Good morning. Hello. How are you? #1096
Late school, chores! Errands! Home IT infrastructure. Coffee with Jeff Jackson. Workers comp insurance audits and greenhouse work and 1099s and school tardiness.
Good morning. Hello. How are you? All well? I am okay. Took about 40 minutes longer than usual to get Jane to school. It is spirit week — for the third or fourth time my god this school simply cannot let a full five-day week go by without demanding everyone dress up. Today was “dress up as your heroes” and Jane somehow got it into her head that this meant costumes, and costumes meant scary costumes, even though I don’t think she’s ever even seen a scary costume and is only slightly fuzzy on what a monster is. It took forever — halting progress, long pauses and conversations at every step of the way. And even as she was walking in the door to the school from the office (where I signed her in because we were late), she was still hesitating. I feel awful, except I know when she gets in the car with Emma this afternoon she will be proud of herself. Facing your fears, however irrational, is a helluva thing.
We are listening to a band called Mood Room. The song is “soliloquy,” and it is great. Big noisy guitars, melodic lady vocals, mid-tempo, like Swervedriver with the woman from Now, Now singing or something. Just great.
Man what a weekend. Wall-to-wall chores, all day, every day. It was freakin great. I am so exhausted. I worked myself to oblivion and took a gummy in the evening and I barely thought about work at all. I am ready to face the week. Just what the doctor ordered.
On Friday after I left you, I went to the other house and met up with the electrician and a crew of workers and we did a ton to get the place in shape. Got rid of the big, ugly bushes in front of the house, mulched it over, got it all ready so I could garden there. The workers and the electrician worked together to get the lighthing rig installed in the greenhouse — this is infinitely complex because it needs to be up on the ceiling but it can’t be up on the ceiling because the curtains are on the ceiling and the lights can’t interfere with the curtains, so you gotta build an entire extra lighthing frame, attach it to the greenhouse, match the color, the whole thing. Nightmare. But that is done. Then we filled in most of the trench that had been dug between the house and the greenhouse for electric and data. Then mulched over that. Then brought about 10 wheelbarrow loads of gravel down from the hoppers by the house to the pond area, building a land bridge between two parts of the pond, the main missing link in the trail in the woods between the two houses. Wasn’t quite enough gravel, but we’re a good 85% of the way done.
Also on Friday I got all the Viridian 1099’s done, which was a tedious AF pain in the ass because I took over the books in 2023 and I am still cleaning them up. There were about five W-9s I didn’t have, so I had to call all these vendors and get them to mail me copies. And they all did, that was nice.
I also worked on the worker’s comp insurance audit, which is a thing I did not know about from tech company finance and using a PEO like Justworks. And I suppose this is probably why Justworks doesn’t want to handle general contractors — because of the morass of the worker’s comp insurance audit. It is tedious. And potentially in-person. And annual. What fun. But I think we’re in pretty good shape now.
Man. That was an exhausting day. I’m probably forgetting something.
OH RIGHT. I am forgetting that Emma, Jane and I all went to Southern Village on Friday to have coffee with the Tik Tok congressman himself, Jeff Jackson, who is running for State Attorney General now, because the Republicans redistricted him out of his seat. He is great! Very down to earth, could talk to endlessly. We were his last meeting of the week and I think we kept him, like, an hour and a half but eventually we felt bad because we were keeping this poor traveling man from his family. But we talked about so much — other political educational Tik Tokers that Emma follows. We had a long, long talk about Volume 2 of Caro’s LBJ books and how much that dude flew around Texas and all the glad-handling. We talked about other congress people and we talked polls and the prospects of flipping the court here in North Carolina. Highly educational. Apparently one-third of Americans didn’t even know Donald Trump was running for president before the Iowa caucus.
It was interesting to me that even though Jeff was born and raised in Chapel Hill, and is the most famous congressman on Tik Tok, with 2.5 million followers, not a single person noticed him. I suppose no one thought he’d be talking to a couple weird goths with a kid.
Saturday was even more intense! Errands day! Jane woke me up at 7:30, we went to McDonald’s and got breakfast and then to the recycling center to drop the recycling off, then to Walmart for groceries. There was another Lightning at Walmart when we got there, and when we left there was an R1S. Been seeing R1Ss everywhere, actually, and I saw three Lightnings this weekend. People can say that the bloom is off the EV rose all they want, but it’s not what I’m seeing on the ground out here in suburbia. There was also a cashier there who told me he liked my shirt and then proceeded to tell me his whole life story. Jane found this very interesting, and it took us forever to check out but who cares! Time well spent.
Then to a store in Chapel Hill to do some gift procuring for Emma for Valentine’s Day then to a farmer’s market and to the grocery store then to Lowe’s Hardware in Pittsboro to pick up a workbench.
Then home for lunch and then I worked on the server and IT infrastructure of our house for, oh, three or four hours. Added a new, heavy-duty rackmount UPS because the old one was too wimpy and every time we had a power blip it would whine and beep and complain and shut down. Also got rack ears for the switch. Redid everything in the rack, untangled all the ethernet cables, labeled the bulk of them. Redid the system that gets Airplay into our home audio, because the old system never really worked. Reorganized all the cables. Got everything off the floor and hanging so I can wheel the rack around and not roll over cables. Thing is awesome now. I am very pleased.
Sunday I disassembled the bulk of the music studio in my office here at the main house, and brought all the synths and pedals over to the new house, and put them in storage. No studio for a while until I finish building the one in the attic. Also got the workbench out of the truck, which was a production.
Very excited about this new workbench, because I put it next to the utility sink, and the old IKEA table that was there can now go behind the table saw, so now I have an outfeed table, so two birds with one stone. Desperately wanted to continue to reorganize the workshop in the garage…
…But I have more pressing matters. I need to move all the boxes in the basement out of the room down there, because I rented it out to the pediatric speech therapist, which is now going to be a pair of pediatric speech therapists, come March. This is very exciting because the new rent will just about cover all the utilities and property tax on that house. And it definitely will once the solar is installed and I get the fiber between the two houses. But before the second pediatric speech therapist can move in, I need to get all my boxes out of that room and then the wall patched up where I tore it apart to get ethernet into that office.
So this meant thirty trips up and down the stairs, carrying endless loads of boxes and meticulously re-organizing them all, unfortunately in the master closet (sorry, future guests). Everything from the studio at home and the rental unit in the basement fit in the master closet, though, so that is good. Well, not everything. I still have a bunch of banker’s boxes, but I know where those are gonna go. And a desk that I am hoping they’ll take, but I know where it’ll go otherwise.
ANYWAY (good word). I am exhausted. Excellent weekend.
And it was supposed to rain all weekend and it didn’t so that is awesome.
And it’s warm enough that the butter is soft so that is awesome.
Media of the day is this drone playlist. One hour of single notes, mostly. All new except for Bowery Electric. I guess this Cynthia Dall is new but I only recently discovered it. Very into this new Jan McLean/Jan Power EP. Oh the Difference Engine is old but it just came out so it is new.
All right I hope you have a great day and week and month and year and decade and ha who are we kidding. BYEEE.