend, owned by Bain, who can do something Justworks, $2 billion valuation and headed to IPO cannot do. Also their iOS app actually does things, unlike Justworks, who raised like $50 million one round with the explicit plan to improve their iOS app and it still doesn’t do jack shit.
The people leading the training were Liz and Raymond, which made me think of the Cocteau Twins, Liz and Simon Raymonde, so that makes it easy. Also Liz was very into the nuances of using Quickbooks in the construction industry and my god did we bro down on this topic, both of us having no one to ever speak to about it and I swear I should befriend her and get after work drinks with her once a month. She is a Quickbooks for Contracting prodigy. That company is lucky to have her.
I wore my Techo Bloc hat so I would look like I fit in with the contracting industry.
Speaking of Techo Bloc, my block for the wall of my greenhouse arrived. Well, seven pallets of it, I guess “the other half” of the order is coming today? That is a lot of block. This greenhouse is going to be so gloriously over the top and so far it still looks like we should have the thing done by Halloween so Emma can decorate it.
Exciting!
Noise and metal playlist for you today. All new except for Fugazi. been giving those post-Repeater “late” Fugazi albums a re-listen of late. They are better than I remember. New Godflesh is better than the live show I saw. I have profound regret not going to that Boris show that was so dumb.
Oh and I did not go to the Nick Cave show. Apparently Colin Greenwood showed up. And he did Black Hair. But I still can’t say I regret my decision. Furniture restoration Youtube is very rewarding.
Until tomorrow.