Good morning. Hello. How are you? #1080
18 years since Livejournal sold to Six Apart, log splitting, farm visiting, Felt box set sale regrets, Jane time, year-end tasks, Pornhub NC ban
Good morning, friends. How are you this fine Monday? A storm’s a comin. Tomorrow’s supposed to be terrible weather. Which is a shame, cuz Saturday was terrible. I used the weather as an excuse to do nothing. ‘Twas great. Started a new city in my city game. Made a lot of roundabouts.
I would like to take a moment and state formally that I regret selling my Felt CD Box Set, cleverly titled Felt Box, though it was not a box made of Felt. Anyway now I don’t have all those albums anymore. I mean, I have two of them on vinyl but not the rest. I miss Felt. There is a new 10” of Primative Painters out. It is very ugly. They should have used the orginal cover. The inside cover is in line with Felt’s design sense. Maybe I’ll just toss the outer sleeve.
Eighteen years ago Friday, LiveJournal was sold to SixApart by its original founder. I predicted doom and, you know, for a few years I was wrong. SixApart didn’t do a terrible job. Until they sold the thing to the Russians. Then it started to go downhill. Even though, paradoxically, the place is pretty much the same.
I sure miss Livejournal. Can you tell? The guy who writes a daily journal newsletter misses the journaling site? It was so much more fun when it was anonymous though.
Unrelatedly, Pornhub has put up a blocker in North Carolina so now you can’t use Pornhub in North Carolina without a VPN. I am relaying this news as a disinterested third-party observer. Not my problem.
Question: is the day-to-day stress of a job and raising a kid at the age of 51 making me younger and healthier, or killing me faster? Really could go either way.
Had a good weekend. Did a Reclying/Walmart run Friday so, you know, I was in my happy place.Took a crazy risk and bought a different type of tomato for the Saturday Greek Salad.
Year-end tasks. Got a lot of photos sorted from my recent trip, and sorted my downloads folder and “To Sort” folder, a catch-all folder I keep an alias for on my Desktop. Whenever my desktop gets too cluttered and I don’t want to take time to file everything away, I just dump it all in the “To Sort” folder and then sort it once a year. System seems to work fine. So now all my file-dump folders — “To Sort,” “Camera Uploads” and “Downloads” are all shiny and new and empty and ready for a new year.
Updated the “When I Die” doc for my wife. Not too many changes this year. ‘Twas quick. If you’re not been around here a while, I maintain a comprehensive document for when I die, so that my wife (who is almost certain to outlive me barring catastrophic accidents) doesn’t have to — well, she still has to deal with my shit, but at least there’s a guide to dealing with my shit. It includes “suggestions” on how to dispose of my various collections and bric-a-brac, contact info for various lawyers and accountants, backup recovery codes to all my major accounts (you never know, I might go down with the ship, and down with my Google Titan 2FA hardware keys), how to access various financial accounts and more. I remind her every year where I keep the physical print-out of the doc (which includes a QR code to get to the digital version so she can use all the links). It’s hidden in the house somewhere. I guess this won’t work in a fire. I suppose I should keep a second copy at the other house somewhere. Huh.
Did a pool company meeting on Saturday, got all the bills paid and sent out all of our invoices. On Sunday the partners and I went and tromped all over the new farm property we bought to make an RV/Boat storage unit out of. It is huge, 21 acres, and a giant mess. Farmers are messy people. Old decrepit barns everywhere — like seven of them. There used to be a little community of mobile homes, and another community of campers who paid rent to the old Farmer in his later years when he wasn’t farming so much. There is a trail that leads to the end of the property, then continues 20 yards or so to a creek on Army Corps of Engineers land and it is just covered in garbage and old barrels. One of the barrels literally says Carolina Chemical Corp on it. It is bad. It’s not technically our problem since we didn’t do it and it’s not our land, but assuming the Corps lets us, we’ll clean it up along with the rest of the land. It’s a monumental undertaking. I was told they’d already taken like 10 loads of trash away and the place is still pretty much covered in it.
The original old farm house is right where we need to level for the facility, but it’s not very nice anyway. Of the eight or so out buildings, one of them seems to be really nice and salvageable — an old log cabin that is maybe a hundred years old. Hopefully we can keep that one and convert it into a small office.
Anyway, all very exciting. Our final (hopefully) approval from the county comes in 8 days, next Tuesday, and then the next day we will close out on the construction loan and then we can really get to work. This land is going to be so much cleaner once we are done. Of the 21 acres, we are using 5 or so for the facility and the rest will be restored to cleanliness and wildlife. If all goes well, as soon as the NC state government gets its act together, we’ll get a solar facility on the roof of this facility as well.
After that I came home and I intended to lay around and do nothing all day again, but my wife pointed out to me I could not do that, and she said something like “oh you don’t want to go out there and chop wood?” And as soon as she said that I realized I did, very much, in fact, desperately want to go out there and use my sweet-ass battery-powered log splitter and finish up with that giant pile of wood left by the arborist like three years ago, the logs of which I plan on using for hugelkultur in the bottom of my raised beds.
So I went and did that, and my god am I sore. The machine is awesome but it is not very ergonomic, you gotta bend over to operate it. Also it’s a two-handed operation and it really fucks with my tennis elbow. So, I suppose, does lifting a hundred or so rotting logs. But I got it all done. All the logs are over at the other property by the greenhouse now. Yay me.
Speaking of the greenhouse we — well, the electrician — is finally getting started on the electrical work for the greenhouse today. Hopefully done this week. Then we can finally get that thing filled with planters and growing things. I missed the winter season so no wheat, no garlic, I am a bit sad, but once this is done that will never happen again. Hail satan.
I’ve been very much enjoying my time with Jane this week. Six is a good age. She still screams about things, but she’s working on it. She is a sore loser at the moment, but has stated she wants to get better about it. At one point, Emma told her she wasn’t trying very hard in a game because she was going to let Jane win because she didn’t want to deal with Jane screaming. And Jane said she wanted Emma to try, and that she was working on that.
She made deal-slash-promise with Emma that she didn’t want to wash her bum during shower time, and if Emma let her procrastinate, she promised to do it tomorrow. She wrote it down and everything. And of course tomorrow rolls round and she has absolutely no intention of doing it. We try to explain to her reputation and the weight of promises but she’s not having it.
So during Daddy bedtime we spend maybe an hour where I try to convince her to wash her bum, take a shower, bath, let me do it, mommy do it, whatever. And she’s still totally stubborn and recalcitrant, but she is doing it conversationally! She didn’t scream once. It was just great.
And eventually she went and joined mommy in the bath and washed her bum.
Progress!
For today’s media of the day, I would like to highlight LAUDADIO, the new project from my friend Nick. He is making a song a day? Or an album a week, or something like that. Dude is sticking to a habit in making his art, which as you know, is a hobby of mine. Last week’s EP was made with the aid of back yard: “Recorded using PlantWave and Playtronic devices generating midi data from living leaves in my yard.”
That’s some Graeme Revell' The Insect Musicians - level shit right there.
Ya’ll be careful out there, ya hear?