Good morning. Hello, there. Happy Monday. Did you enjoy your weekend? I had a lovely time, thanks. Just what the doctor ordered, this weekend was. Short but sweet.
I got a lot of gardening done. I faced the devestation that was my corn. The squirrels got every single ear of corn. Worse yet, I looked at my gardening calendar, and this was the week that the corn was supposed to be picked. Like they waited until it was perfectly ripe, then blammo. Stole all the corn. Pretty devestating technique, too. They would climb up an individual corn stalk and use the weight of their body to topple the corn stalk to the grown, and then eat the ear off. Then do it again. And again. I knew it was happening, but I figured I’d get at least one or two ears of corn. But nope. They got every single one of them.
All those corn stalks and husks sure make for good compost, though.
The good news is I seem to mostly be winning the battle against the Japanese Beetles on the grapes. They’re pretty worse for wear, but they’re going to make it. Of course, I am probably only winning the battle because Japanese Beetles season is winding to a close. I’ll take it. Only found two beetles all weekend.
I got a ton of tomatoes this week. My tomatoes are killing it.
I spent a ton of time trying to fix one of my Birdie’s Beds that I assembled slightly incorrectly and is therefore bulging. I thought I could do a half-assed fix, but no luck. If I want to fix it I am going to have to remove all of the dirt, which is like, oh, I don’t know, ten wheelbarrow loads full. It is not really a likely option. Maybe in the fall or over the winter. In the end I gave up and added more dirt to it, to offset the settling that’s been happening. And it was exhausting. Man. I swear to god. Hauling loads of dirt in 95° weather? Not recommended. So out of break. I sweated through, like, four shirts.
But then I was watching this Youtube channel, Perkins Brothers Builders over in Asheville, and they were working on some subflooring and one guy on the crew commented that another guy on the crew sweat through four shirts that day because it was 95° and those guys are jacked so that was nice, I didn’t feel so bad.
I literally drank six cans of water on Saturday day to stay hydrated.
Anyway, here is the garden video, featuring a few cute Jane moments. As per uszhe, she is very excited to garden for the first thirty minutes or so, and then disappears because it is hot and boring. Can’t say I blame her.
Also got my podcast done this weekend. Topics include: ay 853, July 4th, Pool party, heat, rain, neighbors, New York trip planned, diet, no nicotine, Jane, Jane sick, Jane vaccination, gardening, work, The Wide Sargasso Sea, Recorder the Marion Stokes Project, Limelight, Dr Strange and the Multiverse of Madness, The Northman, Everything Everywhere All At Once, True Romance, The Virgin Suicides, Spiderman Into the Spiderverse, 4K UHD Blu Rays having the extras mastered in 4k, Bright Eves, Orba, Hercules and Love Affair, Calexico, Elis Regina, WhoMadeWho, Roliça, Këkht Aräkh, Part Time, Joan Shelley, No-No Bpy, Blut Aus Nord, White Ward, Regrettes, The Brian Jonestown Massacre, Regina Spektor, Medicine, Timbuk 3, Erich Bachmann and Jon Raunhouse, Carly Paradis, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, Vic Chesnutt, Zola Jesus, Tempers, Embryo, Sleaford Mods, Metric, Die Haut, Wedding Present, Cranes, Hot Chip, Soccer Mommy, Obi Wan Kenobi, Star Trek Strange New Worlds, Ms Marvel, Stranger Things, The Boys, God’s Favorite Idiot, Umbrella Academy, Step Brothers, Crimes of The Future, Freedom’s Laboratory by Audra J Wolfe, The Club King by Peter Gatien, Rough Draft by Katy Tur
Did my Walmart run on Friday. They moved the seeds, I couldn’t find them anywhere. That was weird. In place of the seeds were two Walmart employees, both women, both well over sixty, who were talking very slowly in two different deep southern drawls about how every day the weather says it’s going to rain, but then it doesn’t rain, and it just stays ninty-five degrees and it has been doing this for, like, a week. And, man, that was rough. I felt it too. They were simultaneously talking about the weather because they had nothing to talk about but also because the weather was opressing everyone around here. Luckily this weekend it finally broke, rained saturday evening and most of Sunday. We needed it. It was almost cool Sunday night it was great.
Walmart was out of the rubberized white metal hangers on which I have standardized for my shirts. BUT they had the black felted ones I use for my pants, and it’s the first time they’ve had those hangers in, like, a year, so that was very exciting. I am so close to fulfilling my dream of standardized hangers in the closet, it really is very satisfying. It’s taken like two years. Emma gave away all my old metal hangers to this woman in Chapel Hill who was asking for them on a buy nothing group. It only occurred to us later that this woman was asking for hundreds of wire hangers the week that Roe was overturned. We suspect she is making some protest art. Good for her, we are happy to help.
Walmart also had a sale on Kingsford Match Light charcoal. Lotta Kingsford charcoal in general: regular and match light. And I suspect they do this every year, but, man, this year it clicked something in my brain and sent me down a nostalgia trip about charcoal, my mother’s coffee-can-based system for getting charcoal lit, the way the next door neighbor would use no such sophisticated system, he would just cover the charcoal in gasoline and throw a match in, and how it seemed so much more exciting of a technique. And how everyone had charcoal grills and everyone did a ton of grilling, unlike now where me and virtually all my neighbors have gas grills and it feels like no one uses them at all, though that is probably untrue because grills in general still take up a ton of space at any hardware store and also there are palets of Kingsford charcoal at the entry of Walmart.
But really it got me thinking about how I remember the debut of Kingsford Match Light back in the 80’s, I still vividly remember the accompanying television ad, and how they just lit the single charcoal brick on fire with a match and my god, it seemed amazing, so high tech, a profound innovation that would bring substantial convenience to my life. Of course they probably just pre-soaked the charcoal with alcohol it really is not much of a technical innovation but it sure seemed amazing. Realy American 1950’s style household improvement.
Also I super love these cockroach brands, a single beloved American product, brand, packaging, everything never changes. Not too many brand extensions, ideally none. Styptic pens. Prids. Lot of them at the drug store, actually. Murphy’s Wood Oil. Brasso. Arm & Hammer.
Hrm I just read the Wikipedia page for Kingsford Charcoal it is now owned by Chlorox but more interestingly it is a product of Henry Ford, who encouraged Edward Kingsford to start a charcoal company to make use of all the wood waste as a result from Model 3 manufacturing. Emma and I were talking about Henry Ford just the other day, actually. I was saying that the only two industrialists to whom Elon could be compared are Henry Ford and Steve Jobs, but he was worse in the sense that even Henry and Steve, who were both kind of awful in their own right, at least both posessed the ability to state things like “I made a mistake” and “I learned from that experience,” neither of which Elon seems capable of saying. Elon will talk about difficult times his companies had passed through, and how things are “hard” but he’ll never talk about past fuck-ups with humility and say he learned something. Don’t get me wrong, both Henry and Steve were not especially good at this skill, but there are, at least, a few historical precedents.
We had this weird power surge this weekend. Our whole house is on battery backup with an attendant surge protection but somehow we had a power surge throughout the whole house that it was so powerful that it tripped two different GFI outlets in two different parts of the house. One of them was the outlet that has our entire home server rack and internet, so that went out, and it took me forever to realize that it was a tripped GFI because the breaker wasn’t tripped and I didn’t even know that outlet had a GFI on it. So in the end, everything was fine, but, I mean, weird right? Anyone ever have anything like that happen to them? Both GFIs were indoors too, and not near water. One in the garage one in the utility closet. Strange.
Emma and I started two new shows this weekend because we had finished everything else. So we started the new season of Westworld and we started The Bear, which was described as a comedy in its Hulu genre listing and it is a lie. The Bear is a show about a restaurant and it was far, far more stressful than the show about a dystopian nightmare world where robots secretly walk amongst us and gangsters and the government are battling it out for fascist supremacy. The Bear was so, so hard to watch. Yes, very good, but… gawd. What a nightmare. Thank god it’s only eight half-hour episodes, I think I can get through that, if I hade behind a blanket the entire time. This is not the feel-good comedy to go to bed not feeling horrified about the state of the world that I thought it was.
Also got a bunch of new 4K UHD Blu Rays ripped and into Plex if you are into that sort of thing: new 4K print of the Virgin Suicides, The Northman, Everything Everywhere All At Once. Also got that Limelight documentary up there, and a 1080p rip of Spider-Man into the Spider-Verse which includes all the extras which are amazing and include an entire different cut of the film, which is kind of awesome.
How bout a shoegaze playlist for you, almost all new bands, except Ride at the end, Film School and pinkshinyultrablast which I guess I got into during the pandemic, so, newish, but like a few years now. Y Mike hipped me to them, they are great. Oh Ringo Deathstarr they are pre-pandemic. Austin band. Used to see them live a bunch when I, you know, had a life. Oh Mogwai is old too. Okay okay, mix of old and new, I lied.
All right have a lovely day let’s enjoy this week. Gonna be great for me, I only work two days of it! Yay New York road trip. Talk tomorrow!