Good morning. Hello. How are you? #846
Do you need Cruel World tix or Taylor tix for Boston? Props to Robert Smith. Zoom hangups. Errands!
Good morning! Hello! Happy Friday? All well? All well over here. Have today off. More or less. Got a few work calls that might interrupt the day but I can work with that. Sorry I’m late, been doing ERRANDS. I did not do Walmart this morning, surprise! Because I did Walmart last night! Jane was at Grammy’s, and Emma is in the throes of a remodeling project for Jane’s room and so we took advantage of Jane’s absense to clean out the room and get the dropcloth down and the tape up because Jane is 100% going to want to paint and we need to lock that shit down. And we had no painter’s tape. Which I do not like to use in general but when a 5 year-old is involved, it seems wise. So I did the Walmart run last night. Real party atmosphere at Walmart at 9 PM these days. Bunch of college kids playing with the balls in the sports section, like it looked like full-on league play or something. Bunch of other roaming bands of college kids shopping. Five workers at the self checkout area all singing along and dancing to Olivia Rodrigo’s “Good 4 u (clean version),” to which I joined in, natch. Oliva is a gem.
This morning I got my Micky-Dees and went to the recycling center and then headed toward Pittsboro because I had some county GOVERNMENTAL BUSINESS to attend to, in what turned out to be an old bank drive through. They were not super helpful on the phone yesterday, and told me I needed to come in, so I was bracing myself for a bureaucratic nightmare but they were actually really nice so that all went well.
Stopped at the new FOOD LION on the way there, because I was early and it wasn’t 8AM yet. The new Food Lion is very nice, very clean, very large, but with a consicuous absense of a lot of things I need. No Jones Chicken Sausage. No fake beer at all! Only a weird off-brand fake Rose’s lime juice. Very small local section. But they do have hella cheap Topo 12 packs so that is not nothing in these parts.
Then Lowe’s hardware afterward to get a bunch more painting supplies and some gardening stuff. Redoing my strawberry bed, gonna make it bigger and lower and not in the hoop house — I’m gonna make it’s own hoop house. Which, now that I think about it, I did not buy the supplies for. Alas. Next time. Drop cloths, spackle, a bin, they did not have Emma’s curtain rod hook, they did not have the hand truck I wanted. But I did pretty well, feel pretty good about it.
And now I am home and I have so much to do this weekend. Gotta rebuild one of the volumes on the QNAP — our cold storage drive has filled up, so it’s going into the storage unit and I’m rebuilding the drive with new 12TB drives, in a RAID-5 configuration, should give me about 36 TB which is about 26 more than we have now so that should be fine. Used that Backblaze service and got all the files that are on the current array sent to me on some USB drives, so I don’t need to figure out how to get the old files onto the new drives once the old drives are out of their enclosure. It’s gonna take all weekend, I am sure. But at least I don’t have to stand there and watch it or something.
So, yeah. Painting, gotta deal with mother-in-law’s taxes, gotta make the waffles and broth and do the podcast.. and..
OH RIGHT. If you are in need of the cheapest Cruel World tickets in LA or the cheapest Taylor Swift tickets for Foxborough, Ma, on May 19th, hit me up. I have bought too many tickets for places far away and I do not think I will be traveling to these places at these times this summer, owing to one or more trips to Alaska I gotta make and a wedding in LA at a different time of the summer. There is a longer explanation to this but I am not yet ready to divulge all my secrets to you.
Let us give props to Robert Smith who did what Taylor Swift could not, and a) made Ticketmaster sell us actually affordable tickets, but b) called Ticketmaster out on its absolute Garbage “convenience fees” that ought to be illegal. Not only did he call them out, he got them to give everyone a partial refund. That is just astonishing. Is it a lot? No. $10/ticket for the cheap seats (like mine), $5/ticket for the rest. But still. This is unprecedented. The fees on the Great Woods tickets were one hundred and forty percent. Never mind THIS IS NOT A CONVENIENCE. It is literally the only way you can buy a ticket. It’s not like you can get up at 5 AM and go wait in line at the Filene’s customer service counter like the good old days. You have to buy them this way! How is it convenient to be forced to buy a ticket in a single manner? Ridonkadonk! (Oh man I need to bring back Ridonkadonk).
Anyway, thank you Robert Smith. And I love your all caps Tweets your Twitter account really is entertaining.
I hung up on a dude on a Zoom call yesterday it was immensely satisfying. He was being a dick, and literally rolling his eyes at me and I was just not having it. His client talked me down and talked him down and I got back on and the dude had clearly been told to keep quiet but he just could not stop rolling his eyes and sneering and trying to speak and then stopping it really was something. Also, I was totally right! It was ridiculous. And I had just given them a little bit in the normal give-and-take you do in negotiations. More than I had needed to give! As a gesture of goodwill! And the dude sneered! It was kind of amazing. Been a while since I’ve hung up on someone like that but man that dude deserved it. I am still mad about it! And it’s my day off!
No Daddy Jane dance party last night, alas. It was grammy night so our bedtime was cut short and we got distracted on our walk by the neighbor and their cute new baby who is just learning to walk. Babies are so cute! We ought to pay mothers. Babies are just the cutest unless you have to be the one staying up all night and being exhausted taking care of them. But for the rest of us, we just get to enjoy cute babies without having to pay. It’s totally free! People might even pay US to take care of their cute babies! Mothers of babies should be paid for bringing such cuteness into the world at such extraordinary personal cost.
Look I am sorry Taylor did not put her four new songs on Spotify yet. But I am very excited about them and I am listening to them and you should too. They’re on Youtube. No idea what the deal is here. We need them everywhere, Taylor.
But I got a solid Moody and Quiet playlist for you this Friday. Almost all new, so many good new bands go ahead listen to them all. Chill out. Unwind this evening with a nice fake martini using ISH gin, the official fake gin of GMHHAY.
Have a lovely weekend, talk to you Monday.