Good morning. Hello. How are you? #401
Tech gardening, plant gardening, visiting friends, sad and sick Jane
Good morning! wasssuuup. How’s tricks? Weekend going okay? Getting everything you wanted to get done, done? Or maybe not doing anything at all? Relaxing, recharging? That’s nice. I hope your weekend is…. nice. I’m listening to “Sorrow” by the National. Except I so strongly associate this song with the National’s art exhibit with Ragnar Kjartansson, A Lot of Sorrow, where they did a live show where they played nothing but “Sorrow” over and over for nine hours. And they put it out on a vinyl box set and then, like a lunatic, I bought it, and then, also like a lunatic, I decided to listen to it all, in order, nonstop, one day about four years ago. So now whenever I hear “Sorrow” once in a mix and the mix moves on to another song, it feels completely odd and wrong. So I just backed up in the mix, and clicked the little arrow-circle icon twice till it had the little “1” in a circle next to it, and now I’m listening to it on repeat, and it makes a lot more sense. Smart guy, Ragnar Kjartansson.
Programming note: I would like to apologize. Calling the “Day in the Life” video a “big new project” was probably overselling it. Calling something a “big new project” these days is, like, professional-overachiever-speak for a new job or something. A new startup. An entire new line of business at your company. Something that’ll go on for years. Nah. It was just a video. That made me very excited for, like, three days. It was medium-size new project. Or, I guess, a small new project. Were I prolific oil painter like my friend Emilia who has a prodigious output and is always painting it would have been “just another painting.”
I slept in a bit today, weekend and all. Like 40 minutes. And then when I got downstairs to write this, my computer was giving all sorts of wonky, cranky error messages, until I realized that my hard drive was full. So I emptied the trash to buy me a little space, but really the problem is that I am working on this “Day in the Life” video and I shot, like, oh, got, I think over a terrabyte of video for the thing. And of course I’m up to Episode 15 of these gardening YouTube videos, and they’re all shot in 4k, so, you know, chewing up storage space. So I gotta move a ton of stuff to the Cold Storage volume on the Qnap, so right now the first 180 GB of gardening video source footage is moving over, and now I can tell it’s going to be one of those days. But that’s okay, because today was going to be an indoor tech chores kind of day anyway. Gotta get that new node set up on the Wifi and see if it improves the situation with our evil surveillance state household appliances. And I gotta update the firmware on the Qnap today, which will be a hassle now that the whole day I’ll probably be copying a ton of shit over to it. But that’s fine I’m in the mood for a day like that. Except this post is late, and it won’t be done before Jane needs to wake up. Just like last weekend.
Anyway here is a picture of Jane for world goth day:
Did a ton of gardening yesterday it was very fun and very emotionally rewarding and very cathartic and just an all around good time. My compost is still not heating up that is just maddening. BUT. I took ten more of the sad, neglected tomato starts in the garage and I planted them in the ground. Like I tilled the soil right in front of one of the Birdie’s beds, and I added a ton of garden gypsum to break up our ultra-thick Piedmont clay, and added some Espoma Tomato & Veg fertilizer, and planted the things. Right in the ground. We will see if they take or not. It’s an experiment. But most of them were looking a little happier by the end of the day. I also spent, like, an hour and half potting up a ton of basils, cucumbers, bok choi, Napa cabbage, etc. into larger 3- and 5- gallon grow bags. I got new grey and black grow bags instead of the white ones I have historically used, and they look so much better. The white ones just stain and turn green. These look nice. So things are looking pretty good.
I also composted the remainder of the tomato starts, which was very sad and felt very wasteful, even though they’re going into compost and will, eventually, be recycled back into the garden. I just planted way too many tomato seeds. I hadn’t done anything from seed in decades and I was worried I was gonna fuck it up. But I did not fuck it up. It was fine. So then I had way too many. Farewell, tomato starts. Thank you for your service.
But the most exciting thing about yesterday and that we had two different visitors. It was great. Late in the afternoon, my friend Perry came by. Perry is a fellow contributor to the Why is this Interesting newsletter, and during the pandemic she moved to the Triangle. But she didn’t just move to the Triangle, she moved within walking distance. She’s been getting settled for a while, but she’s more settled, the weather’s nicer, we’re both vaccinated, so she came over with her little doggie, bringing lovely gifts. We stayed outside and I gave her a little tour of the trails and the dock. And the garden. It was quite lovely.
And then in the evening our friend Alice came over! That was so exciting. We hadn’t seen her since, really, the beginning of the pandemic. And since then, she’s moved, she’s had a baby, so many things have happened. And we just sat there talking in the living room for, like, three hours, non-stop. We all could have easily done it for three more, not a problem at all. Like there was so much to catch up on, I feel like we only barely scratched the surface. I was worried post-pandemic conversations would be hard because everyone would be like “nah we didn’t do anything” but I don’t think that’s going to be the case. Life went on. Things happened. Babies were born and parents get sick and jobs change and life events kept going on. It was crazy! I mean, Emma and I are lovely conversationalists but the pandemic has definitely reduced the number of external stimuli to our conversations — we still have politics, and whatever shenanigans happen at our jobs and stuff, but, you know. Seeing other people. That is such a big part of life that was just on hold. Anyway, I am excited now about post-pandemic conversations. Went a long way toward assuaging my anxiety about returning to society.
Friday was rough. First off, Jane was sick Thursday night while over at Grammy’s and actually vomited a bit, which was the first time this is ever happened to her and wow can you imagine the trauma of vomiting for the first time? That can’t be super fun. And she didn’t get enough sleep, and her tummy hurt. By the end of the day, the nausea had died down and she was feeling better, but she was just so tired. And I don’t think Jane has really realized that sleeping is fun. I feel like it’s still something she does because we tell her to. So she was tired and cranky and didn’t want to go to bed. And everything was a battle - teeth, jammies, diaper. Just resisted everything.
Earlier in our bedtime evening — the very brief part of it where she went off and played on her own, which is usually the bulk of bedtime hours — I did get a few minutes to myself but I made the horrible mistake of first reading an article about how Stephen Breyer is being a monumentally selfish dick and not going to retire from the Supreme Court even though he’s eighty-two years old and seriously, fuckin fuck fuck hello the fate of the world could very well hang in the balance stop being a selfish old white guy dick please? So that didn’t put me in a great mood. “Okay,” I thought “stop reading the news just head to your escapist paradise on YouTube” and I switched over to YouTube and this tech reviewer I really like - Marques Brownlee – instead of doing his, like, normal penantic, chill reviews of, like, the latest gamer phone or something did an interview with the CEO of Google Sundar Pichai and it was just…. so bad. I mean, that’s not fair to Marques he’s a fine interviewer, but he is a tech gadget guy and the whole thing was milquetoast and softball but also just so… cultish. Like Sundar seems very smart but he just speaks about reality in that stupid Silicon Valley way I really do not miss at all. And he talked about, without a trace of irony or acknowledgement of reality, how Google has great AI ethicists. Awesome.
So I’m sitting there starting to get real down on the world. Those two were really enough to send me into “the world is coming to an end” spiral, which is never particularly good. But the most heartbreaking part was that after that, for, like, half an hour Jane just kept plaintively pleading to “Make Jane happy. Make Jane Happy?” Like she wanted to cheer up but couldn’t. And she’s empathetic now, and she can sense that I am unhappy. And I am just sitting there, in the dark, in the rocking chair, with her wrapped around me just moaning “Jane be happy, Jane be happy.”
And me responding, over and over: “Sleep will make you happy. You’re tired. If you go to sleep you’ll be happy tomorrow.”
And she’s like: “No. Make Jane happy.” She senses my own sadness. She wants it gone, so she can be happier as well.
And around and around we go, for like 30 minutes. Jane be happy. Jane will be happy when she sleeps.
And then, abruptly, she says “Jane stand up?”
And I’m like “Sure, okay, but it’s not going to make you happy.”
And I stand her up. “See? Are you happy?”
And she stands there, caught between wanting me to be wrong, and the reality of her not actually feeling any different now that she’s standing up. She hesitates.
Eventually her pride got to her, and she needed for me to be wrong and me right, so she stops crying, looks at me and says:
“Yes. Jane happy now.”
Well okay then.
Rest of bedtime proceeds as if none of that ever happened.
But, god. Took a lot out of me.
She was, of course, fine the next morning. Made for a lovely little gardening assistant. Wheelbarrow Jane is just too adorable.
I actually have two whole minutes till I need to go get Jane, so we’re gonna wrap this up early today. Today’s mix is just a mix. Some sweet tunes for your Sunday. Yes, I put non-Roger-Waters Pink Floyd and solo Roger Waters on the same mix. I feel good about that. And my friend Aug’s favorite new Fightmilk song. And a Future Bible Heroes song that my Spotify has been insisting on playing over and over and it’s pretty hilarious.
Have a lovely Sunday! Jane be happy.