Good morning. Hello. How are you? #1091
Showing a 12 year-old Episode IV for the firs time, taking synths to Wilmington, mini jackhammering, cozy sci-fi, a press pool for Taylor's cats.
Hello! Good morning, friend. A new week. We can do it. Only four days for me, only three days for Jane. I gotta say, school kids get a hella lot of days off of school. I don’t remember this many days off. Every month, there’s usually only one week that’s an actual full week. Seems really… chill? Was it like this in the 70’s and 80’s? Sure felt longer.
It’s cold out, so ICE vehicles are doing that thing where the exhaust turns water into steam so the exhaust looks way more voluminous than on a warm day. Jane asked about it — the little toxic holocaust coming out of every gas-powered car. I pointed out the Teslas and Mach-Es and Ionic-5s (there’s a lot of ‘em at her school) and how they did not have the little poisonous plumes. Nice to be able to interject a little hope into that sad lesson.
G Wagon lady is out, now the weird woman that says FITT4MOMM on her license plate is my object of fascination (n.b. that is a slight misspelling of her license and it was out of state so don’t go looking her up). What on earth would possess someone to put that on her plate? And how… clueless about how weight and childbirth work? I sure hope she doesn’t have another kid and has trouble keeping the weight off like, oh, a shit ton of moms. Super sympathetic, too.
Sadly, I could not actually see the driver. Who knows. Maybe it was a dude.
Giving the recent Shabazz Palaces a second listen. I like it, but it’s not as good as that track “Bad Bitch Walking.” I mean c’mon that song rules. Still pretty good, though. I find myself starring a couple of songs.
We are down to 9 and a half hours on the 2023 “to investigate” playlist. Almost there…
Lovely weekend all ‘round. Friday after I left you, I packed up the Rhodes, Farfisa, Ace-Tone and the Fender Sideman into the truck and drove to Wilmington, to bring ‘em to my friend Nick, who’s “got a guy” who can fix such things. Man. The power of “having a guy.” Guy in this is gender-neutral. It is my opinion that America should accept “guy” as gender neutral. Remains to be seen whether or not that happens.
While there I had the distinct pleasure of being present for Nick and Meghan’s son Henry’s first viewing of Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope. I mean, what an honor. Also I was curious to see how it worked with Gen-Z (wait are 12 year-old Gen Z, god naming generations is so tedious). At first he was sort of half paying attention, still looking at his iPad, but slowly, as the movie progressed, he paid more attention. Was this because of Meghan’s prodding, or a genuine interest in the film? I am choosing the latter interpretation. By god, I think he liked it.
Also we watched the Special Edition, on Disney, instead of the OG edition, or Harmy’s Despecialized, and this is probably blasphemy, but I think Special Edition was the right choice for a kid these days. The bad effects really are a distraction these days. And the inserted scenes — oh god, it pains me to say this — are fine.
Except that whole scene with Han and Jabba. That is dumb.
And in the current Disney+ version, Han shoots first, so that is nice.
While in Wilmington I also got to go to my favorite Wilmington attraction, Harbor Freight, where I bought a 6 foot level for almost nothing and a SDS demo hammer, aka mini jackhammer. For cheap, cuz it was harbor friend.
I also got to go to Folks, their favorite breakfast joint, and man, that place ruled. I want to go back. Spinach and mushrooms in a breakfast burrito, mmmm.
Wrote in the guest book, had some pizza, chatted more with Nick and Meghan, transferred the synths straight to Nick’s car for delivery to “his guy” tomorrow, and headed home. Home in time for dinner and doing Jane bedtime.
At Jane bedtime, she played QUEST on a double word score in Scrabble, so I am feeling pretty good about her standardized reading comprehension test this week.
And getting my Sunday for chores, glorious chores. Did Viridian accounting, prepped for the annual worker’s comp audit (as an aside, I think this audit is why Justworks won’t let general contractors use their service, to my continual frustration. I am slowly becoming aware of all the things Justworks does that I now have to do myself at Viridian and it is… a lot. Currently gotta figure out how to actually prep 1099s on my own), paid the contractors — my god it is astounding how many contractors want to be paid by a mailed check rather than an ACH payment. And not just immigrants. So many, got ready for the taxes this year, got some insurance stuff organized, signed up for a construction management platform that we’re going to try… Very productive morning.
Now that the keyboards are out of my office (and will never return — once they are back in my care they will head to the new studio in the other house), I have a ton of extra counter space, so I moved the record player far to the left on its counter, making room for the six more record crates I need to build (soon!) in which to put all the records that are laying all over the floor. Baby steps.
Then I helped the neighbors obtain a free piano, which was an adventure. Three dudes and a woman lifting a piano into my truck, me tying it down, driving home very slowly. And kind of ironic since I spent the earlier part of the weekend moving keyboards around. It all worked pretty well, though, so that was nice. Maybe the heaviest thing I’ve moved yet in the truck.
Next a bunch of greenhouse and outdoor chores. Painted some more “unistrut” they call it, U-shaped metal poles with holes in them used to support conduit in construction. We have an absurdly complex plan to hang the lights in the greenhouse that does not interfere with the curtains. And I need to paint all this support stuff — along with the light fixture boxes — before it gets mounted. Got that done and moved a bunch of other stuff around in the driveway so that the crew can carry away the seven pallets of Teco bloc still sitting in my driveway from the greenhouse wall construction.
Then I broke out the new mini jackhammer and hammered into the frozen clay ground to dig out the underground conduit exits for the electrical connection between the house and the greenhouse and my god it was so fun. Just jackhammering away. Thing went through that icy clay like a hot knife through butter. Just fantastic. Deeply satisfying. If you have anything you need jackhammered, you let me know. I’ll be right over.
I was thinking about Taylor’s cats this morning. Jane let me choose her outfit and I chose cat shit head to toe — a pink cat-print shirt, black jeans with cats on the knees, white cat socks, Hello Kitty shows and a Hello Kitty furry hat (with twitching ears!) I was looking at her in the foyer before we left and laughed at how absurd it was.
But, you know, I figured, cats are cool these days thanks to Taylor. Then I thought about that one song (can’t remember which one) where she says “I’ll go home to my cats” and then giggled. And I started to think about it: which home? TriBeCa? Westerly? Tennessee (she still has that home, right?) Travis’ pad? Does someone fly the cats around? I mean, I assume they fly around on her Taylor jet wherever she goes and some assistant settles the cats into the new house while she’s off doing press or whatever. Or do the cats just stay at a single home, and that is Taylor’s base? If so, which one? Westerly? What a logistical nightmare. I mean I guess there is Westerly State Airport, is she flying in and out of that? Are the cats?
The internet tells me that the cats do, in fact, travel with her and have their own personalized bags.
Super cool I bet the cats love that. Known for their love of private aviation, cats are.
I think Taylor’s cats should have their own pool reporter (come to think of it, it is super weird celebrities don’t make use of press pools and pool reporters like presidents do): one reporter assigned just to the cats at all time, sending out article copy to all journalists on the Taylor beat, which is the second largest journalism beat in the US after the Trump beat, I assume.
Read to more sci-fi novels by Becky Chambers this month, man I just love Becky Chambers. Cozy Sci-Fi, they call the genre: the closest thing out there to my dream of plotless sci fi. Becky Chambers novels do have plots, but just barely. The current series, Monk and Robot is two books long and I swear each book, each clocking in at just over 200 pages, feels like a chapter. What a great racket. $11.99 per 200 page chapter. Imagine if GRRM did that: He’d be making something like $700 off of one reader of ASOIAF.
Anyway, Chambers is great I love her vision of a more-or-less utopian future, except there are still problems, and humanity, and interesting things, and drama, and adventure. I think that is sort of Becky’s goal: to flesh out how a utopia can still be interesting. And I deeply appreciate that.
I do think she sort of suffers from the same fate of most utopians, which is they never talk about how we got there. In this series, there is some vague event in the past that snapped us out of our toxic ways and set us on a new path: exactly what Star Trek does (as an aside, isn’t it weird that for all of the producer’s crappy obsession with “dark trek” they have not yet made Star Trek the Cryogenic Wars? We still know nothing about them). I am very interested in the transition: Not what B looks like, but how we get from A to B. I think a lot of other people are too and I think that’s why my Star Trek Economics book sells so well. It takes a rough stab at a small part of that.
But all that aside, cozy sci-fi rules and I strongly recommend it. Also recommend Malka Older’s The Mimicking of Known Successes as a great entry into this genre.
It’s like romance novels for sci fi.
Today’s Media of the Day is another playlist, this is really not working out the way I expected, but I as I finish up this giant “To Investigate” queue it makes sense. New Mary Timony, love the new mellow Kevin Drew, love the new Emma Anderson, giant fan of this Annie Hamilton lady, we’ve talked about a lot of these before. The mix starts poppy, spends a good while in etherial indie pop, the ends with some synthy weirdness. Enjoy!
Right-o time to jet. Hope you have a lovely week, we will talk more.