Good morning. Hello. How are you? #857
Chores, Jane's bedtime trials, this really long Political article about America's lead-up to the Ukraine invasion. A short one.
Good morning. Hello there. How are you? Did you have a lovely weekend? Was it sunny? Rainy? Did you get some time outside? I do hope so. I had a productive weekend, which is a good one for me because I hate laying around, though I did fall asleep for an hour on Sunday afternoon that was nice. I’d finished all my chores, and I had a full hour before dinner with absolutely nothing to do. So I went downstairs and I watched a couple Youtube videos and fell asleep. It was awesome. Actually, I got a ton of sleep this weekend — more than nine hours both Friday and Saturday night, and even lasst night I got eight and a half hours. I don’t now what it is. Suddenly I want sleep, sleep, sleep. I can’t get enough sleep. Sleep rules. I was like this for a good forty years but the last few years I’ve been fine with less sleep. It was a good run, but it’s over now.
This is contrasted with my daughter, who doesn’t want to go to sleep at all anymore, is staying up well past ten, past eleven. She is staying up later than I am. She is constantly calling us back to her room and just… wide awake for hours. And she will probably be awake when I go get her in ninety minutes. It really is something. Not sure what to do about it. Emma’s been just laying with her, keeping her company for hours. Because nothing else works. We’re not sure if it’s a change in her actual circadian rhythms or just something involving attachment and abandonment. I am starting to think maybe we have to completely rework our lives and let her stay up as late as she wants but that seems like a catastrophic decision at the age of five, probably more for us than for her.
Prior to that, though, bedtime was lovely, we had a good dance party: Le Tigre – she liked “Deceptacon” but absolutely did not want to hear “TKO.” Also absoulutely did not want to hear “Freedom ‘90” by George Michael which was somewhat sad. We did Metric’s “Gimme Sympathy,” Elastica (loved it), Hole (loved it), The Linda Lindas (loved them), Republica (not a fan the video was scary), then we ended with two Slena tracks and two Robyn tracks. Man Robyn looks young in the “Show me Love” video. She went to bed quick and we read a book and she let me go before too long.
I told her I was not coming back, but she called me back anyway and I did the “french wait” then headed up but kept my word and did not go into the room. We talked from the door, and it mostly worked. She had made a deal with Emma this weekend that we’d stay longer at bedtime and she wouldn’t call us back but like I said she now just calls the other one back. So this is making me feel guilty because I do two bedtimes to every one Emma bedtime to make up for other deficiencies in our caring time equality, but now she’s calling Emma back more. And Emma can stay up later than I can, so she can stay with Jane, and so now Emma is doing more work again. Dang it.
Other than that, weekend was chores chores chores. Waffles and broth and refilling the pills and taking out the compost and ordering the groceries. All of Saturday was spent on this massive furniture cleaning and reorganization project Emma is working on upstairs, which involved me climbing 30 flights of stairs brining different stuff down to the garage. The up and down was fine but my arms are sore because of all the holding of these weird bulky items at weird angles as I navigated the stairs and out to the garage.
Then on Sunday I decided to clear all the saplings off of the leach field using my new 60v bruch cutter which worked great but man my arms were already sore and those giant 60 volt outdoor batteries are heavy. But the thing worked great and it was a fairly satisfying experience.
My arm is still really sore today though.
I’ve been working my way through this really good, super long oral history of the actions in the US government leading up to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and it’s really good. I gotta say, I don’t think the Biden administration gets enough credit for how masterfully they handled the invasion. They were dilligent, careful, laser-focused on doing everything they could to prevent the invasion and yet prepare for it at the same time. And the way they would rapidly declassify intelligence and announce to the world what Putin was planning was really well done. Their understandings of America’s failures in 2014 with the invasion of the Crimea (since, you know, Biden was sitting right there watching it all), and their understanding that media literacy had changed and that people would be more savvy to Russian disinformation. All very well done.
It’s also really stunning that Putin just did all this out in the open. One interesting comment one NSA person made was that there was a plethora of commercial satellite imagery providers now, compared to 2014, and no one had to take the White House’s word for it — you could just order your own satellite imagery and check it out. The hubris of utterly abandoning the element of surprise really was something. The Biden, Blinken, and others would tell Putin, his foreign secretary, his cabinet: “we can see what you’re doing you don’t want to do this this is going to be a huge mistake please don’t do this” giving them off ramps at every step of the way and Putin just… ignoring it. It really is something.
One other interesting thing someone said was that the pandemic really helped because they could coordinate with all of the ally countries over Zoom because everyone was used to using Zoom because of the pandemic and it would have been nearly impossible, prior to the pandemic to achieve that level of coordination so quickly.
Anyway, I think that’s all I got today. Short and sweet. Long week ahead of me, and a far more busy Monday than I would normally like.
Got a noise and metal mix for you. Today is April 3, my friend Jamie’s birthday (happy birthday Jamie) and the day that Galaxie 500 played their last show in Boston, at BU’s Walter Brown arena with the Cocteau Twins in 1991. Man that was a good show. So I really ought to be doing some 1990’s alterna mix of things that Jamie liked in the 90s or something, but nope, you get a bunch of metal bands instead. What can I say, it was the playlist that was almost done.
RIP Ryuichi Sakamoto and Seymour Stein. Man, that’s a painful 1-2 punch for alternative music.