Good morning. Hello. How are you? #1019
Shredder carts, weekend work, the fallibility of kindergarten report cards, fear of nostalgia from a former nostalgia peddler, goth walls, lockdown drills
Good morning. Hello. How are you? Happy Monday. Woooo. Was your weekend fun? Yes? Pretty please? Mine was very stressful. I got a lot done, but it was intense. Not a spare minute. Which is not especially what you’d like your weekend to be like. Lots of computer work I did not particularly enjoy and had to force myself to do. And it involved lots of stepping away from the computer to try and think of how to actually say something, to make things coherent. It took forever. Then after that, Ricardo came over and we did the pool company expenses so, you know, a few more hours in front of the computer, cool.
I did manage to finish building my shredder cart, though. I am very proud of it. It is an absurd little device — well, not so little — that makes my crappy little shredder much more usable. That, combined with my routine now of letting branches actually try out before I shred them, and this thing is doing 80% of what I would like a shredder to do. Behold:
This thing is so great. So on Sunday, once I’d done as much computer work as my brain would allow, and literally nothing more coherent was coming out of my brain, I went over and did some shredding for about two hours, while listening to good music on my Isotunes. It was incredibly therapeutic. At one point, I thought “I think I might be happy right now, I might be happier in this moment than I have been in decades. Or ever.” And then “Judy Don’t You Worry” by Sarah Cracknell came on and it took me back to a specific time and place with Aug Stone and Andy Shea and living in Allston and spending too much time watching English comedies like Little Britain and Coupling and that weird one where they were vampires or something and being obsessed with Saint Etienne and I just ached with nostalgia in a way I did not used to do. And I realized that I am scared of nostalgia now, because it hurts, because I miss those times so much, and I desperately want to live them again even though that will never happen and is a ridiculous notion and I am a grown-ass old person and I am perfectly happy here alone with my shredder I have my poetry and books to protect me and a rock feels no pain sing it Paul but also I miss it so much and I’m like that robot in that Star Trek TOS episode whos head breaks with that logical conundrum about lying. Poof.
So, you know, best to not think about the past.
Plus of course I probably did some terrible things I am blocking out and if I spend too much time thinking about the past I will remember them and then I will hate myself even more.
So instead let me tell you about this awesome Techo-Bloc wall we are building for my greenhouse to sit on my god it is so goth.
I mean look at that thing. It’s even darker than it looks, cuz it’s covered in dust from sawing blocks in half, but it is going to be so goth I cannot wait. Wall should be finished in the next day or two (crew just arrived as I am typing this) and then we gotta do the… well, actually I don’t know if we do gravel, compaction and floor tile first or we do the greenhouse itself first. But this phase is nearing completion. Which is a thing I can claim got done this weekend but I didn’t do any of it.
Oh also my sweet concrete pad outside of my side human garage door got done so I moved a ton of bins out there and left the shredder out there (under a tarp) and it was very nice to get all of that out of the garage.
They had a lockdown drill at Jane’s school on Friday. They said they’d tell us before, but they didn’t, which was pretty fucking annoying. I swear, this is a well-run, good school. Jane said it was fun, the whole class hid in the bathroom together (there is a bathroom attached to her classroom which is pretty awesome). Kids were supposed to be quiet, if you were quiet, you got a prize. Jane got a prize, but some kids didn’t. The prize was a small Kork from Thor Ragnarok that shoots missiles which is both cool and somewhat inappropriate, but she seems to like it. I’m deeply upset this sort of exercise was required and I hate this whole stupid system god America has an illness.
She also got her report card in and it was kinda hilarious but also kinda BS. She did fine in every subject/topic except for self control, where she was doing just ok. Not totally surprising. But they clearly don’t give you any real information. They do not give out “exceeds expectations” grades, even though the template says they do. There is a composite number at the top of the report card, but they give you literally no context about it — like no scale, nothing. Many of the other individual grades give composite scales, but they are different for every grade. I don’t just mean the numbers, but the actual setup: some have an “exceeds expectations” category, some do not. Some are binary, some are not, even though the binary topics are just as likely to be something scalable than the other ones.
On vocabulary, for example, they have a sliding scale where, like, a 5 is meets expectations and 15 is an exceeds expectations. She got a 56. That seems… exceptional? But she only got a “performing as expected for the grade” grade on that, and the little dot on the scale was just a little to the right of the 15 on the scale. And then there was one about word comprehension and making sounds and they gave her a numerical grade that I know is patently untrue. Was she being uncooperative that day? It is super confusing.
And then! They also returned all of her classwork for the quarter and they are graded, and here and there she got one wrong. Not many but a few. But one of them she got right and the teacher (the teaching assistant actually) marked it wrong and it is totally confusing! The grading is just wrong! Like obviously so. And I know the explanation is teachers are underpaid and busy and we should always trust them but come on, man. There are six feet!
There are four lights!
I just can’t.
Anyway Jane was mostly good the rest of the weekend. We went to the neighbors and she got some pool time, well, lukewarm hot tub time, and we had a lovely dinner out on the patio with the neighbors. We had a great bedtime except she did not want to go to bed. She was so tired she had turned cranky and wouldn’t let me pick her up, wouldn’t talk to me, so eventually I had to just leave her in bed and go, which felt terrible.
And she missed her shot throwing the rag into the sink this morning and she was in a great mood before that but then she climbed underneath a chair and said she didn’t want to go to school. But we cajoled her and she got into the truck and she had forgotten about it by the time we got to school. It seems like no matter how little she wants to go, once we drive up and she sees the school building and the other kids and the hustle and bustle, she wants to go.
I suppose this won’t last forever, but it’s nice while it lasts.
Moody and quiet today, lotta old. Well, not old, but not new. Well, it’s all over the place. It is music linked by a mood across space and time. Mirah does not get enough credit she should be a superstar. Buffy Sainte-Marie’s Twitter bio says “after the beatniks before the hippies” which is pretty great. Or it did, anyway. I haven’t gone on Twitter in a good bit. The Slapp Happy album seems to have been re-released gotta look into that.
Okay talk tomorrow.
It may be about fitment of panels...
Apropos of nothing in today’s newsletter, Rick, you see this: https://www.freep.com/story/money/cars/ford/2023/10/02/2023-ford-lightning-orders-canceled-quality/71032938007/