Good morning. Hello. How are you? #1109
Teeny progress with child tyranny, almost fell for a phishing attempt, boat storage permitting, greenhouse progress
Good morning. Hello. How are you? Hi. It’s me. It is 8:59 AM. Sorry I’m late. Walmart and recycling day. Alexei Nalvany is dead at 47. That is fucked up and sad. I had a hope that in my old age I would see that man ascend to the presidency of Russia. Fuck. Kansas City shooting. Israelis invading another hospital. Tump trials.
Feels like a good day to maybe not look at the news. My wellbeing is fragile today. Barely keeping a headache at bay. I got shit to do.
Another night of violence and arguing. It was horrible and almost made both of us cry, but at one point, while Jane was so mad, just raging, she started to hit me and stopped. Then she started to kick me and stopped. Inside all that rage she was trying to gain control and making a little progress. What else could you hope for? Tangible progress was made. Emma and I debriefed afterwards and made a few new plans. Parenting is bonkers. Highs, Lows, and Heavenly Blows. And some not so heavenly.
It’s my turn to face the wrath tonight but, at this moment, I am feeling confident, armed with a strategy. It will, of course, all fall apart within minutes.
On the plus side, getting ready for school run a wild, runaway success. Jane was in a great mood this morning. We were very early. It was lovely. Stark contrast.
Oh by the way I forgot to tell you this but I found my slippers so if you were worried about the end of that mini saga, it is all wrapped up.
“Invisible Sun” came on the stereo in the truck this morning. Great song. and “Hoist that Rag” by Tom Waits. Jane was unimpressed.
I’m now listening to a new vinyl reissue of Nick Drake’s Five Leaves Left which I never had owned on vinyl till now and man, I love this record.
Bought a hairbrush for the truck. It is black. Gotta keep it manly.
Walmart was a labyrinth of insanity as they continue their remodel. Special Needs Guy had his friend with him. She clearly works there, but all she does is follow him around and text. It is mysterious.
Still no Quaker Oats Squares, which have been recalled, but the Harris Teeter generic equivalent is keeping Emma happy.
Last night I almost fell victim to a fishing scheme. It was nuts. I got a call saying it was from Apple and if you did not try and change the phone number associated with your account, press one. Seemed fishy but I had had a few drinks with “the guys” like normal people do, and we were in the middle of saying goodbye. Also what harm could there be in pressing 1, I thought. Well, what the harm is is that the robocall now knows to alert the hackers that they have a rube on their hands. So they say please hold, but then there are high call volumes and they’ll call you back. I am only dimly paying attention. They call back and pretend to be Apple. And the one thing they pulled off that am still not sure how they did it is they had an iOS native alert pop up on my phone that was like “confirm you are on your Apple device” or something. In hindsight it was hella fishy and they probably did it by sending some auto-opening URL via Text that triggered a Javscript, or something, and god, Apple should not allow that and my OS is up-to-date.
But anyway, I was paying attention by this point, and the person on the phone was, in hindsight, making a few mistakes. They said the attacker knew all my security questions and I dimly thought in the back of my mind that Apple doesn’t use security questions. They didn’t ask me for any info or anything, so there was nothing to give. But they were shitty at my small talk. I cracked some joke that I should maybe start using Apple Advanced Protection and they didn’t seem to have heard of it. I asked about hardware keys and they didn’t have a good answer. But they weren’t asking for anything, and were just telling me that no one could change my account for 48 hours. Okay, okay, I kept saying, seemed like there was nothing to do here.
But then! Then they said they could not close out the support ticket without me logging in and closing it, which I knew not to be true, and they sent me a link through some random phone number, which was fishy phishy AF, and the domain was tickets-apple.com. I called them on that and they said don’t worry it was a subdomain of Apple, which it obviously was not. Page looked super good, though. Very real. But of course it wasn’t, so my password autofill wasn’t working.
So then I hung up and came home and poked around in my iCloud account and it turns out that Apple does, in fact, support hardware keys now, so, man I added those so fast.
Close one.
Get hardware keys. Put them on everything. I cannot say this enough.
Yesterday at our pool/storage company meeting I learned about the word “phemeral” which is the opposite of “ephemeral,” which is interesting cuz I never heard the “e” prefix being used as “anti” or “un” before. Apparantly topological surveyors use it to describe various bodies of water: they are either phemeral or ephemeral. Anyway permitting takes forever and you need a different permit for every stinkin thing and this thing is going to take months and we have several giant steel buildings arriving in, oh, two months. Madness.
But so, so fun.
I have today off, so it is pool stuff and greenhouse stuff. Trip to the new bank again, gotta deposit a bunch of checks. Maybe stop at Pittsboro Feed, the greatest store in the world. Get the greenhouse cleaned, get all the beds in there and, god willing, start filling them. Definitely by tomorrow. Heck. If all goes well, by the next time I talk to you guys, all the beds will be filled. Bonkers. Bonkers.
Mulch has been purchased to repair the area at the main house where the hoop house and Birdies Beds used to be. Gravel has been purchased to continue our trail-making through the woods. Crew will be here this weekend assisting in all this labor. It’s gonna be great. I am going to be so sore in the best way. Four days in the garden. Oh Frabgeous Day Callot Callay.
Today’s media of the day is a playlist of new stuff that I’ve been listening to of late. Not today’s new stuff, like released today: haven’t gotten to that yet. But the last few weeks. Tis good stuff. Very into Echo Ladies and Ian Sweet.
Have a lovely weekend and remember to floss. Man. People do not floss enough.