Good morning. Hello. How are you? #814
Body temperature regulation, Walmart run, teaching contracts to Jane, kids climbing rainbows, Choosy, Automator
Good morning! A little late! Friday! It’s a recharge day at Timehop, one a month on a Friday, where we all get the day off in order to, you know, process the absurdity and horror that is the modern world. In addition to twenty vacation days for a total of 32 for every employee. Just trying to butter you up for when we hire again.
My god I have such temperature regulation issues it is insane. Right now I am almost sweating because I’m drinking some broth, but my feet are freezing. In ten minutes it’ll be the opposite. The temperature in my office is steady at 65 degrees all day and have the day I’ll be freezing and need a sweater and half the day I’ll be so hot that I have to take it off and I roll up my pant legs. I’m constantly turning on and off the space heater at my feet. I think I’ve always been this way but never really thought about it before. It is strange. Are we all like this? Just sort of vaguley constantly malfunctioning meat sacks?
Back from the Walmart/recycling center run with a McDonald’s thrown in. I was running about 12 minutes late thanks to a particularly tricky Wordle and an extra press of the snooze, and oh my god do those 12 minutes make a huge difference in the length of the McDonald’s drive through line. It’s like black Friday in that line at that hour. People are ruthless. No one lets anyone in where the two ordering lanes merge into one pickup lane. Cutthroat.
At the recycling center, I caught a man urinating. At first I thought it was an employee, but I assume there is a tiny loo in that little hut of theirs. No, it was just some dude, who had his truck parked, wasn’t disposing of anything other than his urine. I saw him, he knew, he didn’t care, just moseyed back to his truck, climbed in and… stayed there. Like he is just hanging out at the collection center. I know there are some hawks there because of the free things drop-off, but… wow.
Walmart was fine I had this whole plan to buy that Pusheen wall calendar that had been snuck in with the LPs and I’d seen it the last three weeks but then I realized I need a wall calendar because for some reason my brain isn’t capable of processing our various travel obligations this year while using a digital calendar. It’s just not working. So I thought I’d rip apart a wall calendar and lay it all out on a table and plan that way. But after ignoring this Pusheen wall calendar for weeks, suddenly when I want it, it’s gone. Not only that, there are no wall calendars at Walmart anymore. How weird is that? I’m so confused.
Do you think Walmart employees have an app? Where they can, like, request vacation time and call in sick? That would be pretty cool. I bet it’s a whole thing, never thought about that before. Have any of you ever meen managed by app?
Hello please let me show you Jane’s drawing on the magnadoodle from Wednesday of “kids climbing up to a rainbow.” I told her it was great. She told me, with visible pride, that she “thought it up all by herself” and I explained to her that she was using her imagination, and had a lot of creativity and then we talked about imagination and creativity for a while.
Then yesterday morning I was doing a long morning because Emma wanted to sleep in and Jane was playing in the other room but then she came into my office and looked at my computer and said “Daddy what is a side letter.” So I stopped and tried to explain it but realized that before I could explain side letters I’d probably have to explain contracts, so I explained contracts to her and this is where we ended up:
Come ON. How cute is that.
Yesterday was the first free time I’ve had at work, really, this year. I spent it getting some nagging automation stuff fixed. I love my new Kindle Scribe so much and I find myself unable to read PDFs anywhere but on there these days. You can email them to your device. So far it’s been this kind of clunky process where I print something to PDF, then go to mail, then open a new mail window, then type in kindle and add the attachment and hit send. But now I got all that automated in Apple Automator so that I can just hit command-p then command-k and the script takes care of the rest and sends it off to my Kindle. It is really magical. Will probably cut into my book reading a bit, but I will read a lot of other stuff so it kind of balances out hopefully maybe.
Also discovered this amazing app called Choosy a while back where you can tell Choose to open certain kinds of links in certain browsers. I use Safari as my main browser and Chrome as my work browser — since either Apple or Google, probably Apple, cripples Google Meet in Safari. This is also nice because Google is so bad still with multiple Gmail accounts and whatnot, so all of Safari is logged into my personal Gmail and all of Chrome is logged into my work email, and never the twain shall meet. What sucks, though, is when someone sends me a calendar, or a doc link or something, because they’re mostly work ones, but not always, and I have Safari set as my primary browser and so whenever I’d have to click a link to a gcal it would go to my Safari browser and give me a bunch of grief. But now I have it set where when I click any Google calendar or docs link, it opens a little popup and asks me which browser to open it in. It is so fast. I also have it set to open all Monday links in a specific browser, and all Twitter links and it’s just so great it was such an annoying little time suck in my life and now it’s gone. Praise be, Choosy.
Justa mix, today. Almost all new. New release Friday. I mean the Neutral Milk Hotel is old but new. Very excited about the new Samia album she is so great I don’t know why but I just think she’s the best. She is the daughter of the woman who played Peggy Hill on Kind of the Hill so I guess that makes her a nepo baby, but like so many things, we excuse their faults when we think they’re awesome so I’m just gonna pretend that’s not a thing. There’s a new National song that is kind of exciting.
Have a lovely weekend. Consider making some soup.