Good morning. Hello. How are you? #801
A weekend of being exhausted but getting some stuff done.
Good morning! Hello there. How are you? I hope you are well, settling into the new year. My god, it is so early. I cannot handle this. I haven’t gotten up this early in, like, a month. I am back on my normal work schedule, getting up at 6:30 or so, so as I can complete this missive to you, my dear friends, along with my Quicken transactions and finances checking and Plex checking and Qnap checking and country flashcards and 750 words and checking my work finances all before getting Jane out of bed at 9 AM. And I absolutely, 100% still have Covid fatigue. I am going to be so tired. I think I either have to get up later — push some of these tasks to after Jane breakfast — or go to bed earlier. I need more than seven and a half hours of sleep for the next week or two, meethinks.
I also turned back on my Apple Homekit integration with my speakers and special wall button to turn the music on in my bedroom again at 6:30 AM, which helps me wake up, and I’ve started doing my Wordle again, which also gets my brain running. I wasn’t doing either of these things for my entire quarantine. I think I did maybe three Wordles the whole time. You’d think with all that spare time I’d have done more of them but my brain was just not having it.
AND… this morning my 5,000+ song randomized playlist decided to play the Sad Girl Autumn version of All Too Well by Taylor Swift so I guess I am just going to listen to that all day.
Didn’t do much this weekend. I was too tired. I will now list a bunch of things I did this weekend and it will sound like I’m being hyperbolic, but I swear to god, I spent hours and hours laying on the couch on the verge of nodding off.
One thing I did do was an incredible amount of putting things away. My god, I put so many things away. Between me putting away all the things that had been brought to my office for me to live in it for three weeks, and all the little things Emma left out because she was doing full-time child care and didn’t have enough time to put every single little thing away. I usually clean the kitchen, and Emma did a great job keeping it clean, actually, it has to be said. But man did I have to put a lot of things away.
And then there was the cardboard shredding. Boy it was satisfying to shred cardboard again, it really just the most zen task. I filled up one of those giant Steralite bins with shredded cardboard and I took it out to my compost pile, which has way too much green in it right now, and not enough brown, and is getting wet and smelly because in the fall I added a giant pile of tomato vines and they are slowly breaking down but need more carbon. Took out my pitchfork and stirred all that brown cardboard into the compost and I swear to god I was going to keel over with exhaustion.
I’m trying to figure out some sort of foot-high or so clear plastic dome for this Bodhi fig cutting, I really should have done that this weekend. Maybe just a clear plastic bag? But I don’t think I even have one of those. A punchbowl? No idea. I did have a good conversation with a coworker who informed me that my purple LED clamp-on grow light is garbage and that I needed to invest in a few Soltech grow lights, so I bought one of those for it. I am excited for that. She says they’re the best, and I believe her, because her Zoom background had so many beautiful plants in it that it looked fake, but no, it was a real background with amazing plants thanks to Soltech grow lights, she says.
It was kind of disorienting, actually, to make a purchase of a gadget. For six straight days of quarantine I didn’t have a single charge on my credit card and I bought nothing. I can’t remember the last time that has happened. Obviously I can go a day without making a purchase, but six? Between my actual actions and all of the nefarious, damnable monthly charges that have piled up between utilities and streaming services and software and god knows what else, it is a rare day indeed, let alone six of them.
On Saturday we were going to have a guest over but she got sick but before we knew that, Jane and I went out and ran a bunch of errands and picked up some wine and we went to my storage unit to drop boxes off. Lots of activity at the storage unit very exciting. But I taught Jane about the concept of “running errands,” how they were like chores, but out of the house, and boy she just loved that. I told her about my friend Suzy who loves running errands and Jane said she loved running errands too.
Oh and the most exciting thing is that we finally did Christmas. That was a good time. Janet got me a Kitchen Aid mixer and I am so, so excited. Emma got me the pasta attachment. I am going to make fresh pasta this week. And bagels in February. I am so excited about the bread kneading attachment. I got Emma a puffy coat and some super comfy pajamas (thank you, Aubrey, she loves them) and I got her and Jane a ton of Hello Kitty Baggu stuff and Japanese treats and a super posh Deluxe Scrabble board, because Emma and Jane have been playing Scrabble lately.
And now the three of us have been playing Scrabble after dinner and it is very satisfying. I mean, Jane is five, we are not keeping score, but she’s actually pretty good at it! And I haven’t played in ages, so it’s good to get back into the swing of things. Jane also got a punch of brightly colored socks because she never wears socks but I think its because all her socks are black and despite all our best efforts, she is just not a goth. ‘
We finished Bad Sisters which was very good but there were just so many awful people in it but it was funny and the acting was great and my god the soundtrack was just phenomenal. I mean, I never thought you’d be able to work “Mother Sky” by Can into a comedy, but they pulled it off. I read somewhere recently something along the lines of “even if the bad guy gets their cumeuppance at the end of a story you still spent that much time with that toxicity in your life” or something along those lines and it sounds like something someone would say who spent too much time on Twitter or Tumblr but I also think there is mayhaps some wisdom in it. I don’t enjoy watching bad people do bad things for long periods of time. But boy, America sure does. I suspect it’s done something to us as a nation. I wonder if there is any country anywhere where that is not a popular pastime.
I also watched every vote Kevin McCarthy lost. Every single one. And then I went to bed before he won, so in my mind he never won and I like that just fine. Here’s hoping the rules vote is just as much as a catastrophe. All these Dems going “we’re just waiting for a partner to get the people’s business done,” yeah bro, not going to happen. The single best thing for the country is that these people just keep punching themselves and never get around to holding hearings about Hunter Biden’s laptop. The Judean People’s Front. The People’s Front of Judea.
I finished The White Wall by Emily Flitter, an account of how racist the American financial system is and how hard it is for minorities to get financial servies, or to work in the financial service industry. It was somewhat disjointed as a narrative, and a bit too ethnographic vs statistics driven but that’s how you tell a story that resonates, and the individual stories did indeed resonate. So, hey, it was the 6th and I finished my first book of the year. For one week, at least, I kept up my pace.
I’ve been spending all my time with my daughter and I am not tired of it yet. She threw a few fits the first day I was out of quarantine. She was very excited to see me and hugged me and kissed me and it was great but before too long she realized, I think, that Emma was going to pay attention to me as well as Jane, and she could no longer have Emma’s undivided attention. Bit of an adaptation period was needed, but I think we’ve gotten through it.
Got a moody and quiet playlist for you today. It has the amazing Low cover of John Denver with Mimi singing. It has the aforementioned Sad Girl Autum version of All Too Well. It has the amazing new Trent and Atticus song from the Bones and All soundtrack. It has a perfect classic of a song by Secret Stars. It has some great new stuff. It really delivers all around, I’m telling you.
I hope your Monday is swell and your week is lovely. Hopefully we don’t have to think about Elon Musk of Kevin McCarthy or Donald Trump and we can spend our time thinking about compost.
yay putting things away! yay belated christmas! yay kitchenaid! yay errands with jane!
i did a whole dismantling and reassembling of my bedroom on saturday and put soooo many things away. it was the best. i also decided that it was finally time to turn some very old bath towels into a braided bathmat. i’ve completed the cutting and braiding (took 4 hours) and now i just need to spiral the very long braid into a circle and sew as i go. it’s going to be very boring and messy (all the little towel bits along the cuts get everywhere), but i’m excited to have a squishy new bathmat to step on 😀