Good morning. Hello. How are you, today? Did you have a nice weekend? Mine was pretty nice. Got a lot done!
Programming note: forgot to make last Friday’s playlist clickable. Here it is.
I got my booster. And my flu shots. Both of my arms still hurt. It has been two and a half days. I am still feeling a little sore but it was nowhere near as bad as the previous two shots.
Oh god, it is holiday address time. Please fill out this form. We are trying a new system. Fingers crossed it works. I’ll probably remind you of this a few times. I’ll leave it in the comments of the Facebook post too. And keep doing it for, like, a week or something, and then individually nag the people who don’t read this and aren’t on Facebook. My god, addresses are such a nightmare.
In better news, IT IS LEAF SEASON. The leaves are falling and that means I get to methodically walk all over my hard with my electric blower/mulcher and suck up all of the leaves. I try to do it only when the sun is out and our house is overproducing on solar, so the whole thing is carbon-free. I put them in one of my big compost bins and let them sit there all year and break down into a super-rich compost. I listen to a lot of music in my noise cancelling headphones. It is a great chore. It gets me sore, it’s good exercise, and it is hella meditative. So into it. I got four bags of leaves for the compost bin.
I got the fourth and final Birdies bed moved. It was the one still growing all the peppers, so I harvested all the peppers, so many peppers, my god, so many peppers, dug up the pepper plants, dug about half of the dirt out of the bin until I could lift it over the dirt pile, and carried it to it’s new spot. Emma leveled the bin whilst I loaded four or five wheelbarrows full of dirt from the resulting pile and poured it into all four bins. We then started emptying the containers that contained plants from this summer that have given up the ghost. Each bin is now about half to two-thirds full. I worked on it every day this weekend, but I was not feeling super top notch thanks to the booster. I still have a ways to go. All of the outdoor basils are ready to go now – they’ve started shriveling since several nights in a row got below forty. And the tomatoes and cucumbers and watermelon are all done. BUT I have consolidated most of the autumn vegetables into the hoop house and it still pretty much looks like an autumn garden, so, you know, I am still going.
Note the snow peas on the left. I have another batch in a whiskey barrel, surrounded by chicken wire, and they’re doing great. Fingers crossed this is the first year I successfully grow snow peas.
My goal for next weekend is to get the Birdies beds to about 5/6ths full and plant my cover crop on them for the winter, so they can get some nutrients put back into the soil for the winter. Then next spring I’ll top off the beds with new soil and compost and away we’ll go.
The other reason I didn’t finish the garden stuff this weekend is because I had to completely rebuild the WiFi network. We’ve been having problems since that weird power surge a week or so ago, and since the cable guy came and replaced the modem. I mean, replacing the modem definitely made our internet better, and fixed the main problem, but the WiFi was still glitching. I ran a firmware update on the main router and three nodes and it just made things worse. God, that seems to be happening to me a lot with firmware updates lately (ahem QNAP). I tried some moderate troubleshooting — the cable guy left the WiFi on in the new modem, the firmware updaste didn’t take in one of the nodes, so I got that one updated so they all matched — but it didn’t fix the fundamental problems, and the whole system was still in a worse condition than when I started (it was showing phantom networks, many, many devices could no longer connect). So I methodically reset the whole system, one node at a time, to factory default, and rebuilt the system from the ground up, one node at a time, reconnecting a bunch of devices each time, double-checking that the system was stable before re-adding the next node. It took forever, and we had to manually add all these devices to it which was a giant pain, but now the whole system works awesomely. Two days and counting.
One weird thing is that I named the system Webbles with our standard password. We haven’t called our WiFi Webbles in a few years, since we got this Asus mesh system. It’s been called NewWebbles2G and NewWebbles5G. But I figured we wanted it called Webbles, so I was just going to do that. And the weird thing is that a bunch of older devices, or devices that have access to a password manager, just reconnected to the system, not caring that this Webbles had a completely different SSID than the old Webbles. That seems so weird! I would have thought WiFi didn’t do that. But I guess it does. Learn something new every day.
Had to run some errands this Friday, to the bank and on the drive home “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” came on the stereo and I swear to god the song made me weep. Was sitting in CVS waiting for my booster and “Clocks” by Coldplay came on and that song almost made me cry too. Although that one was maybe just CVS. Anyway, I am definitely becoming a weeps-at-songs kind of guy. Feel okay about it.
Played way too much No Man’s Sky perfecting my Stasis Device manufacturing supply chains. Went on a few abandoned frigate runs. Took that stupid photo for my whiny overseer. Made about 250 million units. I’m up to about 700 million now. Trying to become a billionare. I made a bedroom and bought a bed so my poor spaceman doesn’t just stand there staring at a wall when I log off, except the game doesn’t let me lie in the bed, which is BS. You can lie in bed in Animal Crossing! Come on!
And, finally, I managed Jane’s transition to the end of Daylight Savings Time. Or, rather, I am still managing it. She is waking up early, but she is content to stay in her bed. I am getting her out of bed slightly later each morning, trying to get her back on track. I spend a lot of yesterday trying to teach her about DST, and the clocks change, and she changed the clocks with me. Only we messed up and the clock in the playroom didn’t get changed so I accidentally put her to bed an hour early yesterday before Emma stopped me. Jane was very excited to get an extra hour of playtime, which consisted her of going “what is two plus four?” Then I would answer and then she would say “what does two plus four equals six mean?” And then I would have to explain the math problem in plain english. Over and over, with different math problems, for hours. It really was something. Eventually I said “no more math,” and she got kind of annoyed so I decided to see if she cared about movies yet. I tried to put Harry Potter on, she did not like it, because she is a good progressive. So I tried Frozen, god help me. She’s never seen it, or any other Disney film, and she was mesmerized from the first moment of falling snowflakes. God, those people know what they’re doing. We only watched twenty minutes of it, but yeah, wow. Crazy.
I’ve been feeling sick and shocked over the deaths in Houston at Astroworld. Have a few friends who were working on various events in and around the festival, and my thoughts are with them, and, of course, the victims of this tragedy. The rumors around it are insane and I hope the investigators get to the bottom of it. Horrible. Awful.
Finished my book, To Drink from the Well - The Struggle for Racial Equality at the Nation’s Oldest Public University by Geeta N Kapur. Man. UNC has a dark past. And it still has giant racism problems! Like there is no point in the book where it’s like “and then they got their shit together!” From the passage of the Civil Rights act in 1964 through the 1990’s the university was still fighting the federal government, suing, countersuing, dragging its feet, being pulled kicking and screaming into racial equality. And even after that it has just been consistently awful. Now, of course we know that it is the government-appointed board of governors and leadership that has been, historically, most evil. There have been many good professors and students. But my god, it never ends. The percentage of students who are black has been declining through all of the 21st century. They’re still cutting deals with literal white supremacists in the 21st century. The book ends before the recent Nikole Hannah-Jones fracas, but it would fit right in, just another piece in a larger pattern.
One person who shockingly comes out great, though, is famed UNC basketball coach Dean Smith. There’s a thing that I did not see coming, a southern sports hero being a progressive activist, pushing to destroy the color bar, fighting for racial equality in sports. What a good guy. I read this passage and it brought tears to my eyes:
I also learned a bunch about my current state senator, Valerie Foushee’s family. Her first cousin was murdered, on campus, by a white biker gang called the Storm Troopers, for fuck’s sake. In 1970. Right in the pit at the center of the campus. Her father-in-law was one of the principal activists fighting to end segregation at UNC. It looks like we are going to get re-gerrymandered out of her seat and that makes me sad. She seems all right. I mean, I already knew that but didn’t know anything about her family history.
Lotta Fabergé stuff in the news, wouldn’t want you to think you can’t rely on me for your Fabergé news. First up, one of the largest Fabergé collections in the world is going on sale. Josiane and Harry Woolf, founders of the UK chain Underwoods, have been collecting Fabergé since 1972 and are selling the whole batch. The photo editor of that article used a photo of the imperial eggs, which the Woolfs do not collect. Philistines. Also of note this week is a long thread from Twitter user (checks notes) Charlemagne tha Gourd that went viral, ranking every single imperial egg, and honestly I am very jealous of this idea I shoulda done this years ago, alas.
Let’s do a mix. Moody and quiet one. Been a while. Old and new. A lot of the stuff that came on while I was vacuuming up leaves. Lovely autumn day out in the yard listening to Lida Husik, couldn’t get anything better than that.
Happy Monday. Let’s get through it. Together.