Good morning. Hello. How are you? #628
A totally chipper GMHHAY, even though it has the story of a man killed by a train in it. A real return to form, this one.
Good morning, happy Friday, etc. etc. Jane is off at Grammy’s I am going to take the recycling to the collection center, stop by the bank and the grocery store. Man there is a lot of recycling in the car. Lotta boxes. I try and shred boxes for mulch to use in the garden and for a few glorious months there, as I was piling up enough mulch to get through this year’s planting, there was very little box recycling. Scintillating Youtube video forthcoming, it’s gonna kill, just you wait. The world is desperate for on-property cardboard re-use solutions. Lotta Amazon box guilt out there. But this week I think I have enough, plus I am out of buckets to store it in, plus Janet dropped off her recycling, so there’s SO MUCH cardboard. I did this stupid thing where I decided “white buckets are for potatoes” and drilled holes in all my white buckets and planted potatoes in them — ten buckets. So this put a serious dent in my bucket collection, and now I only have, like, five buckets for shredded carboard, plus one pink bucket for Jane, plus buckets each for vermiculite, worm castings and blood meal, plus one bucket to store those icky freezer packs that come with the Hello Fresh meals until Emma can disassemble them and take out the goo and wash it down the drain and recycle the casings. We are neurotic about recycling. Rare is the week where we have more than a single kitchen bag for the entire house. Well, now that Jane is potty trained. That’s been nice.
The cherry blossoms are already disappearing, falling to the ground like Americans exhausted after the last three years. I love those damn cherry blossoms so much. Would I love them just as much if they were year round? Of course not. Do I want them to stay just a little bit longer? Yes, I do, oh yes, yes.
Read more Sarah Polley last night. She was in two sci fi films toward the end of her acting career, 2009 or so: Mr. Nobody and Splice. I had heard of neither one of them Mr. Nobody is not super well reviewed but Splice is. I am grabbing them both will check them out. Also she wrote an entire Netflix series based on a Margaret Atwood book did you know this? I did not. Did anyone see Alias Grace? Sarah Polley is a very good writer.
For example, this beautiful line:
“I can already sense how I will feel when I remember it years from now. I’m nostalgic for the present, mourning its passing even as it happens.”
Sarah Polley did not have fun as a child actor at all. Sarah Polley has stopped acting. I earnestly hope Sarah Polley will act again at some point when her kids are holder. Later in her career, Sarah Polley did films with Atom Egoyan (both of which are fantastic), Wim Wenders and Hal Hartley. Her film with Hal Hartley, No Such Thing was widely panned but I loved it so much. I still love it. If I ever meet Sarah Polley I will surprise her by not asking about Baron Von Munchausen or The Road to Avonlea, but by asking her if any of my idol directors are secretly dumpster fires of assholery, and I will tell her that the critics are wrong, and that No Such Thing was a damn fine film.
Also the book had this little snippet in it, so I give it top marks:
Lately at breakfast Jane and I have a new routine. She eats her cheese earlier in her meal — for a good long while there, like a year, Jane was eating her cheese last, in a little waffle, egg and cheese sandwich. But now she eats it more or less first, alone. Then at the end of the meal, she climbs out of her seat — one of those seats that clamps onto the counter. She climbs onto the counter to enjoy her now cheeseless waffle and egg bite. And she asks “Where’s the cheese go?” And then we both sing the song “Where’d the Cheese Go?” by Ween. We discuss Ween, and — this is the best part. She says “Daddy what is this song about?”
And I say “it is a song about cheese.”
And she says “and someone who is missing their cheese.”
“That’s right. He can’t find his cheese.”
“And he wants to know where it goes. Daddy who is this song by?”
“The song is by Ween.”
“Who are Ween?”
“They are a band?”
“What do they do?”
“They write funny songs like ‘Where’d the Cheese go?’”
“Because they can’t find their cheese.”
“Maybe. Maybe.”
Let me tell you: it really brightens your day to start it off by having a discussion about the Ween song “Where’d the Cheese Go?” Let me also tell you, that for a song that originally had two lines, most versions of this song are shockingly laced with expletives. Also it is hugely rewarding that the song “Where’d the Cheese Go” is now a big part of my life again, after not having gotten a lot of thought for, oh, you know, thirty years or so. Welcome back, fine song.
Before that, at breakfast yesterday, Jane also got very interested in the concept of fonts, or typefaces. For the present we are telling her that they are one and the same. We looked at the same word in two different fonts — usually one version of the word on some packaging and another on my phone — and compared serifs, and scripts, and curves on the tops of As and like. I mean, I know she is the daughter of two font nerds but I was shocked how fascinating she found the whole thing.
We also did a quick run to the post office before work to drop some records in the mail and when we got home we did our usual thing where she climbs into the front seat in my lap and discusses different instruments in the car. She has the steering wheel, speedometer, tachometer, gear shift, hazard lights, turn signals, wipers, windows and mirrors down. Of course the hazards and windows excite her the most. If she had her druthers she would sit there rolling the window up and down for hours. I told her when she was nine or so she could reach the pedals and she is very excited for it.
Last night I read the Wikipedia page about the Duke of Wellington, who in addition to, you know, Waterloo, happened to be Prime Minister twice. It does not seem he was a particularly good one. But what was most interesting was that The Duke of Wellington unfortunately witnessed a man killed by a train. He was attending a ceremonial opening of a new train station, and two trains were paused on tracks, and an old MP got out of the other train to come over to the Duke to shake his hand because they had had some political falling out years ago. The old MP was very old and frail. A third train was oncoming and everyone else got out of the way, but the old man was frail and muddled. He twice tried to cross the tracks to get out of the way but couldn’t. He then went back toward the Duke’s train, and all would have been fine if he had just stood up against the train, there was plenty of room for him to just stay put. But instead he grabbed a handle and tried to climb into the train at the last minute. But the handle was a handle to a door, and as he grabbed it, the door swung out into the path of the oncoming train and the dude was mauled by the train, right in front of the Duke of Wellington, who then never rode trains again until he was dead and they put his body in a train to bring it to London for a state funeral.
News of the incident spread far and wide and, because we are humans, and, as Rick says “Human beings are basically a disaster,” what the citizenry took away from this horrible news is that now there was a thing called “a train” that was very cheap and got you where you needed to go very quickly and everyone started taking trains instead of, you know, being scared of them, like the Duke was.
Back to breakfast, here’s what I think. Whenever you buy a new counter, it should come with a spare piece of material from the counter. A square or round, maybe four inches across. And in the middle of this flat, coaster-like piece of perfectly matching granite or quartz or whatever, there would be a small raised indentation, maybe an inch and a half wide, quarter-inch thick. And you could leave this thing on your counter, right by your stove. And it would be more or less invisible. And it would be a perfect egg-cracking device. Because it is not my lived experience that cracking eggs on flat surfaces works. And everything else makes a mess or is ugly. This is what I want, and when we finally redo our kitchen I am going to get this piece of spare material and I am going to mill it into the proper shape and make a Youtube video about it and it is going to change the world, and from then on everyone will have this as an available add-on option to new counters, just you watch.
I guess if I want to change the world I will have to make a Tik Tok video but that is fine, I will make one. It’s okay if the Chinese know this egg cracking quirk about me.
I switched the order of those last two bits to end on something more positive. I know I have taken you on a bit of an emotional rollercoaster this week. Sorry. Let’s have a nice weeknd, shall we?
Here’s some modern classical for you. A classy, sophisticzted, cultured Friday is in your future. You deserve it.
Have a lovely weekend. I will return Monday and regale you with exciting garden stories of transplants and seed spreading.