Good morning. Hello. How are you? #592
A lovely weekend of gardening. Buy my book please. What if Biden's not being dumb? My grandpa's harrowing tales of Territorial Alaska.
Good morning! Hello! How are you? Doing okay? Have a good weekend? Did you get presidents day off? I hope so. I got four days off it was just fantastic. Sorry I didn’t write an edition of GMHHAY yesterday, I know you missed it. Instead I had three days spent in the garden, which ruled so much. Retired life is going to rule so much. Man, it is crazy how much emotionally better one feels when one gets exercise. Don’t get me wrong, this winter I had my treadmill, and I used it dilligently and Emma and I kept our walks up all winter, which we did not do in the 2020-2021 winter. So, first off, I mean, go me for making both of those lifestyle improvements this winter. It really was an accomplishment to not only not gain weight over the winter, but actually lose some weight. I am proud of that. Well, honestly, usually I never even think about it and just keep on continuing a good run of self loathing, but I should be proud of it, and I am trying.
That being said, nothing is like real hard work. I moved a literal ton of rocks, in the form of little yellow pebbles, that have been the bane of our existence since we first moved into this house five (six? seven? lol time has no meaning) years ago. Built a couple of big, new, sturdy, sexy hoop houses. Well, the frames. I didn’t put the fabric on yet. Shredded a ton of cardboard for mulch. Assembled yet another birdies bed.
But the best part was Jane helping! I mean, seriously, it was so freaking cute. I was in this endless hell cycle of loading up load after load of rocky dirt into my wheelbarrow, then hauling it and dumping it, and then doing it all over again. And Jane got her shovel, and got her wheelbarrow, and loaded up her wheelbarrow alongside mine and went and dumped it with me and it was so cute. Seriously. You can see for yourself, because, good news, I know you’re all very excited, but the gardening videos are back.
Paid the price for that video. I have a band of chigger bites across my stomach that are itching something fierce today. Thought it was too early in the season for chigger bites. I was wrong.
Jane has been super cute and broadly good all weekend, actually. Should out to Jane. She had one little meltdown on Saturday but it was fine. And otherwise she has been a real joy. Emma invited over one of the neighbors and her daughter, and Jane had a play date. She has not had a lot of playdates in her life, Jane. Especially with a single child approximately her age. She had one little moment where she tried to boss the girl around and the girl was like “nope” and Jane adapted quickly and everything was fine and super cute. They played restaurant. It was lovely. And then last night she sat on my lap snuggling for, like, two hours watching Home Improvement YouTube. It was fantastic.
I also got the GMHHAY books all ordered, with express shipping, so they should be here next week, and then I will get them out to those of you who have ordered one by, hopefully, the end of next week. That is so exciting! I also updated the text and cover for the Amazon print edition, so the Amazon print and kindle editions are ready to go and will be available for order the end of this week. We will put the digitial edition up on rickwebb.net at the same time. SO EXCITING. Thank you thank you!
And if you haven’t bought it yet, never to late to pick yourself up a copy! You never know when your internet is going to go out for eight hours like ours did last Thursday and you will find yourself desperately wishing you had a weighty print tome sitting around. Or you can leave it in your guest bedroom and guests will pick it up and thumb through it when they visit. That’d be nice.
So, looks like we find ourselves on the brink of a stupid, pointless war. Gonna just put this out there, try the theory on for yourself, see how you like it: perhaps Biden is… doing a god job? Everyone is, like, “oh Biden is gonna look so dumb when he says Putin is definitely going to invade and then he doesn’t.” I would posit that Biden would consider that a win? I have a theory that Biden is maybe performing his foreign policy with an aim toward specific outcomes and not how dumb he, personally, might look in the matter. Or, rather, at least that is not his primary operating concern. I strongly suspect Putin thought this whole thing was going to go the way of the Crimea, that he was the unchallenged, unparalleled master of the information warfare space, and he was going to say and do the things he’s doing right now – that there are Russian breakaway republics and all he’s doing is helping them with their internal security, no big deal, etc. — and he thought the whole world would mostly ignore the situation like they did the Crimea. I suspect he absolutely did not expect all of Europe to, like, actually stand united, since they’ve been relentlessly bickering about the stupidest shit for, like, a decade now (like we should talk). I definitely think he did not expect the Germans to halt the NordStream 2, like they did last night. I suspect he thought the close business interests of the German business community would override their more democratically inclined urges.
I am still absolutely hoping that this does not turn into a full-blown war, of course. BUT, the minute this turns into a full-blown shooting war, I super hope someone launches a couple cruise missiles from the Black Sea and takes out Putin’s giant, illegal, stolen, billion-dollar palace, since that is a 100% personal retaliation and not one against the country. I suspect most Russians, deep down, know about the palace and are embarrassed, and even some strong, conservative Putin supporters would find it kind of funny if he lost the thing. I don’t actually 100% advocate this, since, you know, violence, and some groundskeepers and shit would probably die, and that is bad, but him losing his kleptopalace really is a fitting result of this ridiculous debacle.
Been reading my dad’s dad’s autobiography, as recorded and prepped by my uncle Jack. It’s called True North in Alaska: Memories of Indians, Eskimos, Bush Pilots and Us, and Jack wrote it in, like, gosh, maybe 1999 or so? But I never got around to reading it, because I am lazy and that was dumb. It is so good. Grandpa Dick and Millie’s live was crazy! Crazy! They moved to Rampart, AK in 1937 and on to Kotzebue in 1938, and Wainwright in 1939-1942, being a Bureau of Indian Affairs teacher, but the BIA teacher was generally the only federal employee in the town so they were also the postmaster, the census taker and, in Wainwright, responsible for the reindeer census, which was another whole crazy thing I didn’t know about because the Alaskan Reindeer mostly died out in the 40’s, but apparently back in the Russian days, the Finns and Laplanders brought a bunch of reindeer to Alaska. I mean, there are still reindeer in Alaska, but there aren’t many and they’re down in Seward area, not, like, massive roaming herds across the northernmost part of the state.
At one point, a little girl is injured and gets a big gash across her stomach, and he has to clean it out and close the thing up with clothes pins and a box, tape it up, put a note on it and stick her on a plane. At another point he has to take a dog sled across a half-melting Peard Bay and the dogs swim, the sled floats, and he has to jump in the freezing water and swim along with the floating sled. This happens, like, twenty times, and he does not write it as any big deal. One time he and his friend ride a dog sled off a cliff, well, the first, like, four dogs go off the cliff, and they brake, and now they have a sled half over a cliff and can’t get the dogs back up, so they take everything off the sled, let the dogs run over the cliff like lemmings, hike 30 miles around and down the cliff back to the sled, and the dogs and sled are just chilling in a giant snowbank, unharmed. The whole thing is madness and I already knew a fair amount of the stories in it. Also the number of friends of his who were bush pilots who just crash and die is… astronomical.
There seems to be some confusion about my dad being the third or seventh white child ever born in Utqiagvik (fka Barrow). In his original documents right after the birth, my Grandfather says third (the other two being whaler’s kids). My dad always says seventh. Jack was unable to reconcile it, and of course today everyone is gone that might know. Did my dad mis-remember? Did my grandfather receive additional information through the years? Was he exaggerating at the time? I remember when I was a kid my dad and I were in town and he ran into another white guy born in Utqiagvik around then, Dad was like “that guy was number four.” And now I want to know if number four was before or after dad!
Alas. I should have been reading all of this stuff a decade ago. It was all just sitting there on my shelf. Oh, god, the guilt.
Anyway, lovely weekend. Let’s do a mix. Still haven’t been able to migrate to Aple Music. When I launch a clean library on my Mac, Apple Music just says “Loading iCloud Music Library….” in the main window in big letters, with a beachball above it, and it stays that way… for days. It is ridiculous.
This mix is mostly new stuff, and it is really good I like it lots I have been listening to it on repeat all weekend. The new Sharon Van Etten song is so good and the video is so hot. Thank you, Nick, for alerting me to this perfect song by Good Morning. New Dehd is awesome, revisiting Sonic Boom’s last album this week, find some gems on it I overlooked when it came out. New Tears for Fears is great I am so excited to see them this summer. I sold a Jale CD and hadn’t listened to it in, oh, 30 years and forgot how good it was. And I am not a huge Caroline Polachek fan but this new song is just fantastic. Fantastic.
Okay! Let’s do this work week thing! Lots to do this week!