Good morning. Hello. How are you? #783
Farm adventures, Bodhi tree adventures, luffa sponge adventures, Time Machine NAS adventures, ruminations on the ethics of Walmart, Jane feeling nostalgia for our old games
Good morning, friend. Hello. How are you? All well? Happy Monday. Have a nice weekend? I do hope so. Mine was great, thanks. Friday I did a lot of puttering a lot of chores. Cleaned out the freezer. Listened to my new copy of Shellac’s Terraform on vinyl. Did something else very productive, but I don’t remember what. Oh right, I went to every nearby grocery store and bought the county out of caffeine-free Zevia, because Emma is addicted and our monthly bulk order was unable to be filled. Found 12 six-packs not too shabby.
A friend asked me after Friday’s edition how I can shop at Walmart, aren’t they just terrible. And he’s right, the Waltons are not exactly my favorite people. Here is how I justify my Walmart shopping: first, they are obviously less evil than Amazon at this point. Back at the height of Walmart’s evilness, they were accused of treating their employees badly and, you know, helping hollow out the retail core of America’s small towns. Amazon treats their employees worse, and is hollowing out all of America. I routinely chat with the employees at my Walmart, they like their jobs, and they all 100% would rather be working at a Walmart than an Amazon fulfillment center, which is manifestly a more depressing job. Next, I only buy stuff at Walmart that I cannot otherwise get locally from a local retailer. I do buy groceries there, but very few, they are very few specific items unavailable elsewhere around here, like our specific brand of organic peanut butter (which is so weird I don’t understand why the local grocery chains can’t have organic peanut butter wtf) or organic grapes. I could probably get these things, for twice as much, at the Whole Foods that is 10 minutes further away and owned by Jeff Bezos. I could probably get blu rays from Best Buy but… nah. Most of the stuff I get at Walmart is, like, office supplies, post-its and sketchbooks for Jane and stuff, and there is nowhere around here that sells those. I could do online, and I do for things that I can’t get locally at all, but I prefer local to online, even if it’s Walmart. I do not claim it’s a perfectly moral act, but I’m pretty sure it’s the least evil option.
Saturday Jane and I went on a morning adventure. We went to Bojangles and got biscuits for her and mommy, then we drove out deep into the depths of rural Chatham County to go to the farm of an old widow who was selling some stuff I wanted. She was selling a 25 year-old Buddhist Bodhi fig tree, that was descended from one Duke Professor Cannon’s Bodhi tree. That Bodhi tree was:
…descended from the Bo-tree planted at the ruined city of Anuradhapura, near Kandy, in Ceylon. In the year 288 B.C., King Asoka of India sent a shoot from the parent tree to Ceylon. To this day the tree is worshiped by throngs of pilgrims. In 1929 an American tourist obtained a shoot from the Ceylon Bo-tree, planted it on his Florida estate, and several months ago presented a shoot to Duke.
That mysterious American sounds sketchy AF but we’ll just ignore that part. Yeah, I really wanted this tree. This recent widow also had some kitchen stuff that was a good deal. I had emailed her Friday evening and she said a man said he was coming for the Bodhi tree at 10 AM but if he didn’t show up, it was mine. I told her I wanted the kitchn stuff anyway, so I’d be in touch in the morning.
Morning comes round, Jane and I get our Bojangles and I give her a call and she says come on by. We drive out there, through winding country roads, and Jane gets to see some sheep and cows and it is all very bucolic.
We arrive at the farm and, alas, the other guy is there in his truck, too, and they are just about to load up the Bodhi tree.
House is not quite hoarder level, but it’s close. She tells me her husband died in September, and she is selling everything and “moving to a tiny house.” I excuse the mess as the mess of someone who is packing and selling things, and politely ignore the layer of dust over everything. I only step into the entryway. I will say, though, it did not have that hoarder smell. You get the sense that it was the husband that was the hoarder, and she is cleaning house, literally and metaphorically.
I’m very disappointed this guy beat me to the tree, and I joke about how beautiful the tree is and how much I wanted it. The widow lady, though, tells me that she has been propagating it. She hands me what looks to be a dead branch, except it has little tiny green shoots coming out of the ends of it. She tells me that if I get this shoot into a nursery pot, it will grow. I tell her I am no spring chicken anymore and was looking forward to the 25 year head start, but I take the shoot all the same. I pick up my kitchen supplies that I’m buying from her.
Anyway, Jane and I get home and I pamper the hell out of that Bodhi sprig, descended from the Jaya Sri Maha Bodhi, which turns out to be the oldest living tree in the world with a known planting date, Wikipedia tells me. We’re talking clean fresh pot, a brand new bag of Black Gold organic and natural potting mix that I went to the garden store and picked up especially. A couple liberal handfulls of my posh organic fruit tree fertilizer, and a good healthy watering. I bring it inside, put it on a table in my studio in a nice, sunlit corner, and clamp an LED grow light with a timer on it. Hopefully I can get this thing to root. Hopefully I can get this thing to grow till I die. We shall see, we shall see.
I also finally dealt with the luffa this weekend. I had been trying to dry them out, but it wasn’t really working. The time had come to cut ‘em open and deal with them. It… mostly worked? For the larger ones? The smaller ones were too damaged by the early snap frost I accidentally let them endure and were all mushy inside, with no spongey material. But the three biggest ones, well, those look like sponges. They smelled, but I washed and scrubbed and got all the seeds out and got the gooey organic matter off of the sponges — it really was pretty gross — and I got myself three foot-long sponges. They are not perfect, and they still need drying and bleaching, but as a first try, I am pretty happy. We will ignore the fact that it’s actually a second try, the first year I did not get any luffas at all. I have big plans for next year’s luffa endeavor: a better trellising solution, seedlings started indoors even earlier so I can get a longer growing season. Magical luck that we don’t have a month-early snap frost next year. It’s gonna be great, just you watch.
I also re-worked our Time Machine drive, which has been a long time coming. I’ve been stalling, working with only about 12TB for both Emma and I, which is definitely enough to back up both of our 4TB computers, but Emma works with these giant, multi-gigabyte files, and has a ton of different multi-gigabyte files every day, so even a week or month of Time Machine backupps for her can be a lot larger than the nominal size of her internal hard drive. The thing filled up again, Emma’s backups were erroring out, and it was just time. I had three spare 14TB SATA drives handy, got a fourth overnighted to our house, and pulled the old 4-drive array, formatted the new one in a RAID-5 configuration, created a volume on it, a shared folder for each of us, and then re-directed her Time Machine app to the new volume. This was not hard but it was incredibly time consuming. Twelve minutes between restarts on the QNAP, and I had to restart five times. But it is all up and running again, Emma’s computer is backed up, and my computer is churning through its first new backup.
I took the four old disks and wrapped ‘em each in plastic and tin foil, packed ‘em up in a box, wrapped that in tin foil (gotta protect from EMPs!) and took the box to my secure off-site storage location, which was teeming with college kids moving in or out of their various college apartments. It’s funny how there are busy times of year at the storage unit.
I also booked a colonoscopy which I am super looking forward to, but luckily it’s not till February, and I have an appointment with the pain management doctor today, which I am actually, non-sarcastically looking forward to. Productive weekend!
Jane was mostly lovely, she scarfed down her biscuits too fast and got indigestion and then curled up in my lap until it passed. Her and Emma have been playing Scrabble. It is very impressive! She made a magna-tile house that had gables and windows and this insanely complicated triangle-based roof. She drew me a couple nice photos. We snuggled while playing No Man’s Sky. In addition to the farm adventure she accompanied me to the pizza place and grocery store. She is great I love my daughter so much. Last night we played all our old dumb bedtime games. We hadn’t played them in, oh, four months at least, probably more. She was experincing nostalgia. It was so fun for her to do daddy slide and ABC circles and blanket-tent and bonk-and-bonk. I had been thinking about how I might never get to do those games again, that once a kid forgets about a game, it’s over. But here they were, back, one last hurrah. I soaked up every minute of it.
Noise and metal playlist! Everyone’s favorite! I am listening to this Birds in Row album right now. I don’t know how I ever first listened to these guys but they are great. Probably Aimee or Bill, thank you whomever. Genghis Tron is a bit of a cheat but it has a good metal feel to it. This Converge Chelsea Wolfe album is great.
Okay! Talk tomorrow.