Good morning. Hello. How are you? #802
Fig cutting greenhouse, Low UMG masters petition, Trigger point injections, dreams of pill dispensers, ankle clicking, gas stove bans, discussing famine with a five year-old.
Good morning! Hello there, friend. How are you this fine morning. All well? I do hope so. It’s a balmy 29 degrees outside here, and the sun is rising over the pond. I am toasty warm with my thick sweater and slippers and space heater at my feet. I am listening to Christian Lee Hutson. Everything seems okay so far this morning.
Grocery delivery came yesterday and they annoyingly used plastic bags, because we live in a misguided state that hasn’t made them illegal and in a misguided country that still allows single-use plastics even as the stuff is poisoning the entire planet. They redesigned their online shopping experience recently, Harris Teeter did, and it is garbage and also on top of being garbage it is nearly impossible to request paper bags. You gotta put it in this single random comment space that no one looks at and the comments do not stick from week-to-week so you gotta remember every week. This week, however, they sent a single pear in a clear plastic bag that I happen to be able to use on the Bodhi fig tree, so that little fig cutting is now in its own personal greenhouse like people online say you’re supposed to do. Fingers crossed.
A think I meant to say last Friday was that it has now been 18 years on Friday since Brad Fitzpatrick sold Livejournal to Six Apart and I was convinced it was the beginning of the end of the service and look. I told you! It was! Although, on the other hand, some friends are still using it after all these years, and I just posted my annual entry in it last week, so maybe it’s not dead after all. Man, I sure miss Livejournal. It really was the best. Is it too obvious that all of GMHHAY is an elaborate endeavor to replicate Livejournal? Was LJ perhaps the best service the internet ever gave us? Definitely a good argument for that.
If you are a fan of the band Low, please consider signing this petition, which someone started on their behalf (ugh, I guess I mean on Alan’s behalf now, RIP Mimi) as part of a pressure campaign to get WMG to give them back the masters of their first five albums, since they keep reissuing them and never paying them a penny. It really is ridiculous.
So I went to the doctor yesterday to get what is known as a “trigger point injection,” wherein they stick a needle filled with some magical fluid — and some painkillers — about two inches deep into each of my neck muscles that is locked up. They do this about 10-15 times. Each one stings like a bee (it does not, alas, float like a butterfly). The staff was very friendly. The office is very far away. I am supposed to do it every 4-6 weeks. I feel absolutely no improvement so far after one treatment. My pain doctor is awesome and it turns out she is like best friends with my primary care physician and says she’s the best too, so that is a nice bonus. Two nice woman doctors. Woman doctors are the best. She said the pain would be worse the first night, but didn’t say anything about the next morning. If anything, it feels a bit more stiff. Alas.
I did change my (non-narcotic) pain meds about a month ago after my first visit to this pain doctor and that does seem to have helped a little bit. I’ve also added a kid’s aspirin, a blood pressure med, and nattokinase of late. The good news is that the new pain medication, unlike the old one, can be taken at night, so I can take all my pills, once a day, at night. The bad news is, there are now like eight of them. It is a total pain to get all these pills gathered each evening. I envision an amazing, super durable, like made of stainless steel, pill dispenser where you dump entire bottles into individual tubes and then you press a big lever and the machine mixes them, taking one pill from each tube, and it dumps them all into a cup. I figured something like this would have to exist but, alas, it does not. Pill dispensers seem to be catering to two markets — old people who are losing their memory and/or have a very complex regemin of pills multiple times a day, so all the pills are pre-sorted before you put them into the container, which is not what I’m going for. Or sort of compact, multi-pill containers for, like, herbal supplement addicts and fitness enthusiasts, which look great but do not, alas, actually dispense pills.
I picture something big and clunky and industrial, kinda like those things that poker dealers wear on their hip with all the chips in them. Alas, this invention does not seem to exist. The dream is dead.
While we are on the topic of health I will tell you that a few weeks ago my ankle started clicking while I go up and down the stairs, even though I am nowhere near my heaviest weight historically. This used to happen to my mom back when she was younger and overweight as well. Seems to run in the family and I’ve never heard of this happening to anyone else and it is deeply weird and disturbing and I do not like it one bit nope.
The US Consumer Product Safety Commission is considering banning gas stoves in the United States which simultaneously seems crazy and absolutely the right thing to do, with the things contributing to up to 40% of childhood asthma cases. If you own a gas stove and do not own a gas detector, I strongly encourage you to purchase one. We bought a Gasknight 2.0, though they are currently sold out, and also last night, upon reading an article on the topic, Emma asked me if we have an NO2 detector, and, like, the Gasknight 2.0 does not do NO2 as far as I can see, so, you know, maybe that’s a different thing. I dunno, man, we sure have a lot of different air quality monitors these days the world can just kill you dead while you’re sitting there breathing in your own home I guess. Boy we have a species have really made a mess of things.
Yesterday I made a tactical parenting error. Jane and I were doing breakfast and we were discussing the concept of problems and solving problems. And after a while she asked me what “the biggest problem” was. I decided to go with hunger, because we talk about hunger a lot at breakfast, because we have a giant round magnet from CORA, the local food bank that we support, and we’ve talked about people who don’t have enough food and how they can go to CORA and get food and it never seemed to bother her. So we talked about hunger, and how some people don’t have enough food, and when that happens, people work to bring them food and feed them, but “sometimes a lot of people don’t have enough food?” she asked. And “do some people not have enough food for a long time?” she also asked. And I said yes, both those things happen and that is called “famine” but focused on how when that happens lots of people work to help them and bring them enough food.
It did not seem to bother her at the time, she found it very interesting. Then she asked what the next biggest problem is and rather than tell my five year-old that, you know, we’re killing the planet, I said “some people have too much money and some people don’t have enough money” which did not phase her in the least because while she knows this already and knows what money is, she hasn’t connected the dots on that yet. In hindsight, I shoulda gone with that one as the biggest problem.
So then last night after I put her to bed, after fiteen minutes or so, she cries out and asks me to come back. She tells me she needs a hug. And then she asks me my favorite thing in the day and least favorite, and then I ask her the same, and her favorite thing was hugs and her least favorite thing was “when we talked about the problems.” And I had to slowly bring the scope of problems back down to a level she could handle. We talked about how sometimes people need a place to pee when they’re on the street (“they could just pee on the floor of a store” she said, and I kinda agree) and then we brought it down to “sometimes you can’t find your pants and that is a problem.” And that she just loved, found it very funny, and went to sleep happy.
But yeah maybe I should not talk to my five-year old about global famine just yet.
Justa mix for you today. New Peter Gabriel. It’s not bad! And that McKenna Grace song that I inexplicably love. Man. Her music is something. Her new single is so crazy insecure it really makes me wonder. Is it, like, bonding with her teen audience or personal? Hard to tell. Some oldies on here from the Cramps and Hole and Adriano Calentano (thank you, Doug) and Lime.
Until tomorrow, friend.