Good morning. Hello. How are you? #535
Back to work, no more video games. Potty training. Hay rides. Wim Wenders. Brad Laner and Lindsey Buckingham. Desktop catastrophes. Spacemen 3 zeitgeist.
Good morning! Hello! Back to the grind! How are you? Ready to face the week? I am shockingly okay with it. I think my vacation was long enough that I am ready to go back to work. I have much to do. Got a board meeting next week. Gotta finish up this insurance renewal stuff, woo. Probably have ten more work things on top of that that I’m not thinking of, because it’s 7:30 AM on Monday and no one’s bugged me yet. Let’s do it.
Also have a bunch of personal project stuff I need to work on today. The big news is Lisa got back to me with a fully edited draft of the Good Morning, Hello, How Are You book. I just dumped a 500,000 word manuscript in her lap, like six months ago, not even, and she carved and chopped and shaped it into something readable. I haven’t looked at it yet, but that’s on this week’s agenda as well. I am very, very excited.
Programming note: Holiday cards are imminent! Emma is going to try and send them out this week. So if you want one, or if you’ve moved in the last year, please fill out this form:
https://www.postable.com/thewebbles
Anyway. Mostly didn’t do anything this weekend since I last wrote to you. If I am being honest, I spent most of the weekend — aside from Jane time — playing No Man’s Sky. They are running this limited-time challenge and I want to finish it, because you get a sweet gold space ship, and I am using this video game to calm my restive brain and enjoy myself and have one day of vacation where I wasn’t consumed with thoughts of the chores I should be doing. So you gotta finish, like, fifty little tasks, and I have finished forty-eight of them, but the last two are just so grindy and I am so annoyed and I don’t want to do them, and I think I’m probably missing something because there has to be a way to raise your explorer’s guild rank besides doing these boring-ass missions and shooting animals and I do not want to shoot animals. So I’m waiting for this Gamer YouTuber to finish his walkthrough in the hopes that he has an easier way to do that. Or maybe an easier way to find an abandoned system than just randomly warping to low-economy systems and crossing your fingers. It is tedious and taking the joy out of the game.
Our potty training proceeds apace. Jane won’t poop on the potty (even though she can) but we don’t really have accidents, she wears her undies and pees in the potty and everything else seems to be working, and she just poops at night in her night time diaper before bed. It is progress, but not complete progress. An uneasy truce. I suspect it might be this way for a while. But there is no going back. At least now she is pooping every day (more or less) and we didn’t have another three-day spell without poop where both of us went into tizzies thinking our daughter was going to die or something. Okay it wasn’t that bad, and we both tried to keep it together for the other one, but we were both freaking out. I gotta say, I thought allotting nine days across a vacation was going to be enough for this — all the books and guides and tutorials said it would be — and now? Ugh. But I wanted to do it on vacation because the thought of an accident while I was working would stress me out (I watch Jane for 90 minutes every morning while technically on work time), but I guess the likelihood of that is low now, so continue we will.
I also thrillingly salvaged the eggs yesterday morning. I was distracted and I forgot to break the yolks in our morning eggs for a while, and by the time I remembered, the egg whites were already half cooked. This was a dire emergency. Jane may notice these eggs are improper. She may reject them. She may throw a fit. She may question them. And I am not going to make a second batch. So I quickly broke the yolks, stirred them in as well as I could, and flipped the entire batch of eggs. I served them with that side up, and she did not seem to notice or care that the bottoms of all of her eggs were white. The tops looked correct. I was ridiculously proud of myself. Crisis averted. Or maybe Jane was never going to care anyway. Maybe she is no longer a tyrant in that particular manner. Who’s to say.
But, man. I was really proud of myself.
Oh and this is fun. Our neighbors have three kids (I think?) fully grown, with kids themselves. All back for Thanksgiving. And they grew up around here, so while the kids were in town, they wanted to see their old friends, who are also all mostly new parents of young kids. So our neighbors hosted this giant gathering for them, outside. And our neighbor went all out making the back yard a play area for all the kids. They love Jane so they invited her over too, so went over, and Jane got to play with a bunch of other kids and didn’t act like a psycho, which is always nice. Also she got to go on a HAY RIDE:
That’s some country living, right there.
I also did do my podcast since I last saw you, so that’s a mildly productive thing I did:
Topics: Day 627, Genesis at PNC Arena, NYC Planning, Thankgiving, Wegovy, Jane potty training, Jane drawing kitties, work, management is hard, insurance applications, gardening, GMHHAY book, Persona, Submergence, Boxing Helena, The Extraordinary Adventures of Adele Blanc Sec, Marfa Girl, Dune, Steel Pole Bathtub,Friends of Dean Martinez, Saint Etienne, Body Dilloway Head, Dead Can Dance, Helium, Peter Gabriel, the problematic term “World Music,” Gram Parson, Goldfrapp, Taylor Swift’s Red (Taylor’s Version) on Vinyl and the red stars and the Target red vinyl version, Bauhaus, Casiotone fo the Painfully Alone, Dead Can Dance, Susanna Hoffs, Hard Feelings, Taleman, Damon Albarn, Makaya McCraven, Acid Mothers Temple, Adia Victoria, Adele, Perel, RL Burnside, Elise Trouw, Cranes, SNL, Mythbusters, Foundation. What We Do in the Shadows, The Great, Hawkeye, The Big Bus, Venom, Venom Let there Be Carnage, The Dawn of Everything by Davids Wengrow and Graeber
At this moment, I am still planning on going to New York next week for four days. Omnicrom is freaking me out a little bit, and they’re not going to have any real info about vaccine resistance before I have to make the call about going. Emma is thinking I should go anyway, and is rightfully pointing out that even if I am extra careful and mostly hole up in my hotel, it was still be beneficial for me to get some alone time. We’re both not sure what would happen if I skipped the trip. Back three months ago, when I was super sad and she told me to plan a trip so I cheered up, it worked like a charm. So, am I just in a better mood now? And I’d be totally fine even if the trip didn’t happen? Or will I sink into a larger depression? It is hard to tell. And what if I just postponed the whole thing but had a new trip to look forward to? Would that work? But then I would not be able to see Wet Leg and that would make me very sad. So, so far, trip’s still on. Fingers crossed.
Here’s a fun story about Brad Laner, the driving force behind the experimental/noise/shoegaze/freakout band Medicine from the 1990’s ( you may know them as the band that appears in The Crow), being a songwriter for a song on the new Lindsey Buckingham album. Apparently back like 10, 20 years ago, Brad Laner met Lindsey Buckingham through his friend Jordan Zadorozny, with whom Brad had a band at the time. Jordan was engineering some songs with Lindsey and Brad went and visited, and hubristically handed Lindsey a demo CD. Decades go by, the new Lindsey Buckingham album comes out, and there’s a Brad Laner composition on it. They figure Lindsey must have listened to their demo all those years ago, and made his own demo version from it, and when he was working on this new album, he plummed the vaults, found it, and re-recorded it for the new album, forgetting that it was originally a demo. Laner and Zardozny reached out, Lindsey realized thats what happened, and gave them songwriting credits, updated the artwork everywhere on the digital sites, and will put it in all future physical artwork. So, yeah. Brad Laner of Medicine wrote a song for Lindsey Buckingham. Mind blown.
On the night of my wedding rehearsal dinner, Medicine were playing down the street, at my wedding venue, Music Hall of Williamsburg. After my rehearsal dinner, I snuck up the street to see Medicine before heading to our pre-wedding drinks gathering. It was very exciting. I remember the first time they played Boston, at TT The Bear’s, there were maybe 15 people there. The guitarist used a Tascam 4-track as part of his effects rig. They were majestic and amazing. I still consider “One More” one of my all-time favorite tracks.
Here is a crazy tweet wherein we learn that Wim Wenders is the mentor and godfather of the children of the director of Black Panther:
This tweet caused Wim Wenders to be trending for me on Twitter this weekend, and I was immediately filled with dread. But he is only 76. We may still yet have Wim for a good long while.
The other big drama this weekend is that I messed up my desktop. My desktop is a carefully arranged assortment of aliases to folders. It is great. I have a folder on my desktop for any type of file that might ever actually clutter my desktop. Everything stays sorted, forever.
So I was about to read a new LiveJournal entry from an old friend who hadn’t posted for a while, and I was very excited, and I hit command-plus three times to make the text bigger to read it, except I did not have my browser window in focus, my focus was still on the desktop, and command-plus on the desktop makes your icons bigger, which also messes up their arrangement, and poof. Just like that, all of these icons had been moved to different places, the whole thing messed up. I had to spend, god, like, an hour fixing it. It was very unpleasant. But it did allow for me to delete a few aliases of projects that are done or, let’s face it, abandoned. So maybe it was productive after all.
Talked to my mother yesterday. Her Kindle had died, so I got her a new one, and she was setting it up, but somehow inadvertantly switched the language to Dutch. There is no way to hard reset (to factory settings) a Kindle just using the physical button, you gotta do it from the menus. So I’m, like, on the phone with her, with one browser tab open with the instructions of the menu order to get to the reset option, and another one with Google Translate, translating each level (four levels deep!) of text from English-to-Dutch so we can find the factory reset button. That was some quality Parental IT support that I’ve not had to do for a while.
So.. that’s about it. Back to work. Back to using the treadmill every day (actually, I was really good about this for the first half of my vacation, until Thanksgiving). Back to eating food that isn’t thanksgiving leftovers (SAD). Back to stressing about politics. Back to being annoyed that Quicken has suddenly stopped working with my local bank. Back to checking my stupid finances every day.
Okay let’s do a mix. It seems that the mixes are working fine, even though Spotify removed the “make public” option, by the way. Who knows. Mysterious. Anyway, drone mix. And we end it off with Spacemen 3’s majestic “Big City (Everybody I know Can Be Found Here),” the magnum opus from their criminally underrated last album, Recurring. The song is making a zeitgeisty comeback, being the first song that LCD Soundsystem played at their first show of their new residency at Brooklyn Steel. Though they messed it up, and they didn’t play it the second night, so now I’m all nervous they won’t play it the night that I go. And since LCD Soundsystem is a band perhaps most directly descended from the dance-meets-drone-rock that Big City pioneered, and I love, love, love Recurring so much, that would make me very sad. I might cry if I actually manage to see that. Anyway, by the time Recurring was recorded, Jason and Sonic were at creative and personal loggerheads, barely getting along. The album is essentially two solo records — one side each for Sonic and Jason. Sonic’s side includes “Big City” and the fantastic “Just to See you Smile,” and Jason’s side includes the first version of what would become Spiritualized’s first single “Feel So Sad,” and the fantastic “Hypnotized.” The CD also included the last song they ever did together, a cover of Mudhoney’s “When Tomorrow Hits.”
And continuing the zeitgeist of “Big City,” not only is LCD Soundsystem playing it, it showed up on Succession this week. Or at least, I have it on good authority (thank you, Gareth). I haven’t started this season yet. But I think it’s time. The buzz seems to be increasing as the season continues.
Wow that was a long bit about Spacemen 3, sorry. What can I say, my favorite band. There are other good tracks on here, too, I promise.
Okay! Hope your transition back to working life isn’t too painful. Talk to you guys tomorrow!
i have vowed to not waste this time between my booster (full strength today!) and the arrival of omicron like i did that beautiful time in the summer when we were freshly vaxxed before delta took off. SO: i'm partying my lil butt off, going dancing/seeing shows anytime i can. all that to say: you should go to NYC. i'd love to see wet leg and find out whether the rest of their songs can possibly touch the brilliance of "chaise longue."
Hi Rick, re poopy training, if this is still going on near Xmas you can enlist Santa to help you. Santa knows that Jane is ready to poop on the potty, so he will exchange (remove) all the diapers (nighttime diapers, whatever) and leave new underpants for her that she will not want to poop in. Probably he will leave a note explaining the situation.
- This worked for a friend of mine with same issue. It was like magic, her kid totally went for it. He was also a bit older on the potty training (probably Jane’s age) and they had begun to wonder if it would ever happen 😊
Obviously she has excellent self control and it’s just a head game. So you gotta find the angle. Who knew that outsmarting a 3 year old would be so challenging 😆
If you don’t do Santa or don’t want him associated with such things, you could also try 2022 - as in well Jane, enjoy your last diaper on New Years because we just got a memo, in 2022, everyone poops in the potty.
If she does have an “accident” or tries out pooping her underpants, she will hate it because it feels gross. Probably will only do that once 💩.
We had more than one poop accident while potty training 3 kids and it’s definitely not the grossest thing I’ve had to deal with as a parent. Projectile vomit on an airplane is much much worse. 😇 but I do feel your pain. I can also reassure you that she’s unlikely to head off to high school still wearing a nighttime diaper. This too shall pass. Enjoy!