Good morning. Hello. How are you? #533
Potty training time. Genesis at PNC Arena. Leaf vacuuming. Building Wizarding World. The Big Bus (1976) with Stockard Channing. Kyle Rittenhouse. SNL. Our first (temporary) woman president.
Good (mid) morning. Hello. How are you? I am good. I am writing this late cuz I slept till 8, which meant there was no time to finish it before getting Jane from bed for breakfast, which means I’m finishing it now, several hours later than usual. I hope you don’t mind. What can I say, I am on vacation.
Programming note: Don’t forget to fill out this lovely form for a holiday card. Who doesn’t love holiday cards. Doooooo itttttt.
After watching a long-ass tutorial video and reading some book sections, we have begun “potty training” Jane. We’re doing the “rip the band-aid off, with kindness” approach, which means basically she said goodbye to diapers yesterday and now goes without them. We waited until I was on vacation to do it because the prospect of dealing with accidents while working was stressing me out. And there were indeed accidents. She embraced the idea of saying goodbye to diapers, but she does not seem to have embraced the idea of actually, you know, using the toilet yet, which is is totally capable of doing. We are trying to talk about “the feeling” you get before hand, and she sort of gets it, but basically she is being stubborn. Still, though, I have faith, it’s only been a day. We will keep at it.
In other Jane news, it’s now been about two weeks of her saying “no” in the morning to our rock-a-bye-baby routine, which was so great and I miss it so much. I knew it wasn’t going to last, though, so I did my best to enjoy every minute of it. BUT last night during daddy bedtime she came and curled up on my lap and sat with me for a full hour of daddy bedtime, so that was really nice.
On Friday Emma and I went off to see Genesis at the PNC Arena. Jane stayed over at Grammy’s house. I had tickets to Charlotte that I bought when the first dates of the tour were announced, but much later, they added on a Raleigh show, and that was much easier to do. It was maybe three-quarters sold, which was fantastic, because it allowed us to buy tickets in the very back row of the top level, with five full rows in front of us completely empty. Perfect social distancing at an arena show. The encore was going to be “I can’t dance” and two other early songs I didn’t care about, so we snuck out during the encore, thus comletely avoiding crowds. Yay us. The sound is shockingly good at the PNC arena – they have fabric baffling all over the ceiling, and the back walls are made of sound dampening fiber board. I was impressed.
Genesis are really going for a career retrospective approach here, playing songs from all phases of their career – including the Peter Gabriel phase. Well, that’s not entirely true I guess they didn’t play anything from the first four albums. But they played songs from Selling England by the Pound, The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway, Wind and Wuthering, …And Then There Were Three, Duke, Genesis, Invisible Touch and We Can’t Dance (ugh). The most glaring omissions were “Abacab” — I mean come on! — and “In Too Deep.” Would have liked “Man on the Corner” and “Misunderstanding” too. But it delivered. “Home by the Sea / Second Home by the Sea” was epic, so was “Duchess.” And of course the Invisible Touch hits — I would have swapped out Domino for “Abacab” and “In Too Deep,” but hey that’s just me.
Other than that, what have I gotten done since I wrote to you. I vacuumed more leaves (I swear I am leaving plenty for the bees don’t worry). Got a nice new compost pile of leaf mould compost going. I built yet another new Birdies Bed, took apart the Greenstalk planter, recycled all the soil from all my remaining summer crop containers into the bottom of the new Birdies Bed, along with this week’s kitchen scraps, a lot of green matter that was finishing up in the garden. Excited for next year. Plus the lettuce, beets and spinach are all doing great. Somehow a fucking squirrel got into my caged up snow peas and ate them all and I am pissed. It is SO HARD to keep these fucking squirrels away. I watch this lady gardener, also in zone 7B, and she just has her garden out, not fenced, not netted, and squirrels don’t eat it all. Same for my neighbors. I have some sort of mega-squirrels. It is horrible. Anyway, I really wanted to get the cover crop seeded, but I ran out of time, and it’s raining today. I’m worried it’s too late to get it going now. Alas.
Emma’s college friend Mike gave this amazing interview to MuggleNet about building the Wizarding World. Years ago, Emma and I visited Mike at Diagon Alley and he gave us a tour of the whole thing. It was amazing. The scale of the work they did there is absolutely astounding. It’s twenty minutes but worth your time if you are into creativity, creative management, or spending boatloads of money on amazing stuff. Strong recommend:
Re-watched this movie that’s been going through my head my entire life, The Big Bus, a sort of proto-Airplane! disaster screwball comedy about a large, nuclear-powered bus making a non-stop run from New York to Denver. I have had images of this movie in my head my entire life — specifically the bowling alley scene, all those people jumping over the ball one by one, I just thought it was the funniest thing in the world. It came out when I was four, in 1976, and I must have seen it not long after. I have visions of seeing it in elementary school, actually. When it got too cold — I think -30°F was the cutoff but it might have been -40°F — we had recess inside. And they would just show movies. I remember Capricorn One, and Condorman (which I totally gotta rewatch soon) and The Big Bus. I gotta say, it kind of held up? It’s not as outright absurdist as Airplane! but you can totally see that’s where things are going. Stockard Channing is a comedic genius and I don’t know who this Joseph Bologna guy is but he was great. All in all, a pleasant trip down memory lane.
Played my dumb video game for a while, though I am trying to cut down, ha. I had a mission — well, not, like, a mission the game gave me but a personal mission — to find some runaway mold, which can be easily converted into nanites. I found a nice batch that replenishes itself every few minutes, made a base there, threw down a teleport, penned up the mold and now I got a fairly straightforward nanite farm. It is tedious, but it gets the job done. It was mildly surreal going from, you know, gardening and harvesting in the virtual world to turn around and garden and harvest in the real world. Like all I did for a whole day was harvest things. It was an annihilation of the self. Meditation. Escape from the physical and emotional pain of reality. My entire reality is harvesting solar vines and sucking up leaves. The metaverse and the real are one.
And who can blame me because back in the real world, then, we have the Kyle Rittenhouse verdict, which is as horrifying as it was predictable. I was half-heartedly following the trial, but even from that vantage point it felt clear that this was the way it was going to go. The tossing of the gun posession charge. The blocking of calling the victims victims. The judge refused to allow the prosecution to pinch and zoom in on a video on an iPad because they could maybe add things in while doing so. Plus racism! SNL did a good skit on it, one of those skits that’s very dead on and funny about some horrible thing and you can tell the crowd is deeply uncomfortable about the whole thing and it calls into question the very act of laughing at tragedy and sends you into a tailspin of internal ethical debate of whether or not comedy is making things worse by acting as a palliative and dulling our sense of outrage and demand for action, or if it is performing a valuable service by taking evil down a peg and reminding it that it is not the boss of us. Who can say.
BUT, we had our first woman president for a couple minutes. That is pretty exciting. I suppose it should have occurred to me that that was going to happen when she became veep, but it didn’t. Also why is everyone saying Kamala is doing a bad job of being veep? I am confused. Is she doing a bad job, or is she just not, like, making proper use of the platform to position herself as the heir apparent? I am genuinely confused about this line of conventional wisdom.
And the house finally passed BBB. I mean, the senate hasn’t, and got knows when they will because it is soooo important that they continue their 50+ year bipartisan run of fellating the military industrial complex, and Manchin and Sinema are raking in the money from the Republicans and blah blah blah but at least yet another hurdle is past.
OK well, good talk. Gotta go. I guess today’s the day we will start the holiday tradition of re-watching the Lord of the Rings movies in extended editions. No Hobbits. Maybe Bakshi, not sure if there’s gonna be time.
Today’s mix is a mix of old and new, just a mix. This Indelicates song came on when I was vacuuming leaves and it was so great. I watch a lot of Youtubes by this young woman named Hannah Lee Duggan and she does a lot of home improvement and shit and she is always dancing during it. Like takes little dance breaks and stuff and I’m always like “well that looks great and makes for compelling YouTube content but isn’t very realistic” but there I was, strapped to a leaf blower-slash-mulcher dancing and rocking out. So I owe Hannah Lee Duggan an apology, apparently it is very realistic, you just need the right song. “Hug of Thunder” came on during leaf vacuuming too, and, man, what a great song. So expertly crafted. And yet it is probably, like, the 50th best Broken Social Scene song and no one really cares about it and that’s just, like, the situation with music these days there’s so much great music it is so hard to break through and man “Hug of Thunder” is a great song. Also new 100 Gecs, they seem to still have it. Sweet jam.
Okay, well, Jane hasn’t peed or pooped yet I suppose I better go offer some encouragement. Wish me luck.
good luck with the potty, jane, and happy vacation, rick!