Good morning. Hello. How are you? #1114
Jane and pink eye, greenhouse glass, wall repair, pop culture references and youth, solar roof installation, miter saw misery
Good morning! Hello, there. Monday. Jane is sick. Pink eye. And a cough. Maybe. And a stomach ache. Maybe. But definitely pink eye. On the drops again. Mildly stressed. Would prefer not to have to do antibiotics again. Once was fine, twice didn’t think about, but three times in a year… I dunno, that stresses me out. I am a parent. It happens.
Today is the day! Ten months after purchasing the solar roof, they are installing it today. I am very excited. Very excited. I have a ton of work but I will head over there soon to do some coordinating about a couple vents that need moving.
Excellent weekend otherwise. Got a lot done. Not the things I wanted to, really, but things that needed doing. The second pediatric speech therapist moves in next week, and they are taking over one additional room in the downstairs office. And that room had a ton of junk in it, and a giant hole in the wall from where I ran CAT-6 cable from the IT closet to their office, and I never patched it up, because there was a ton of junk in the room and no one was using it. Well no more. Needs to be fixed by next Monday. So I moved everything out of the room, lugging it upstairs box by box, maybe twenty trips up the stairs. Then I got the patch in, which was a pain because it was the wall and ceiling, and bigger than my 24x24 inch drywall patches, so there was a lot of blocking that needed to get screwed in, and a lot of joint compound. I am still useless at joint compound paper rolls. I gotta get the hang of that. Just keep doing layers until you can’t see the seams. It is not perfect. But the paper… it bows and buckles. Maybe it needs to be more wet. I do not know. Anyhoo the patching is done and now we are on to sanding and thus returns the eternal question about why Dewalt sanders and shop vacs do not have compatible dust ports. A real mystery.
So now I gotta sand again, then vacuum and wipe the whole room down, then find new paint to match the old paint and the ceiling paint somehow, then paint all before next weekend. And I am super busy at work. This is… ambitious.
Speaking of the mysteries of Dewalt, my miter saw just stopped working, the blade stopped turning, it is so weird. I used it to cut some notches into a shelf, and then a few hours later one of the crew asked to use it to cut something for the greenhouse work they were doing and I said sure, and it no longer worked for him. Like.. it just stopped working. Like.. I am not one of those guys who assumes “the help” broke it. And he pointed it out to me and we tried all the obvious fixes together. But it is now not turning the blade when the engine runs. And this is a giant hassle for me. Where do you even get Dewalt stuff fixed around here? Is it even broken or am I dumb? Maddening.
Meanwhile the crew got more mulching done at the main house, and then on Sunday they got the last of the glass into the greenhouse put in. There were four pieces we had to custom buy because when you use the drop door kit, they don’t supply glass, which is really weird but whatever. And now one of those pieces seems to be a single millimeter off, and it is causing the door to be a little sticky and now I get to agonize over whether or not I am going to spring more money for another piece of glass just to make the door a little more smooth, but we are talking the rest of my life here. Gah.
On Sunday I started on the shelves for the greenhouse. All the supplies have finally arrived: the very specific shelf brackets needed, the special bolts that work with the walls. The first board of the shelves goes right onto the stone wall, so it had to be cut in a million different ways to fit: on the bottom to make gaps for the brackets that hold the greenhouse to the wall, ditto on the sides, a notch for the electrical system unistrap. I was cutting and routering the thing in a million different ways, it is an absurd frankenstein of a board now, but when it sets down into its position, it looks awesome. I got one coat of paint on it, the thing is going to need two per side, so this will take some time. The next six boards are all the same, so I can do them in a batch.
Somewhere in the weekend I had a chat with Tina, the children’s party planner who is helping me with REAL WILD CHILD, the Man Ray goth new wave dance party for kids, and boy, we have some excellent ideas. It is going to be so good. I am so excited.
Emma and I finished our re-watch of Garfunkel and Oates, what a great show, I am so sad it only a single (very short) season. My life will feel more empty without it. We also finished the last season of For all Mankind this week, finally. Season four redeemed itself with a very taught, very soap-opera-free final episode, but gawd, things got a little dicey there. Now we’ll tackle this new season of True Detective, I guess. Also I am supposed to go to Yo La Tengo on Saturday in Saxapahaw and KMFDM on Thursday night and Dune 2 on Thursday day and all of that seems wildly ambitious. Going to KMFDM with the pool partners, which seems absurd, now that I think about it, but was a great idea when drunk and you know what? I stand by it.
There was a Chinatown reference in SNL last night — you know, the classic one: “Forget it, it’s Chinatown.” I’ve already forgotten what was doing the parodying. But I mentioned to Emma that it was the same reference as in Inside Out when they are in “Cloud town.”
And also yesterday I saw this Tweet (on Threads) saying something like: “was on a zoom call for work and a coworker made a Hollywood Squares joke and one of the coworkers said ‘I don’t know what that is,’ and I said ‘It was a game show in the 60’s that had a remake in the 90’s’ and the coworker said ‘I wasn’t even born in the 90’s’ and ugh.”
Okay! so: 1: people are younger than you! Get over it! But that is not what we’re here to say. I see this format of thing a lot: something gets mentioned, someone says “I don’t know what that is,” someone tells them, and they say “I wasn’t alive then.” And I just.. I mean, I think this is really weird! Not being alive at the time of the original event isn’t really an excuse to not understand a pop cultural reference? I was 2 when Chinatown came out, probably didn’t get around to watching it till my forties but I get the reference!
Let’s chart this: thing X mentioned, thing X inquired about, thing X explained, age protest, age angst. Strike out age angst: get over it, you’re aging. Strike out age protest: get over it, not all cultural references are going to be from “your time.”
What are we left with: thing X mentioned, thing X inquired about, thing X explained.
Stop there! That is a perfectly lovely educational and kind interaction! Maybe let’s just stop there. In the immortal words of then-fourteen-year-old Aaliyah, age ain’t nothing but a number. Except it wasn’t Aaliyah it was R Kelley and it was gross. I have that cassingle somewhere. Ew.
I don’t know why I am complaining about a standard social media format. They are all dumb. We know this.
Jane’s been on a kick where she won’t go to bed. It exhausted Emma last week so I am on an extended run of Daddy bed times while Emma recovers. Well. I have done one, but the plan is to do more. But.. .man. For a while there, Jane was being a pain to Emma but mostly going straight to bed for me. But last night… nope. Things were exacerbated by the fact that she didn’t want to take her eyedrops for her pink eye. She usually loves those things, but the last batch I administered was “too cold” so now she was afraid of them. And I was trying to do them at bedtime, so the two combined into an unholy nightmare of resistance and screaming and it was wildly unpleasant.
She’s a little angel today, though. Took her drops no problem. Apologized for being unkind. The parental fates giveth, the parental fates taketh away.
Today’s Media of the Day is The Lego Movie game, because Jane is playing it again, and has been playing the same three levels constantly for weeks and the songs get stuck in our heads and it is a real mixed blessing because it keeps her occupied, but also.. man. That song. BUT the game has some really good one-liners and either the original cast members or some really, really good doubles. There’s a moment where Wildstyle hums “Everything is Awesome” under her breath and it is hilarious.
Okay byeeeeee.
I was explaining something to a co worker (computer scientist 20 years my junior), and he asked "Pete, what's a DAT machine?" No big deal, because it is an antiquated format. But as I described it as a little piece of analog tape that stored digital data, I felt very old.
Like a senior citizen describing 'Limelight' in NYC and sounding like Stefon.