Good morning. Hello. How are you? #518
Wounds, gardening, chores, halloween, unfriending an anti-vax friend, AT&T tribulations, manufacturing supply chains in No Man's Sky, #teamseas
Good morning! Hello, there, how’s tricks? Holding up? Have a nice weekend? Mine was quite nice. Though I am wounded in so many ways. This ain’t some kind of metaphor, to quote Steve Albini: these wounds are real. It’s one of those weeks where you suddenly find yourself getting many little injuries. I have a lon gscrape on the top of my foot from kicking the dishwasher. I have a burn on my right hand from where I cockily thought I could reach into the stove and pick up that errant noodle without hitting the scalding burner grate or burner. I was wrong. I woke up this morning with my right ear inexplicably plugged up like I just got off an airplane. And, worst, I have about twelve chigger bites, or perhaps fire ants, all over the right side of my back. They itch like a mofo, which is honestly fine. Because the first day I had them — Friday — they stung. It was bad. My back, my back!
I was doing some “gardening,” which wasn’t really gardening but, rather, like, garden infrastructure work. Somehow in the process a chigger, or maybe a fire ant, we’re not sure, the bites have characteristics of both and neither, got up in my shirt and bit me a ton. It stung right away, and I ripped my shirt off, thought it was a yellowjacket, but I saw nothing and it kept stinging. Damn.
I did get one of the two old Birdies beds moved, and I got the two new ones assembled, and I got them all leveled. I then took all the spare logs, wood and dirt I had and got the bottom third of each one of them filled, so they are stationary and won’t blow away in a strong wind. The order for the rest is tricky. I need to harvest all the summer vegetables, then put the dirt from their planters into the birdies beds, then add a bunch of amendments, and then add new soil to top them off, then add my cover crop seed mix for the winter, all in the next two or three weeks.
My video about moving Birdies Beds has not gone viral yet, but it will, it will. Give it time.
I was gonna harvest more peppers but I’m still waiting for the peppers in the fourth Birdies’s bed to redden, they really are taking a while. I picked a few, but just enough for this week’s stir fries. And two whole tomatoes for our salad on Saturday. The spinach and lettuce and snow peas and beets and carrots are doing well, though. Who knows maybe I’ll even successfully grow my own beets for Thanksgiving, that’ll be a first.
Got my podcast done on Friday, too. I was having an existential podcast crisis, thinking maybe I should stop doing the thing, but I got a few reassuring messages from the listeners, that was nice, and it was actually really cathartic once I started doing it. So I think I’ll probably keep it up.
Played a lot of No Man’s Sky. My new thing is manufacturing and selling stasis chambers for fun and profit. You get about fifteen million units for one of them, but they’re hello complex to assemble. So I’ve developed this complicated supply chain spanning five or six planets and a pretty extensive farm. It is pretty satisfying. It’s like a giant, multi-dimensional Tetris puzzle and once it all clicks into place and I suddenly manufacture ten stasis chambers from all of the source ingredients, it is going to feel so good.
Did you know that Tetris can help combat anxiety? Makes perfect sense, right?
Hrm, other chores. Showered twice (two day gardening binge!), breakfast for Jane every day, did bedtime on Saturday, which was lovely. We played with the green ball and did catch. Jane’s idea of catch is to hold out her hands and you have to perfectly throw the ball into them. She won’t assist in even the slightest, it really is pretty hilarious. She’s a very good thrower though. We also played “under the covers” and “ABC circles,” she’s been back into the old games lately. It’s kind of crazy we’ve been doing “ABC circles” for almost three years. Jane and I shredded cardboard, loaded the recycling into the car and drove it to the recycling center. We stopped by the Post-office-gas-station-convenience-store-taco-stand to drop off a package — I accidentally purchased two copies of Saint Etienne’s I’ve Been Trying to Tell You on vinyl and sold the second one on Discogs. Did a lot of general puttering and cleaning. Ripped the 4K Blu Ray of The Green Knight, though I haven’t tagged or filed it yet.
But the big action this weekend came on Sunday, Halloween. Emma had an old friend from New York visit, and Will brought along his partner Ellen. Emma, Jane, Will and Ellen all dressed up for Halloween and we ventured over to the big neighborhood down the street for some serious trick or treating. We have a few friends in the neighborhood, Briar Chapel, so we stopped by Lauren’s house, who had jello shots for the adults. Jane played corn hole and made all the shots. From like three feet, but still. Born natural. Best part is there were three little girls there all around her age and she just played with them and it worked just fine. That was nice.
Jane went trick or treating two years ago, but she had no idea what was going on, really. This year she definitely got the whole routine, but she absolutely refused to say “trick or treat.” It was pretty funny. She was super nice to the people giving out candy, she’d say “please” and “thank you,” but if you asked her to say “trick or treat,” she’d just say “noooooo!” Emma found a clever workaround where Jane would go up and ask for candy and say “meow meow!” And that worked well.
We also drove to the otherside of Briar Chapel — it’s big it would have been nearly a mile which was a bit too far for Jane to walk, and back — to see my friend Perry. Perry lives on a dead-end street on the outer edges of Briar Chapel and I thought that maybe that street would be kinda dead for Trick or Treating but, nope, that street was lit. Man, a kid could absolutely clean up in Briar Chapel. I wonder if they are super strategic about it, employing machine learning to map out the best route, covering the most ground during the limited trick or treating window. Also apparently there is a parade. Lordy.
Halloween, man. That is some crazy shit.
An actual human AT&T guy came this Friday. He was great, and he swapped out both our modem and our fiber interface box. Finally. Unfortunately, it does not seem to have fixed our internet problems. He says the signal going into our house is really strong, too. It is a mystery. The outages are shorter now, though, like maybe 30 seconds. Maybe they’ll just magically go away, we really are at wit’s end. The tech told us to save his cell number and text him if there are any problems, though, so I think we will probably do that in the next day or two? Intermittent outages are the god damned worst, because of course just when you’re about to text an actual human tech, you don’t get an outage for 8-12 hours, and so you think maybe it’s fixed. I swear to god this problem’s gonna string us along and pretend things are fixed just long enough to make it awkward to text the guy.
Another sad thing is that I unfriended an old friend on Facebook late last week because they were spewing anti-vax hatred on Facebook. They were doing it from the hippie angle, but it was ignorant hatred nonetheless. I have zero patience for these things, I am not a gentle or patient soul, I am not an especially noble person, I can’t endure this, and I am unable to, like, you know, patiently talk to them in their terms. It still sucks, though. We weren’t especially close anymore but we’ve been friends for nearly thirty years. It reminds me of when you get news of an old friend of yours has died. You mourn them but you also haven’t seen them in so long, they’re not really part of your life anymore, but it’s still sad. I wish I were a better person about it, but I just… can’t. A single meme made my blood boil and I got so upset and hurt for the people being hurt that I couldn’t even think rationally, had to protect my psyche.
Same thing happened this morning reading an article in Vice about the Redneck Rave. Was reading along enjoying this fine aritcle about this interesting entertainment event and then the author got to the part where she mentions all the “Fuck Biden” signs and then there’s a picture of a Confederate flag and I’m like, nope. I am done. Lovely article you got there about rednecks insisting they’re misunderstood while they wave confederate flags. Nope nope big ole nope. Close window. Don’t read it. In fact, lemme just remove the link here so you don’t have to.
On a more positive note, I watched a ton of YouTubers go all in on this #teamseas effort to remove thirty million pounds of garbage from our oceans, and it was just lovely. Mark Rober, one of the ringleaders, showed how robotic garbage cleanup boats work. Mr. beast, the other ringleader, gathered a hundred volunteers and cleaned up one of the most dirty beaches in the world, removing sixty thousand pounds of trash, by hand.
One guy I watch used his scanning electron microscope to find microplastics in Lake Champlain. It was all very heartening. They’ve partnered with select charities and did a ton of work to ensure that for every dollar donated, they will remove a pound of trash from the oceans. Thirty million is not all of it but it is not nothing. And they’ve raised eight million dollars. Since Friday. I mean, shit. That is impressive.
Okay let’s do a playlist. Not exactly sure what we have ready and on deck here. All right, looks like we got a covers playlist about ready, that’ll be fun, who doesn’t love a bunch of covers, right?
Happy halloween, happy November, happy Monday. Thanksgiving, the best holiday, is in 24 days, that is nice. I like being thankful. It is a good spiritual healer. Plus, turkey.