Good morning. Hello. How are you? #1119
Chores, greenhouse shelves, maybe I should start a dumpster company, spirit weeks and attendance, RV & boat storage loan closed, shelf bracket saga, depression about waste on projects
Good morning, happy Monday, greetings from Chatham County, where I’ve just taken Jane to school in an incredibly pleasant morning experience. Five minutes early. Go Jane. It’s another spirit week. My wife told me she heard that spirit weeks have a higher attendance rate. I believe it. Jane gets so psyched to go to school in her pajamas. And who can blame her.
Lovely weekend of chores, A+, no complaints. Rained exactly when I wanted it to, didn’t rain when I didn’t want it to. I get to sleep in an hour longer on the weekends. Love that shit. I don’t think, in the coming four, five, six years or whatever, that I will ever get used to waking up at 6:10 in the morning as opposed to 7:30 or 8. It sucks. I am bitter I have to do it for years — well into my planned retirement. It’s far and away the worst thing about school. It was when I was a kid, it is now. And, of course, summer will roll round, the obligation will go away, and I’ll settle back into a later wake-up time, thus fucking me mentally when the next grade starts. This is my future. For a decade or some shit.
Best not to think about it.
Spent two mornings with Jane, one was idyllic and great, one was a long, tempestuous tantrum and boy that was not great. Did a shared bedtime with Emma where we watched Elemental, and a solo bedtime where we played a very complicated game involving crayons and building blocks for like two hours.
Went to the hardware store and the paint store and the recycling center and Walmart and the other evil grocery store on Friday. Errands being the love child of chores. Errands are great. Very into the Sherwinn Williams paint store lately. Friendly staff, all VOC paints. There was this gadget that was, like, a whippet can attached to a jar and a paint nozzle — a thingy to make your own spray paint. I’ve been wondering about this, can you make your own spray paint colors. So I asked the woman if it was any good.
“No. It’s garbage.” She said. Gotta love that honesty.
Friday afternoon I met up with the Viridian partners and spouses and we closed our loan for the RV storage facility. Very exciting. Gonna get some bills paid. Gonna buy two million dollars of steel, try and stop us.
Saturday and Sunday, I got the wall patched and painted in the extra office downstairs in the rental, and the second neurodivergent-affirming pediatric speech therapist moved in to the little clinic down there. One of the boards is rotted on the cool, long walkway to their office door from their little parking lot. I put up some caution tape. But I’m gonna have to get that fixed. Which is exciting because that means Ima gonna paint that thing a more goth color. Thrilling.
Speaking of paint I got over my fear of my paint sprayer and used it again and honestly, the cleanup isn’t that bad. And it makes for such a better coat of paint, and it’s so fast. Fun times. But god, that thing just sucks down paint. It will go through an entire gallon can in like five minutes of painting. It is intense.
But the painting of the greenhouse shelves is done, as is the application of Total Boat Halcyon Clear epoxy on top of the paint. These shelves are gonna have seed trays on them so I wanted them waterproof. Got the shelves onto their brackets as well, though they’re not screwed down yet, and they’re not touched up. One of them is drilled right into the concrete block. The rest are on brackets.
And don’t even get me started on what a saga the shelf brackets have been. First brackets looked great, and I can use them for one long shelf, but they didn’t work for the wall of shelves on the end of the greenhouse, because they were too wide, because I forgot about the corner of the greenhouse having a narrower area to mount the shelf compared to the other posts. So then I got a second set, and I got cocky and ordered all twelve at once, and they arrived and everything was great except the holes for the screw mounts into the wall were staggered, and not aligned in a straight row. This is probably great for mounting into a 2x4 (maybe?) but doesn’t work at all for my needs where am using special bolts to go into a recessed channel on each of the greenhouse posts. The holes have to be aligned because the channel is one vertical strip.
So now I have, god, I don’t know, fifteen or so extra shelving brackets, probably cost me like sixty bucks. But the third batch worked, which, ironically, were the ones you could just buy at the local Walmart.
So I’ve opened these two other batches of brackets, tossed the boxes and recycled them, and used four of the twelve from the first batch. They don’t seem really returnable? Do people open boxes of shit, toss the box, and then still return shit to Amazon? I’m sure people do, and I’m sure Amazon takes them back, and honestly, fuck Amazon, but even so, I cannot bring myself to do that sort of thing. I am just not a person who returns things to e-commerce stores, except in the most extreme conditions (wrong order, didn’t even open it). So I am donating them all.
I hate this part of projects. The amount of shit you buy and just waste. I mean, it’s always built into the budget, and watching professional contractors, you can see they are over this problem. My roofers? Sitting on the top of the dumpster were three unopened packs of shingles. Job was done, I paid for the shingles, not them, not their problem, just toss them. The waste drives me insane, I can’t handle it. All the cardboard they left in that dumpster. That shit shoulda been recycled.
I wonder if there are any dumpster companies that secretly scavenge and scrap the contents of the dumpsters for extra income. I wonder if they all do this. Oh my god I suddenly want to own a dumpster company.
Anyway. Shelves are up. This was the last obstacle to actually planting something in the greenhouse. It’s March. Jesus. Let’s get to it.
I also had this brilliant idea that I could run a direct-bury Cat-6 cable from the greenhouse to the pump house, thus giving Wifi to the other half of the property, and while I wasn’t dying to trench and bury the whole cable run of 175 feet this weekend, I did want to get the cable passed from inside the greenhouse to outside, so I could finally bury the underground conduit tubes. Done! I ran the cable about halfway. I’ll finish it up next weekend.
Chores chores chores, they’re great. They’re so great I skipped Yo La Tengo at the Haw River Ballroom cuz chores are so great.
There is a new Contrapoints video, three hours about the Twilight saga. I am about… an hour and a half in? It is so great. She is so great. I mean, I am a moderate Twilight fan, saw every movie opening night in the theater, and was drunk every time. Just the best. Plus, as usual, she takes the thing in glorious directions, discursive and erudite, with a dash of self-annihilation. A+ so far, no complaints.
That’s all I got. Am I gonna talk about current events? No, because I haven’t looked at the news in three days haha I am so lying I look constantly my god I don’t think it’s Biden’s age that’s gonna do him in I think it is his campaign style, though I suppose he hasn’t really started doing his campaigning yet. Also if every Republican in the world can pretend that Trump is not a fascist lunatic, I don’t see why every Democrat, lefty, socialist, whatever can’t all kumbaya and insist that Biden is not too old. This election is going to be such a nightmare wait a minute it already is wait a minute I said I wasn’t going to talk about current events okay bye.
Today’s Media of the Day is a Moody & Quiet one. New and Old, well, mostly new except for some older Boston stuff. Into this new Gruff Rhys. Excited about new Six Organs of Admittance. Lovely soothing mix. Enjoy.
Okay I’ma gonna go do my weekly checkin with my map game and the countries of the world. Missed two last week. Can I beat it? Tune in tomorrow for the thrilling conclusion.