Good morning. Hello. How are you? #637
Weekend gardening and friends. I dig music. Someone make an EV with a realistic fake manual transmission plz k thnx bye.
Good morning! Happy Monday. How’s tricks? Everything’s pretty good over here. Lovely weekend, even though it was only two days, two day weekends are garbage. Did some gardening, but things are really getting to be a bit on auto-pilot now. I fixed up the hoops on the peppers. I ridiculously lost the little metal tube connectors that connect the two hoops together. I put all of them in a safe place and then conveniently lost them. So I had to order more. What do you even call those things? One of those impossible-to-search-for items that you can’t find on Google or Amazon without knowing the exact technical term. “Little aluminum tubes to connect wires” yields a bunch of electrical stuff. “Hoop connectors” yields nothing. That was a pain. And then once I got the hoops rebuilt, I ran out of the good netting, so the thing looks super janky right now until I get the good netting. It’s always something. And then I added more dirt to the one potato plant (of ten) that is randomly outgrowing all the other ones and is, like, three times as tall. Quite mysterious.
Jane had a very busy weekend. We had some visitors on Saturday when our old babysitter and friend Lauren came by with her two year-old daughter Kara, so Jane could have a playdate. It was very cute.
Sunday Jane and I went to the hardware store in search of strawberry plants, no luck, but Jane picked out a basket of flowers, that I added to the garden and irrigated up. She is very into flowers. I’ve planted two beds of flowers for her and a row of sunflowers, but none of those are sprouting yet, let alone blooming, so this nice basket should tide her over, assuming the squirrels don’t eat flowers? Not sure about that, actually. It is not in any netting. Fingers crossed! Then after the hardware store we stopped by Bojangles to get some lunch and biscuits and then we went to (so exciting) the storage unit! Woo storage unit! That place keeps increasing the rent on me it is so ridiculous. Current rent is about 240% of the supposedly “guaranteed” rent they started charging me. Though I guess that was about four years ago so, hey, seems like everything else in the world. Pretty hoppin’ place this weekend, too. Two whole other cars there. Jane is very good at wearing a mask.
And then! Later on Sunday we all hopped in the car and barrelled on over to the posh suburb nearby, Cary, to go to our friends’ son’s second birthday party in a park and wow that one was one posh-park, the posh suburb Cary really is posh. We were regaled with insane tales of psychotic “room parents,” which is apparently a thing where a parent volunteers in a classroom and gets actual duties and does them unpaid because even in a very liberal town like Cary that approves every bond measure and prides itself on paying its teachers well, it is just assumed that the school is going to rely on free, untrained volunteer help. Seems very American. Anyway Jane did great all weekend, she seems a generally sociall well-adjusted kid, given her two years of more or less complete isolastion from the outside world. She plays with other kids, she isn’t too shy, it’s all quite a relief.
And then we drove through a thunderstorm on the way home and it was crazy and intense. Jane astonishingly pretty much did bedtime normally, she was amped up and excited but also worn out and it could have been a recipe for disaster but it mostly worked perfectly. Emma and I did a rare joint bedtime but in the end all worked well.
Last night I discovered that all 40-odd seasons of SNL are on Peacock, so I wanted a bunch of stuff from the first season and it was just fantastic. The second episode ever has Paul Simon hosting and there are, like, six musical numbers? It’s really quite thrilling how they aren’t stuck into a specific format yet at the beginning. Garfunkel showed up and they did “Scarborough Fair” and “The Boxer” and it was just freakin’ awesome. And then Paul Simon let Art do a song solo, which is not a thing that happens now. We also watched Richard Pryor’s monologue from the first season and Patti Smith doing “Gloria” which just freakin’ ruled and she’s the only punk-ish musical guest first season. Well, they had Gil Scott-Heron, he’s kinda punkish in his own way. The musical guests are funny. The soul and R&B and Black guests are all awesome, and the white ones are mostly 70s pastiche like Nitty Gritty Dirt Band and whatnot. Oh they had Abba that was fantastic, in a weird skit, actually. Like they used merge the skits and musical acts, and they had Abby playing “SOS” on the Titanic which was kinda funny. And Gerald Ford shows up on Episode 17 weirdly. Less than one year in and they already had the president on, not bad.
Oh! And there are Canadian Geese on our pond! Well, there were Friday and Saturday. Hopefully they are still there, though obviously they are migrating. OMG I love Canadian Geese so much, it reminds me of growing up in Fairbanks and all the geese and herons and whatnot that would end their migration at Creamer’s Dairy field in Fairbanks and every year we would go park in the little viewing area and look at all the cool birds, like that’s just a thing people in Fairbanks do, and I really took it for granted. Yesterday while I was outside gardening the geese were just honking and honking and it was so great. They also had two little baby geese!
Oh and we had BAT PEOPLE here for three days! What a major bat relocation operation! But the bats have been removed from the eaves of our house, and we set up little bat houses around the property and they have been installed and hopefully the bats find them and everyone lives happily ever after, until I slowly jack up the rent by 230% over four years like the storage unit.
I should say that on Friday, after I left you guys, Jane was at Grammy’s so I went and did the recycling and groceries and I got McDonald’s for myself, and I was sitting in the car eating an Egg McMuffin when the new Arcade Fire song, “Unconditional I (Lookout Kid)” came on and as the song progressed I just started bawling. Like uncontrollably. Like, first, this is a very good Arcade Fire song and it really, to me, felt like one of their most perfect songs since those heady early days of shows at TT The Bears and Clog Shop employment and “Wake Up” and all that shit. Just perfect. And secondly, just the fact that, a few days nigh on Fifty (we’ll talk about that in a few more days, not just yet), it is good to know that music can still move me. Music is magical, it really is something else, and I am so, so glad that for all of my emotional and asthetic vicissitudes, growth, twists and turns over the course of my life, I am very happy that music has never left me. I just set up a whole new system for listening to music in the morning, music turning on automatically in the bathroom very quietly while I’m getting ready, which I dont’ think I’ve had since the days of, like, tape decks or something, it’s been decades, but this morning, my alarm went off and, with it, The Cranberries’ “Zombie” started playing, and then “Girl from the North Country” by Dylan and Cash and it was just fantastic. Music rules.
Speaking of music I would like to officially welcome Maren Morris as an artist whom I collect on vinyl, her new album Humble Quest has a Walmart white vinyl exclusive edition and I picked that up so I guess I’ll have to go back and by Girl because that song “Bones” is so, so good.
Finally, I would like to put a request out into the world for an EV Manufacturer — preferably not Elon for obvious reasons — to make an EV that has a fully realistic-feeling manual transmission. Like… just fake the whole thing. Even though the car doesn’t need it, give me a clutch and a gear shift and the whole thing feels exactly like a manual transmission, where you gotta learn the peculularities of that clutch and there are little lurches, and you can over-rev the engine and feel that resistance, or be in too high of a gear and the engine revs too much and your accelleration suffers. Like it can all be accomplished fakely through changes in resistence through changing the regenerative breaking levels, and maybe some sounds. Maybe you even give me a fake tachometer gauge when I’m in this mode. God, that would be so great that would make me so happy.
Today’s mix is justa mix. Many of the songs I just mentioned, songs and artists I’ve been grooving on this weekend. Listened to a lot of the Safari EP by the Breeders this weekend for some reason. And Luke O’Neil mentioned Hum and my shuffle randomly played Treble Charger so that seemed like a sign, I always think of those two bands together. And there is a new Metric and it is good. And new Stars and old Ocean Blue and.. yeah. Good stuff. Enjoy!
Three meetings today which is BS for a Monday but at least they don’t start till one. I can ease into the week a bit. And it’s only a four day week cuz I took Friday off as a birthday present, which we’re not talking about yet.
Till tomorrow!