Good morning. Hello. How are you? #847

Just a weekend around the house.

Good morning! Hello there. How are you? Did you have a lovely weekened? I do hope so. Mine was great, thanks. Three day weekends. Just lovely. I got so much done. Let me regale you with a list of producitive things I did this weekend. Let me just click the “show” button in the Apple Reminders app — the app I use for person, non-work, human, weekend to-dos, so I can remember all the amazing, productive things I did.

I took out the compost. I ordered the groceries. I made the waffles. I made the tom yum bone broth. I watered my seedlings, which are coming along just great, and set up a little fan and a little space heater because it’s so cold for the next three days. This sucks because it’s gonna murder my electric bill but we spare no expense for our lovely little seedlings. I ordered more vitamins and refilled my little spindo pill dispenser thingamajig. I got my mother-in-law’s taxes all ready and sent them out.

I dug out a little screwdriver and adjusted the strength of my CPAP machine so I could lay on my back more often and it has been amazing. Do I feel more well rested? No. Do I feel tired still all the time? Yes. Do I think it has anything to do with my CPAP machine now? Nope. Thing’s in tip-top shape, for being ten years old.

I am replacing the hard drives in the “Cold Storage” volume of the QNAP: the volume where Emma and I each have a shared folder where we dump things we want ot keep that are taking up too much room on our computer. The volume gets backed up to Backblaze each night. But it was a bunch of very old drives, in a RAID 5 configurtion, so only had about 10TB in it and it was full. So I sucked it up and ordered four new 12 TB drives (that hurt), and then ordered a hard drive backup of everything from Backblaze. So this weekend I got the old drives out, the new drives in, the new RAID5 formatted, the new shared folders made for me and Emma, and started the tedious process of copying all 10TB back to the new volume. We have about 5TB left, so we’re exactly halfway. The copy says “about two days” left. I am mildly annoyed because I have to do this over the network because these Backblaze-delivered drives have a Western Digital proprietary drive-locking-and-encryption app on them, and it can only be decrypted on Mac or Window, not Linux, so I can’t mount it locally on my QNAP and copy them via USB3. They have to go over our network. This is very sad and slow. I am sad.

The big thing this weekend is that Emma is redecorating upstairs and we painted two rooms including Jane’s bedroom. We painted it lavender. Jane helped, which went about as well as you imagine a five year-old helping you paint, but boy, it was a good time. I gotta say, though. Not a lot of “work” but it really made me sore! My back is very sore. Lots of painting and lugging furniture and covering and taping. I’m doing lots of stretches to get over it and it’s helping, but, man. I don’t know about this old age thing I hurt all the time. I get plenty of activity! My health app tells me I get 47 minutes of exercise a day and burn 800 or so active calories. I walk 7,400 steps a day on average. Come on! I know this isn’t, like, marathon levels or anything but i’m hardly a couch potato. Why am I always so sore? It’s so annoying.

Emma bought no VOC paints and I can’t recommend them enough. Just no paint smell at all! Kind of amazing! Why aren’t all paints like this?

Anyway, the rooms look great. Jane is very happy with her pink walls and purple curtains and grey carpet. I ought to take a picture of the finished product. Well, it’s not completely done yet. But getting there.

We went to dinner at our friends Nora and Brian’s on Friday. It was so fun. They have two kids — one a little younger than Jane and one a little older — and they all played and did not fight and would play together, and then solo, coming together in different combinations. Nora and Brian live in Raleigh so we went to The Big City. I was very confused cuz I knew they’d moved but we were headed to the same place as their old house but it turned out they had only moved a block or two. City living! We talked about all the awesome electives they have at their cool magnet school in North Carolina’s best school district and I was very jealous because we don’t have any of these things out here in the sticks. City Living! And the barbeque that Brian picked up for dinner was amazing. At least we do have things like that out here in the sticks. Nora foisted a juicer off on me so I guess now I will get into juicing things, which is a thing I have never done once in my life, having grown up in the Arctic on Minute Maid frozen cans of juice.

All the kids stayed up late and we drove home and Jane sang made up songs in the back seat and they were kind of soulful and slow and it was a very different sort of song than the ones that she likes dancing to. And she was very into musical instruments this weekend too, playing the Rhodes and getting the chimes out and digging into the percussion box. Maybe it’s time for piano lessons or something. I can’t remember how old I was when I started. I think it was more like 10 or 111.

Jane went to bed an hour later than usual and I was about to say it was fine and she suffered no ill effects, but on the other hand she’s had three complete meltdown tantrums this weekend so maybe it did have an effect. Or maybe it’s just one of those weeks. They’ve been pretty rough, not gonna lie. Ready to turn a corner on those and get our perfect little kid back. Real flashbacks to 3 years old here. I do not know how we ever got through that.

She did replace every outlet cover herself on the outlet covers, though, screwing every outlet back into place. That was really impressive.

W Hotel in a Better, Alternate Universe playlist for you today. Just as the daylist savings time sun peeks up over the trees and pond and blinds me for the next 20 minutes or so. I love it and hate it. It is beautiful and blinding.