Good morning! Hello there, how are you? Are you mentally prepared to handle a Monday? I hope so. It’s not an easy thing, facing Monday. I am listening to Yello’s Solid Pleasure this morning. The absurdity is helping make the day seem a bit better. My arthritic fingers are acting up, which is sad. I desperately need a haircut. I look terrible. I have two meetings today, and need to cover for Emma when she goes to the Dentist. It is sixty-eight degrees and sunny outside.
I didn’t look at my email all weekend that was super nice. I remember in Barbarian days I would spend the whole weekend sitting on the floor, cross legged, in front of the television, at a coffee table with my laptop. I would watch and re-watch movies I’d already seen a bunch while spending the entire weekend, well, the daytime part of it anyway, answering emails. God, how depressing is that. I swear to god, for a decade all I did was go to meetings, drink, and answer emails. I like to think that I’ve grown and matured as a business man (“my daddy is a respectable businessman”), but maybe it’s just luck. Lower headcount, maybe. Or Slack. Maybe Slack saved my life. That’s a disturbing thought. At any rate, I actually do other things on the weekend now, and it really has been one of the biggest quality-of-life improvements of the last decade for me.
That weekend was lovely, just lovely. Got a ton of gardening done, got the home networking done, used medium-strength cyanoacrylate glue with a kicker to glue together some prescription sunglasses I’ve been meaning to fix for ages. Composted the extra tomato starts. Shop vacc’d the garage, twice. Finished another season of Great British Baking Show — only one season left to go. Had visitors. Went on walks. Downloaded all of The Purge movies, because I suspect they are better than I think. Listened to records. Got my “A day in the pandemic life” video edited. It’s good. I kinda want to do it again — my hair looks absolutely terrible in it, and I used an old iPhone instead of a new one and some of the indoor, low light scenes could have been better quality if I used my up-to-date phone. But all-in-all it’s a pretty good document of what pretty much every single day of the last fifteen months has been. It is, however, disturbingly intimate, and I don’t think I want that that on the internet. So I guess I’ll just show it to Emma once and then file it away on Plex, never to be seen again, like all of the best art.
I also got my gardening video done for the week, and you can see that one, so here it is:
Lotta mounding potatoes and planting tomatoes in that one.
Oh also, in the GreenStalk planter, up on the porch, there is an entire Napa cabbage already grown. It is nuts! It’s huge! A whole cabbage! I’m gonna cut it this week and use it to make some spring rolls. It’s gonna be delicious.
I’m really into these new grey grow bags. They’re so much prettier than the white ones. Emma had a vision years ago when I got started gardening to use nothing but white planters and it would help everything look very neat. And it does, but there’s a reason there are so few white planters, and even fewer white grow bags. Because they get dirty. The grow bags, especially, are very ugly. So I’ve been slowly moving to grey, which definitely hides the color better. The big problem is my tomatoes - they are in these 5-gallon white grow bags and the bags just look like absolute garbage now. Plus I am worried that 5-gallons isn’t enough. I bought ten 7-gallon grey pots and I am considering transplanting them all, but that seems a nightmarish endeavor and I can’t decide if it’s worth it. I did do some work to hide their ugly bags this week, though. I planted 10 different basils in the grey grow bags and set them in front of the white grow bag tomatoes, for a form of companion-planting-cum-camouflage. it looks pretty good!
The other big news is we had a giant hawk land in the yard. I am psyched. Please, mister hawk, move into our back yard and keep the squirrels and ravenous rabbit at bay. Terrify away those hungry critters.
Still reading the Three Body Problem books. On Book two, which I am enjoying, but not as much as I enjoyed the re-read of book one. There is a sort of fantastical parable early in the book about writing and love that I totally hated the first time around, though, that I liked a lot more this time. The first time I found myself just sort of skimming through it, thinking “yeah yeah yeah, blah blah, true love and fantasy and reality and writing, where are the space lizards,” but this time it struck me in a slightly more different way. Brought some depth, some tenderness, some mysticism to the books that really help things. Nice contrast from Kim Stanley Robinson in Ministry for the Future which definitely could have used something like that.
There’s one thing that’s been really applicable in the Three Body Problem books that I might be dumb for not having realized sooner. Because it’s just… so perfect in a way. The big impending confrontation that is in the future in the books — and the effect it has on humanity, on their outlook. It really is a fantastic metaphor for our current global political situation: inaction on climate change, rising fascism, the AI apocolypse knocking on the door and us inviting it in. I keep reading the book and thinking “wow that’s so weird they have this big maybe-apocalypse in their future I wonder how I would react to that,” and then remember: oh, right. We are reacting to it right now.
Ooof. Our bookkeepers are India, and get a lot of this email they just sent us:
Just to keep you updated, we had resumed working from office, but with the Covid-19 situation in India, we all have returned to working from home since the end of April, 2021.
Now, there is a cyclone (Cyclone Yaas) heading our way. It is expected to make landfall around noon (IST) on Wed, May 26th (which would be close to midnight PST on Tue, May 25th) between Paradip (around 285 miles from Kolkata) and Sagar Island (around 85 miles from Kolkata). More details available here. We do not know how it will / will not impact our city, Kolkata - whether it changes its path and hits us directly or whether we are spared its fury. We pray that the cyclone weakens considerably before making landfall and that it doesn't inflict significant damage to anybody.
God. When it rains, it pours. When it Covids it Cyclones. Whst is a Cyclone, anyway? A Tropical Storm? A Hurricane? Thank you, Wikipedia:
In the Atlantic and the northeastern Pacific oceans, a tropical cyclone is generally referred to as a hurricane (from the name of the ancient Central American deity of wind, Huracan), in the Indian and south Pacific oceans it is called a cyclone, and in the northwestern Pacific it is called a typhoon
Learn something new every day.
India, man. They really have gotten the shit end of the stick these last few months.
I guess maybe I don’t have much to write today. I have some notes, but they don’t seem particularly interesting right now. I lost my thunder because I was mixed up about Josh Hawley and Amy Klobuchar’s antitrust bills and thought Hawley’s was Klobuchar’s and was gonna rail against its stupidity but who is shocked that Hawley’s bill is stupid and what’s the point railing about the stupidity of that guy. And in any case, he’s not stupid, he’s malevolent.
I was thinking about how a year ago in these emails I could write for a week about my problems keeping a butter dish clean or something and it was great fun. It’s harder to do those sorts of bit these days. I think perhaps because we’re all so exhausted from the pandemic. And because we’re not… we’re not all in the same place anymore. Doesn’t it feel that way? More and more people traveling, things like that. This isn’t a bad thing at all, but it definitely… I don’t feel the same sort of community that I used to. We’re not really all in this together anymore. If we ever were. I do not trust when sending this out that you, my friend, are also stuck at home. That shouldn’t matter, but I do think it has kind of a mini impact. Again, this is not a bad thing. But I feel it.
Here’s a moody and quiet mix. It suits me today. Lotta classic, 90’s, personal-head-canon moody songs on here: That Buffalo Tom song and Single Gun Theory and His Name is Alive and Biff Bang Pow! and Lloyd Cole and Big Star and REM and I am just listening bands now. But about half this mix I could have made in 1996. However had I made this mix in 1996 I probably would have been a lot more sad and depressed about it than I am now. I am better equipped to handle such things in the 2020’s. Oh and it has Rosey on it. My old friend, I haven’t seen her in years, I miss her something fierce. She was there for me, took care of me, when I had a bad breakup. She has new music coming out this year and I am so excited. Maybe she’ll tour. Maybe I’ll see her.
Monday, Monday, can't trust that day
Monday, Monday, sometimes it just turns out that way
you can tell wikipedia that the word hurricane actually comes from the taíno huracán—so central american isn't strictly correct.
(and, yup, soy boricua pa' que tu lo sepas!)
Have you tried keeping a food diary w/r/t the arthritis pain? My friend tried this because he was miserable and tired of getting shots in his hands all the time... For some people tomatoes/nightshades cause flare ups (not for everyone though)