Good morning. Hello. How are you? #352
Clinical dystopia, potting up and the Last Starfighter meets cranky toddlers.
Good morning! Hello! How are you? I am doing okay. I am a bit sore from gardening. But oh my god this weather. It’s just amazing. Yesterday was about 74 and sunny. And very humid. Today is supposed to be about the same, though it might rain a bit in the afternoon. That is just dandy. Spring is here. It is very exciting. There are even (very tiny) green shoots on the cherry blossom tree.
Yesterday my mom and I made a trek to the futuristic clinic. I gotta say, it feels like medical personnel are done with what they seem to perceive — not unreasonably so — as COVID theater. I mean, not all medical personnel are mask scofflaws, but every mask scofflaw there was medical personnel. I guess who can blame them? They’re vaccinated, everyone they work with is vaccinated. The masks don’t matter to them at all anymore. But it’s disconcerting for the rest of us to see many, many nurses and doctors without masks on. And, of course, these places are supposed to be places of zero tolerance, not beynsian statistical analysis. You don’t tell an MRI patient, “well, you probably shouldn’t have any metal on, but, you know, maybe you have a bit it’s no big deal, we’re tired let’s just throw you in the machine and hope it doesn’t rip through your skin!” This is medicine! These things are supposed to be a big deal! But, alas. They’re human, they’re vaccinated, they’re tired. I understand. Still, it really does trigger some panic in me after this many months of enduring this pandemic.
I walk a lot more quickly than my mom, so I went over to the COVID screening pre-check they have and asked for two masks. It was a somewhat less than warm reception.
“I need to ask the COVID screening questions before I give out the masks,” the attendant brusquely said.
“Okay, that’s fine. I have POA and health care authority so I can answer for her.”"
“No you can’t,” she said.
This is one of my biggest pet peeves, when people pretend rules are rock solid, eternal, and immutable when they have been routinely “breaking” them for weeks. I used to immediately get really snappy about it, but I’ve gotten a bit better about it, what with all my time-acquired elder wisdom.
“Oh sorry did the rules change since last week?”
“Whatever,” the woman mumbled under her breath. I mean. She muttered Whatever! It was amazing.
Now, this lobby is horribly designed, and it gets really loud. I can’t remember if I’ve written about this but I was meaning to. This building is brand new, obviously cost a hundred mil easy. Super high tech and futuristic. And it’s lobby is a catastrophe. You have to shouts to be heard, so everyone shouts. It was so loud in there last visit I actually plugged my ears. I feel so bad for the people working in this lobby it really is a hostile workplace.
So maybe she didn’t think I would be able to hear her. Maybe she didn’t care. Maybe she couldn’t control herself? It was so weird.
But I didn’t get bent out of shape or anything. I just took it as assent. “Whatever? Great. Thanks.” And I picked two masks out of her hand. I suspect she was stunned she blurted it out in front of a visitor.
So then I go over to check in, which goes mostly well but another thing about this futuristic new UNC clinic is it has automated kiosks for sign in, which is great, but it also has those required terms & conditions to be signed to enter a building, like it’s freakin’ Facebook or something. I say Facebook because the first time I ever encountered one of those was back at the first Facebook office on University Ave in Palo Alto, 2006 or so (they assigned us a project to take on a competitor in Germany. We told them they should consider marketing. They hated that idea. Too messy.). I’ve always kind of hated them. The new additional absurdity that is worked into the situation at the new UNC clinic is, though, that they do this slowly-animated scroll through the whole T&Cs document. Like you can’t speed it up, you can’t skip it, but you also can’t slow it down to a speed to actually read the terms and conditions. It is pure theater. It is fantastic. Just a complete legal absurdity. Is it a HIPPA notification? Some weird UNC-specific T&Cs doc that says, like, I can’t take photos in the building or talk about it or something? I have no idea. And I’m someone who has routinely encountered these things in his life, unlike, I would assume, most of the people who come to this clinic.
The final thing I realized about this clinic that seems new to me in clinic design, or at least something I don’t recall encountering before, is that the entire clinic is designed so that there are patient hallways, and there are doctor hallways, and never the twain shall meet. Like there’s an outer set of hallways, whereby patients go to exam rooms, but doctors don’t use them. They enter exam rooms from doors on the other side of the room, all connecting to an inner sanctum of hallways and a central office just for the medical personnel. Not only does it seem pretty antisocial to avoid patients for people whose jobs are to care for people, but I am concerned about this clinic design style, and if you happen to be a showrunner on a medical procedural drama, you should be concerned as well.
After I got home I got to turn to things more pleasant: gardening! I potted up a ton of tomato plants, I still have more potting up to do today, but it’s going great. I realized that we are almost certain to have no more frost, so I am thinking about bringing some of these plants outside permanently soon. But i am a bit behind in my hardening off, so I can’t do that this weekend. BUT! The most exciting thing about yesterday’s gardening is that after four different attempts to find the right size castors for my seedling shelf, I got a properly sized set, and Emma and I got them on the shelves, which means I can wheel the whole shelf out of the garage into the driveway for hardening off. It is glorious!
Isn’t it great? I am so excited. From here on out, this stuff will be going outside more and more. Everything will be hardened off by mid week, and then I am going to start planting. I think we’re going to have a bit of a cycle going on. I have at least 3-4 of each type of tomato variety potted up, so those will be the first to go outside, once those are outside, I can pot up the rest of the tomatoes, and maybe I will be able to string those along for a while and not plant them outside till the peak of summer, so that they can deliver into the fall? Still working that out. But I AM EXCITED.
I keep calling “potting up” “up potting,” and I can’t stop. I am trying, I am trying.
Today we’re going to go check on the compost again. I kept the tarp off and it rained a lot but i didn’t go turn it this week so I doubt it’s warm. I don’t care. I have accepted it. I am just going to keep at it. One day it will click. My composting is like my Alaska Yo-Yo-ing (formerly, and derogatorily called Eskimo Yo-Yos. In Yupik it is a yuuyuuk, which I like). You just start going with that thing, up and down, up and down. Don’t stop, get a rhythm, eventually the synchronicity will follow. Like those paddles with little pink rubber balls tied to a string. That is my composting. Turn this into a little poem if you like, (the plastic bag swirling in the eddy is so beautiful), but I am not going to.
We’re also going to get all the dirt into the Greenstalk planter. Given that the frosts are almost certainly done, this seems the more pressing “garden infrastructure” task than getting the tomato trellises up, since the tomatoes won’t be big enough to trellis for sometime. But if I get dirt into the Greenstalk, I could theoretically start planting things in it this weekend. That is so exciting.
(I like the term “garden infrastructure.” I cribbed it from Adam Savage who is always talking about “shop infrastructure.” I don’t particularly like to talk about shop infrastructure because our little shop in the garage has terrible infrastructure - not enough power, not a good workbench, no decent dust collection. But our garden infrastructure? It is going to be lit.)
Anyway. I am not sure when you guys will get the gardening video update. I will try and bring myself to stop gardening tomorrow early enough to spend an hour or two in front of iTunes (still haven’t migrated to Premiere yet) on Sunday. Because I have a super-busy Monday at work, and I won’t have time to edit on-the-job.
The other day I watched Gary Whitta’s animated storyboard for his old pitch for a sequel to The Last Starfighter. I’m not gonna lie, it almost made me cry at the end. That’s how emotionally sensitive I am these days. But, then, I really loved The Last Starfighter and it was pretty amazing to see those majestic gunstars in all of these different settings. Just so pretty.
It also made me really want to actually download and try Charles Forman’s Wonder Unit Storyboarder software, which seems like the most amazing thing. I think I could really get into the animated storyboard as an artistic style. Of course, I can’t draw, so it would have to be a collaboration with a visual artist, but… I think it would be fun. I am hoping and planning to finally download the software and explore after years of thinking about it and Charles showing me amazing early demos back when I still lived in NYC.
Man, I sure do like being able to put photos into these missives now. It really has made the whole exercise much more rewarding for me.
Okay, well, gotta go get Jane out of bed and do breakfast. She’s been being a bit… emotional lately. Just a ton of fits that we can’t help her work through. A lot of getting stuck in “Jane try again” fits where she so desperately wants to stop being in a fit, and go “try again” at whatever task she supposedly just failed at. Only most of the time, there’s no task she failed at that can be fixed, because her failure was rooted in her stubborness and stalling. Like we’ll give her five chances to turn off a light, clearly explaining to her that the light has to go off one way or another and eventually if she doesn’t do it, we’re going to do it for her. But she won’t do it. So then we do, so then she loses it, starts crying and saying “Jane try again” but even if we let her try again, she won’t do it. It’s a pretty horrible loop. There are tricks to get her out of it sometimes. Sometimes you can patiently explain the situation and she’ll adapt. Sometimes you can move along in the process a good long way till it seems clear to her we actually mean it (though we actually meant it the whole time, OMG) and she’ll actually do it this time. If she is doing some task when all this starts, then of course you give her warning, and let her finish her task first, and often that’s enough. But, god. It’s been hard this week. Moreso for Emma who has been filling in for me as I take my mom to all of these appointments: one of which I have this morning in a couple hours. There’s a light at the end of the tunnel.
When I used to whine about Jane’s terrible twos, people were like “don’t worry, three is even worse.” I’m not sure if it’s worse, I can’t really compare. It certainly hurts our ears less. But it’s certainly not much easier. So I take heart that so many of you said four was better. Four is coming. I mean, not for seven months, but I can see it on the horizon. Even though I love her and I don’t want to rush through her young years. It’s a dilemma. Last week she was great, though, and if there’s been one thing that’s been consistent about this parental process, it’s that everything is a phase. Hopefully this one breaks soon.
Anyway, let’s do a mix. Oh look, we have a punkish mix done. That’s a good change of pace. That’s a good energy for a productive weekend. Yeah, this is a good mix I am going to listen to this today. Lots of solid punk ladies on it. Good times. Let’s rock out! As the years go by I love Hole more and more: well, the first two albums. Really do love Pretty on the Inside, such a great, noisy mess of an album.
Have a lovely day. Remember to hug your loved ones. May all your toddlers be content. May all your compost piles be warm.
WHATEVER?! I am so angry on your behalf. Why can’t people just be delightful?
(Also that seedling rack is sublime ❤️)