Good morning! Hello, happy Monday, how are you faring? Everything okay? It’s Monday, so that’s a drag, but I worked a bit over the weekend and somehow that makes Mondays feel less bad, which makes no sense. Man, haven’t worked over the weekend in a while. That is a thing I do not normally do anymore, I am happy about that. I did not enjoy that aspect of previous jobs.
Still doomscrolling about Ukraine every morning, upon waking up. Well, no, first thing I do is my Wordle, because it gets my brain going, then I take that now-active brain and immediately poison it with the worst news on the planet. Then it’s time for brushing teeth. Awesome. There are some rumblings about real progress on a peace deal, and we should all simultaneously cross our fingers, pray, and not hold our breath, if one person can pull all that off at once. It does seem like the whole thing is tailor-made for China’s obsession with showing itself to be a player on the world stage. You wanna be the foreign policy leader of the 21st century, China? Then fucking do something about the maternity wards, hospitals and innocent civilians being bombed. It’s part of the job.
Anyway.
I just realized it’s a four-day week for me, as Timehop has one of its monthly recharge days this week. I haven’t been taking personal days to make three-day weekends this year, and I still miss it so much from the end of last year where I used all my extra vacation time to make three-day weekends every week. I saw the recharge day on my calendar this morning and it made me so excited. It’s crazy how much we still need them after two years of this pandemic, during this war. Five day weeks are hard.
Daylight Savings Time sucks when you have a kid. I think we have navigated this one all right, hopefully. I mean, I won’t actually know till tomorrow because she’s at Grammy’s today, which, ha, god, I hope she’s okay. Can we just ban the thing it is so dumb. Every benefit it has is limited to some specific latitude, the whole thing is just… god. Make it stop. Can we make it stop?
I sort-of got some gardening done this weekend, but not really. No video. I mean, I did film stuff, but it wasn’t enough for a whole video. I made a pact with myself that I would get five of my Birdies Beds topped off with fresh soil, soil I “built” myself. Funny word, “built,” when it comes to what is basically dirt, but that is the word gardeners use. Anyway it involved first hacking apast all of the plants that are currently in the bed — clover and hairy vetch and such, a seed mix from Johnny’s Select Seeds that is specifically made to over-winter your beds and add nitrogen to them. Next, three-to-five wheelbarrow loads of dirt for each bed, load the dirt in the wheelbarrow, haul it over to the beds, unload it, then add in a bunch of “amendments” to the dirt to make it great gardening soil — perlite and/or vermiculite for drainage, crab & lobster shell, blood meal and worm “castings” (great euphamism, I just went and casted before I started writing this) for food. Mix it all together, then go get another load. So I did that eighteen different times across two days to get all five of these beds prepped. Then on each one of them, a layer of mulch, and water it in.
I am using shredded cardboard as mulch again. I like the idea of recycling all of these stupid Amazon boxes that come to our house, not sending them to landfills. I did it last year, and it worked pretty well. All of these famous gardening YouTubers have videos on mulch, and they all say you can use shredded cardboard as mulch, but none of them do, presumably because they want their gardens to look photogenic. So in addition to my normal gardening YouTube videos, I’m gonna make one just about cardboard as mulch, and it is going to kill. YouTube manna, right there. You just watch. Unfortunately, I can’t finish that one till mid-season when I can show how well the plants are doing in cardboard mulch.
And it was so cold. At one point, I was hauling loads of dirt in driving snow. It was so absurd. I could have postponed the whole chore till next weekend, but I have two more beds to fill next weekend, and then I need to make a few garden rows in the hoop house – till the ground, add fresh dirt, till again— and also build the dirt and fill the greenstalk planter, build a bed over by the septic tank where I’m gonna try and grow sunflower seeds and ground cherries. And I only have two two more weekends at home before the average last frost date, because I’m going up to Boston for a show on the last weekend before the last frost date. Very stressful! Then when I get home it is planting, planting, planting, and I gotta get all my drip irrigation installed, all before Emma and I disappear for two weeks to Boston for our trip. I’m thinking of enlisting a neighbor or something to pop in once a week and check on everything, but the garden needs to basically run itself for two weeks. A stressful proposition!
Anyway, the beds are all done, and they look pretty great. I am happy. You’re also supposed to “build” you beds and let ‘em sit for a few weeks before you plant anything in them, so all of that plant food has a time to leach and soak into the dirt and not just be sitting in there in hard crystalized form. I’ve always been really bad about that, but, look! I am on schedule this year!
The other big chore accomplishment this weekend is I got our sweet new workbench surface installed. It is a three-quarters-inch piece of nicely sanded birch plywood, with two coats of tung oil applied after the sanding. It is a deeper bench than the old one, so we can clamp things to the front end of it. It’s not, like, a super nice workbench with hole for bench dogs or anything, but it is a definite improvement.
I really should have opened up that photo in Photoshop and used the transform tool to adjust perspective and level but I am too lazy. I’m worried that with the new, deeper bench, we won’t be able to reach half our tools, lol. Thinking through a few potential solutions for that this week.
Oh I got my podcast done, too. It is the shortest episode I’ve done in, like, a year or two. Not a ton of new, exciting stuff to report? Or, also, I guess, I just didn’t listen to a lot of new albums in the last two weeks, I was listening to a lot of old stuff, so that whole section of the podcast was fairly short. Plus Jane was stomping around upstairs, because I didn’t do it Friday morning when she was at Grammy’s, because I had to work Friday. Plus this guy from work was calling me and making me do stuff. Not my finest hour, not gonna lie. If you are considering dipping your toes into the Webb Chatham Report, consider going back an episode or two.
Jane had a Facetime date yesterday with an “old friend” and it was so cute. They hadn’t seen each other in… mmm… gonna say two years? Maybe a little more? Definitely more, pre-pandemic. But we send her mommy holiday cards, and that card was posted in the house, like holiday cards are, and she was very into one of Jane’s pictures and decided they were still friends and needed to FaceTime, so we set that up last night and it was so cute. Jane clearly doesn’t get nearly as much FaceTime in, so she was less chatty, but it was just the best. They did not want the adults interfering with their Facetime, so my ability to converse with my old friend was limited. But it was all so adorable it was just totally worth it. I really should have gotten some photos. Whoops.
Long ago in GMHHAY, I wrote about a YouTube star named Shelby Church, who did a video on “should I move to Texas?” I made fun of Ms. Church for talking so much about parking, and I do believe I cracked a joke, saying something along the lines of “this is how Republicans are born as people age.” I would like to apologize to Ms. Church, who has a new video, where she announces she is leaving LA after a year-long bout of traveling and trying out a bunch of new cities and locales (the Texas video was one of the earliest videos from this period of exploring). And while she hasn’t announced where she is moving to yet, she did say that one of the primary reasons she is leaving LA is because she hates driving, driving is bad, she is sick of driving and she wants to live somewhere where she doesn’t have to drive. Good for her. I am jealous and pleased, and I rescind all my wiseracks about her Texas video and extolling the virtues of Texan parking lots.
We watched Turning Red and it was great even if the parenting was awful, man there is so much bad parenting in movies I swear to god. I suppose there is bad parenting in reality too, but I do not love watching bad parenting on the television. I soldiered through, though, and it is a great movie. The music is awesome, especially. And we watched the new Spiderman, which I had already seen but Emma hadn’t. Man that movie starts bad, but the parts that matter are really good, the last half is mostly solid, and the most important part—the interpersonal story, the characters, is really good. But god, the plot to make all that happens is dumb.
A drone playlist for you today, which I suppose for most of you will not be very exciting but it sure is exciting to me can I tell you how much drone music kept me sane in my most manic, depressed, confused years? Just sit in an empty room and listen to music that drones, and it’ll really help. That Spacemen 3 album, Playing with Fire, especially, kept me sane.
Okay talk tomorrow, have a lovely week.
i have taken a very small stance against ST + DST - i stopped changing the clock in my car. sometimes having the wrong time for months at a time causes panic but since it is stuck on DST time, it’s not an, OH SHIT I’M LATE panic.