Good morning! Hello! How are you? Did you have a nice holiday weekend? I sure did. Man. That was so great. You know what is so awesome? Not working! Doing things on your own time! Oh wow, what a great weekend. Except for the dream from which I just awakened: My toilet was filled with an endless amount of rats (cute ones, though!) and I was a VC again. horrible.
I just had the best time. I went to the Asian market, got a bunch of new flavors of Kit Kats. I don’t even know what some of them are. One is a cranberry walnut thing and one is sort of a coffee flavor but it’s not coffee it’s some other super bitter thing. Two flavors of green tea as well. And the weird not-coffee one and one of the green tea ones say BREAK on them, which is pretty sweet. I don’t know what means. I also bought a bunch of bamboo, some thai basil (I don’t really need more basil, but I want to plant cuttings of this particular variety), xiaoxing wine, dark soy sauce, and some fresh mung bean sprouts.
Then I went to Home Depot and bought Emma some wood. Here’s an interesting observation about wood prices, at least in the 2-foot X 4-foot plywood range. In the old days, the expensive plywood was maybe 200-300% more than the cheap stuff. Like you could get a cheap 1/16” piece of 2’x4’ plywood for, like, $4 and a super nice 18/32” 5-ply Scandinavian piece was like $12, or about a 300% markup. Now, of course, they are both waaaaay more expensive, but the percentage increase between the garbage plywood and the good plywood isn’t even 100% — they were $16 and $24 respectively.
That’s kinda interesting, right?
I also bought a battery-powered Dewalt chainsaw to work with my 20v battery system and it is super dope. I also got a Dewalt mini worksite blower this weekend — I wanted to buy it at a retail store but no one carried it so I got it on Amazon. It weighs 2.5 pounds. It was cheap. It works with my current batteries too. I am excited.
Then I came home and did my podcast, which was a pretty good one if I do say so myself:
Then I got started on gardening. Gardening was a big part of the weekend, obviously. I probably spent… almost 20 hours gardening? It was so great. I made so much progress. I did have to do a second run to a different, more local, hardware store (why don’t they sell power tools there?) to get some more dirt. And I kinda had to schedule things around a grow bag delivery, but in the end I got all of the stuff that was in smaller nursery pots potted up into their final home pots. I gave up on the overwintered peppers and recycled their soil and mulch and organic matter back into their respective systems. I did some soil amending to the in-ground tomatoes, which are doing shockingly well, and to the blueberries.
Man. Yeah, gardening. It’s so great. It’s a hobby that a) helps you get a bunch of exercise, b) makes the land healthier, c) provides food! Really can’t go wrong.
Oh and we got our first harvest! Two giant Napa Cabbage. Well, they are baby Napa cabbage, but they are giant babies. Like Sweat Pea on Adventure Time. And a bunch of lettuce, a very small amount of spinach and more parsely than I will ever need. We have been eating the spinach and lettuce in salads all weekend and it’s great. But I need more Napa Cabbage recipes. I grew it for fresh summer rolls and I am going to make some for lunch today. But what else? Anyone have something awesome they make with Napa Cabbage?
So, Sunday I needed to turn my attention into the house, because I had all these chores I needed to get done inside. I also decided to front-load my gardening because the weather was forecast to get progressively worse as the weekend went on. And it did get worse, but it never really rained, except at night on Friday, so in hindsight I could have gardened when it was a comfortable 72° instead of doing it in the 90’s like I did. But that’s okay. It was nice to be out when it was so nice.
Anway, Sunday. We have this table at the bottom of the stairs to the basement. Nice table, stainless steel top. Drawers. Grey. Matches the carpet. But due to its location it really becomes what my Taylor twin friends call a “kulch pile,” I believe is the term. I can never remember the exact word, even though I live for these things. Just a pile of stuff that you need to get to soon. I like to have one by each staircase for bringing upstairs and downstairs. Except, I guess maybe due to gravity, the one in the basement just gets bigger and bigger. It was taking up the whole table. It was absurd. And it wasn’t, like, a situation where each thing just needed to be put away, each thing was a task. I swear to god I spent, like, an entire day dealing with this table.
First we had all the emergency supplies, which we used to keep in the laundry room but after our recent Tornado warning we realized should be in the basement, which has a few windowless rooms, being the safest place for a tornado. So I needed to find a place for all this stuff. But it also occurred to me that the amount of emergency supplies was roughly equivalent in volume to this great big old Pelican case I have. But it was in storage. So I had to go the storage unit. I mean, I had to go anyway, because I needed to drop off some boxes and pick up some Texas Governor CDs. While I was there I did some reorganizing and removed a few boxes of electronics that I no longer own. Brought back the Pelican case and I was right — all the emergency supplies fit into it just nicely. I’m so glad to use this thing again because about ten years ago I had the brilliant idea that this Pelican case would be the repository for all of my stickers, so it is covered in fantastic old stickers and I love those stickers and it was a bummer that they were hiding in the storage unit. So now they’re back home.
See? That was one thing on the kulch pile table and it took, like, 45 minutes to deal with. I had to list two items on the table on eBay, which meant taking photos of them and everything. And then I had to completely re-work the Apple TVs because I had this brilliant idea of how I could connect the Apple ecosystem to the archaic, built-in legacy home audio system that came with the house, and it involved an old Apple TV, so I rotated down all of the Apple TVs, putting the best new one on the good TV in the basement, that one on the old TV upstairs in the play room, and that one is now planned for the home audio system. Except when you do this, you gotta rename each one, move em in HomeKit, and then on the new one you have to re-download all your old apps and log into everything again. Oof.
Anyway, with those three time-consuming tasks done, I had broken the back of the kulch pile and the rest of it got taken care of pretty quickly.
All of these tasks yieded in a new batch of orders of various bits and bobs off of the internet, which will result in a new batch of tasks for this weekend. UV-resistant sharpies. Small rubber grommets for hole covers for wires going through walls. HDMA to VGA+1/8” audio adaptors. Cheap, large, plastic bowls to put all of my garden harvest in — this lead to a loooong tangent researching something called a Tubtrug, which seems to be a rubber basket that has cornered the market in garden harvest bowls. They even have a recycled line. But they are sold out everywhere. I made do with cheap catering bowls. But wow. Tubtrugs. It’s a whole thing.
Hakuna matata. The circle of housekeeping chores.
Then I edited my gardening video for you guys. The exciting thing is that after that and the kulch pile table and the Apple TVs, I had completed everything on my list of “shit to get done” for the holiday weekend, and it was only Sunday. So I had a whole day to do whatever I wanted. Of course, I was already basically doing whatever I wanted. I like doing chores. I really like doing them when I can choose the order in which to do them. I was a bit panicked on Monday, because, like, what was I going to do with a whole day of nothing to do? I could watch a movie, but there’s nothing to see in the theater — I am about ready to go back. Well, A Quiet Place 2 is in the theater, and I saw the trailer for it pre-pandemic and it looked amazing and I meant to watch A Quiet Place before it came out so I could watch it, and even though AQP2 was delayed, like, 15 months, I still never got around to watching the first one. This would lead you to believe I could actually spend my day-with-nothing-to-do watching AQP, but, nope. I had zero desire to watch a movie.
In the end I spent… maybe four hours? working on layouts for my impending studio reorganization. I am making progress. I’ve been thinking on it for about six months now, and I think I have an idea. The first part of the idea is to just get rid of a bunch of furniture, so that is kinda cheating, but also the right thing to do. The next part is to use mobile workbenches as furniture. Like the kind you’d have in an auto garage or a home workshop or something. I’m not sure if I wanna go with something cheap and simple and drawerless or if I want to splurge and get one of those bajillion-drawer rolling things like you’d see in the background of Fast and Furious or something. Also I don’t have the exact new layout worked out. But i think I am almost there. I prepared a Keynote of multiple layouts and mocked up four different scenes of different layouts, so I could consult Emma. Because if there’s one thing Emma loves in this world as much as her family, it is rearranging furniture. Yes, this is the Rick room, but to rearrange any furniture in this house without giving Emma a chance to participate is just cruel. She would respect my decisions, but it would be verry hard for her to keep quiet. So it’s best to just include her in the process. So I made a whole Keynote. I feel very accomplished. I’m gonna sit on it for another day or so before I show it to her, to try and anticipate her feedback and incorporate some of it in advance. Even though, as I write this I realize I shouldn’t do that. I should use, like, my old agency pitch skillz and leave little imperfections in the plan that she can point out. And think about the order of the pitch to lead her to my preferred decision. Haha like that ever worked in agency life.
Here is a picture of our cute cats in the laundry room this weekend:
In media consumption, I finished my re-read of The Dark Forest and I loved it almost as much the second time as the first time. One small gripe about the pacing of the final act. You could’t see the first time, but upon a re-read, I would definitely have worked on that a bit. Now I’m on to the third book of the series, Death’s End, which I am liking a lot more the second time. I had a lot of problems with it the first time, but so far I really like it the second time. The Australia part still burns me up and is very hard to read and I get all flustered and rush through it because it’s too unpleasant to think about.
We finished The Great British Baking Show, yay us. We watched it completely out of order, but it was just fine. After we finished we poked around in the later seasons that we had watched first, years ago, pre-pandemic. It was fun to watch the progression. They need to remodel that tent, though, it’s getting old. And they need more refrigerators. I am excited for a new season, though. Shouldn’t be too much longer, right? God, those people booked an entire hotel and quarantined everyone to shoot and deliver a season during the pandemic. What heroes. We needed that. Thank you, Bake Off cast and crew.
Now we are going to watch/re-watch all of Mythbusters. It’s one of Emma’s favorite shows, and I always really liked it too, but it started in 2003 and I was super busy at Barbarian and barely watched any TV back then. So I’ve seen a few here and there, and she’s seen most of them but not all of them, especially the early ones. Plus it’s educational and interesting. It’s gonna take forever, though. First season is short, but then it settles into like a bajillion of those 20+ episode series. God, that must have been so much work. For, like, a decade of your life.
It’s been nice taking a break from writing these, I’m not going to lie. And I only wrote my 750 Words to myself once this weekend. It’s made me wonder what I’m going to do when I’m in Alaska, though. Am I going to try and write this every day? Part of me thinks no but part of me thinks yes, why would I stop writing this now that I am doing something actually sort of interesting? We shall see, we shall see. But I missed you guys. Good to be back.
Wow I had a whole giant list of topics in my notepad and I barely scratched the surface but I think we can stop there.
One thing I did not do was work on mixes, whoops. And Spotify’s redesign finally made it to my computer and it is garbage. One of those whole-redesigns that seems like a good idea, but chucks all of the key-commands and user-improvements that had been made incrementally for years, that the product designers don’t use, so they don’t realize other people do. For instance, in the old days, you could use the arrow keys to scroll through your playlists on the left, and when you did, the main window on the right re-populated with the next playlist you selected. Now it just highlights the next playlist in the list, and you have to hit return to see that list, except hitting return also starts playing the list. Which is not useful to me when I am trying to scan through all the playlists looking for one that is an hour long. Also they removed search from home. Who does that? It is command-L, by the way. And they made it waaay more clicks to make a new playlist and name it.
Anyway, looks like I do have a “W Hotel in a Better, Alternate Universe” playlist done for you. Oh man, Tortiose Gamera. My roommate Nick owned the 12” in 1997 or so and it was on constant rotation in our house cuz I loved it so much and I couldn’t find a copy anywhere. I own one now but I didn’t find one till the Discogs era. Absolutely my favorite Tortoise song. Erika de Casier is a new 4AD signing and she seems worthy of the label’s legacy.
Okay! Let’s go to work. It’s a four-day week, so that makes things more tolerable. Have a super busy day today. Gotta remember, like, what we do and how we make money and stuff. I can do it. SHIFT GEARS. Good luck!
Man those fairy tales in Death's End... incredible.
https://magnifissance.com/food-beverage/chef-grinkers-soup/