Good morning. Hello. How are you? #629
Gardening, a Jane freakout, Mythbusters blueprint is back and framed! It is sad Substack doesn't let you put italics in subheads.
Good morning! Hello, there. Happy Monday. Wassup. I am listening to my new copy of Psychic TV’s Love War Riot. I bought a KLF record from some dude on the internet and he had a copy of this cheap. Why not. It is raining outside, so my new plants are happy. So many new plants! I did so much gardening this weekend. I did so much gardening I was dreaming about gardening. I dreampt I had a fantastic bumper crop of red onions that I grew inside a fireplace. So many onions. One can only dream. Literally, apparently. It was only a two-day weekend for me, which sucks, but this week I will have a three-day weekend the way god intended. You’d think he’d give us three days off to celebrate a resurrection but whatever, I suppose if you can be resurrected you’re less concerned with getting everything done in the time you have alotted.
I planted my cucumber transplants outside. I planted my herb garden transplants outside. I planted seeds for fennel, baby bok choi, watermelon, beets, four kinds of carrots, three kinds of radishes, shallots, onions, three kinds of celery, three kinds of corn, and four kinds of bush beans. So many plants! I did not plant my peppers or basil out because there is one night that’s supposed to get to 38 degrees and that’s a smidge too cold for them, also I was out of time. With every raised bed, I planted it, labeled it, watered it, then added drip irrigation and then hoops and netting over it. I am relentlessly protective this year from the squirrels and deer. This is war, people.
Here is a picture of a completed bed:
How awesome is that?
And now it is raining. My plants are happy.
I also organized all my gardening stuff. I guess the technical term is gardening shit. Garcening shears and trellis netting and drip irrigation bits and bobs and tomato hooks and Irish Spring (supposedly helps with the squirrels) and all my (organic, hippie) fertilizers and everything is in labelled, waterproof bins and out of the garage and into the gardening work area outside my office and there’s so much more room in the garage and it’s raining right now and I don’t even mind because everything is in a bin.
I did not get my gardening video done for you, though, really takes a three-day weekend to get that done by Sunday, or possibly a two-day weekend where it is not daddy bedtime Sunday night. Hopefully I will have it for you tomorrow. Forgive me.
Somewhat inconveniently, this weekend a major new No Man’s Sky update came out, along with a big new quest. I am trying to play it, but god, I have had no time. I am convinced they knew it was first post-frost planting weekend here in US Climate Zone 7B and they put it out this weekend just to fuck with me. Also I’m convinced they knew I only had a two-day weekend. Also there are way too many pirates in this pirate-themed update, they attack you all the freakin’ time and it is exhausting. Space battles were already my least favorite part of the game and now it’s just space battles all the stinkin time. I hope they pull them back, it’s enough to put me off of the game. Once I finish this expedition.
My new Apple studio monitor arrived, so now I have three awesome monitors, no more using a low-res, ten year-old Apple Thunderbolt Display as my third monitor. The camera on the Apple Studio Display is as bad as everyone says, even with the firmware update that I ran when I installed it. Also it is stupid that a monitor runs an OS and just makes the whole thing a lot more slow and I do not like that. The new monitor situation necessitated new cabling, and so I ordered a new 2-meter Thunderbolt 4 cable from Amazon, and it came, and it was in a sealed box that said Thunderbolt 4 and it was totally not a Thunderbolt 4 cable, it was just a USB cable, so that is what I get for still buying shit from Amazon I really have to stop.
Emma went to Raleigh to get her hair cut Friday night, so I had Jane solo all afternoon, evening and bedtime. We went and got the pizza then we had dinner together, then we did our walk together and then we did bedtime together. The irony here is that bedtime, alone together, is the only part of that that is normal, the rest is very abnormal as we usually do all those things with Emma. So she was perfectly fine for all the abnormal stuff, the afternoon and dinner and walk were all lovely. But bedtime was a complete nightmare, two solid hours of yelling at me to turn back the clock. Like literally turn time back. We taught her about it at Daylight Savings Time and it really stuck and she’s really convinced you can turn back the clocks whenever you want. I tried desperately to explain to her that that’s just a once-a-year thing, but she was not having it. It was exhausting. And then she’d get more upset as it dawned on her that she wasted her whole evening screaming about clocks and didn’t have any time to play, so the whole thing would start anew. I tried to be patient and did a pretty good job. I tried to teach her about regret and clocks (that sounds like a line from a song) with only the tinest amount of success.
By actual bedtime she had calmed herself down a bit and we managed to get our bedtime routine of singing and hugs and turning off lights and such done. She fell asleep within seconds. Fastest she’s done it in ages. I guess she was just tired.
It occurred to me afterwards, as I was downstairs with Emma, that in 2020 a night like that would have broken me, and I would have written to you guys about how fucking hard it was, how I don’t know if I can take it anymore, etc., etc. But now it was just merely really annoying. A tiny wine, a night on the couch talking to my wife, and I was right as rain. I got Jane out of bed in the morning and we had a talk about it and she was fine.
Oh! And one last exciting thing this weekend. Remember that Mythbusters charity auction we won like six months ago? I’d do a copy/paste from an old edition of GMHHAY if I were that kind of Substacker but I am not. But to sum up: charity auction of props from Mythbusters, going to benefit the Grant Imahara STEAM Foundation. We won an awesome fake TNT detonator box, that featured prominently in the opening credits for the show, and one of the famous Mythbusters blueprints, this one signed by Adam and from the fantastic episode Shredded Plane. Anyway, the items arrived quickly after we won in September, and I immediately took the blueprint in to get framed. Except the thing is huge and there has been a lack of 48”x48” foam core available in the US forever, at least our framer couldn’t get any. So it took… um… six and a half months for them to get the thing framed and back to us. But they delivered it Friday! And we hung it up last night. It is epic.
So, that is pretty exciting.
I was so busy this weekend. So much catching up to do today. Really is inhuman, two-day weekends.
Moody and quiet mix today. Did not get a lot of time to work on mixes this weekend, so we’ll be playing catch up a bit this week. I am excited that the Lomalands album Sweet High Rise is back on Spotify. It was off for a while. I swear I am still working on getting off of Spotify. God, I’ve just been so busy for weeks. Gardening planting season, being a parent, having a, you know, job. LIFE, man.
Talk tomorrow!