Good morning! Hello, there. How are you? Did you have a good weekend? Did it rain too much? Man it rained a lot here. We got a nice day yesterday though, that was… nice. Got a lot done, had a lovely time with our visitor, Jussi.
Had a really long tedious dream about attending some Elon Musk love-fest where everyone just loved him to death and he programmed a whole conference at a convention center and it was almost all middle-aged women and the headlining keynote wasn’t about trucks or cars or rockets or even Twitter, but it was him talking about Eugenics. Checks out.
Yesterday was Emma’s 40th birthday. It was, of course, also Easter. Jane inexplicably got into Easter somehow, so Emma got her a Hello Kitty Easter basket, and Emma and Jussi staged a Eastrer Egg hunt for her. Jussi also wanted to hit up a restaurant in Chapel Hill while here, and we hadn’t gotten to it yet, so we went there for Dinner. And I wanted to go see a band at Cat’s Cradle that Emma hadn’t really heard before, and we went to that show. So, you know, 40th birthday and she just did a bunch of things for other people. She is nice. Happy birthday, Emma.
I got her a Canon Rebel Digital SLR and a 500mm lens that we’re going to permanently mount in the dining nook and aim it at the turtle stand out on the pond so she can take pictures of the turtles when there are turtles there. It will be very simple for a non-photographer, always on, LCD monitor pointed up so you can see it easily, just click the button.
And on Saturday we had our neighbor friends Ricardo and Selin over for a fire out on the patio for Emma’s birthday. Because it was raining all weekend. It was lovely and cozy and they brought a delicious cake that we are still eating yum cake.
I had been wanting to do it for a while, so on Saturday, I finally told Jane she could stay up as late as she wanted. She was so excited. Ricardo and Selin and Jussi were all here, three of her favorite people. She had a whole piece of cake, she was shaking with excitement and jumping around and having the best time and I mentally prepared myself for her being up till like 10 or 11 and maybe even sleeping in bed with me, as I’m the early-to-bed one and Jussi and Emma stayed up watching their Tim Gunn.
She lasted until exactly 8:44.
The sleep problem is mostly licked. We tell her we’re coming back in 15 minutes. We keep coming back until she falls asleep. It’s usually by the second time. Yesterday we didn’t have to come back in at all. We might actually get to watch some TV again and I can watch last night’s Succession episode that the internet already spoiled for me grr.
Show at Cat’s Cradle last night was High Vis, and they were great. If you are looking for a new hardcore band in your life, you can’t do much better than High Vis. Back Room at Cat’s Cradle, maybe 70 people there. Bought a shirt. Lovely.
Been thinking a lot about all the Boston bands I did not appreciate enough in my youth when I lived there. How my musical tastes have changed. I wouldn’t go so far as to say I didn’t see these bands, I saw them all a lot, you couldn’t help but see them a lot. But there are some bands I love now that I didn’t appreciate enough back in the day: Isis comes to mind. Karate. Morphine. I mean, I liked Mark a lot and saw Morphine a fair number of times, but I took them for granted, I wish I could seet them one more time. Caspian. Man, Caspian are so good. Cave-In. The Gersh. Damn Personals, of course. Basically the rock bands. I saw the indie bands, noise bands, sensitive bands, quiet bands, but I didn’t see the rock bands enough. I regret that. I find myself listening to Morphine, Isis and Karate a lot lately.
Couple more music comments:
The Cranes are reuniting. Boy I hope they come to America that would be great it’s been ages since I’ve seen the Cranes that would rule. One time Nine Inch Nails and Marilyn Manson were playing the Garden in Boston and I was like “nah, Ima gonna go see the Cranes and then go to Man Ray.” And that was absolutely the right decision. Man they were so good. Cranes!
And, finally, RIP Vivian Trimble of Luscious Jackson and Kostars. Loved them so much. Very sad. F— cancer.
Other than that, most of the weekend was spent moving stuff to the new house. Was gonna do some garden planting but the low tonight is 34 so I decided to wait another week. I have made that mistake before.
We have so much stuff, I swear to god we’ll manage to almost completely furnish that house through stuff we had laying around. I took over I think maybe 10 truckloads of furniture. It’s all mostly piled up in the garage because Viridian, the contracting company I do the Quickbooks for as a hobby, has a house painter on hand so he’s coming over today to start painting the place. I got the internet up and running and the alarm system and the music speakers, of course, and a TV hooked up the ancient, ancient, composite-and-svhs-inputs-only Bose audio system built into the walls. It’ll do. If we actually lived there it’d need to get replaced but whatever, it’s fine. Bought at Walmart the cheapest TV that fits into the nook above the fireplace. It was a Hisense brand, which, whatever, except I didn’t notice the thing was Hisense+Roku and oh my god, it’s so annoying.
I don’t want to have to put an email address into my TV just to get the thing set to HDMI input 1. Man, modern TVs suck. Enshittification.
The house has a super long driveway and I am coming to terms with the fact I’m gonna need to blow it with some regularity. Also there’s not a lawn, per se, but there are assorted patches of grass, designerly-stuck here and there amongst the woods. The former owners spent a fortune on landscaping, and it looks amazing, but I have zero desire to spend any money on the landscaping or, really, to maintain it myself. I’m gonna let the lawns go, somehow. Debating tilling them and planting wildflowers, giving them a layer of mulch and forgetting about them, or just forgetting about them completely.
Then there’s the grass that’s along the side of the road. The HOA has a guy who will maintain those. The former owners did not use him because they wanted their gorgeous lawn, but I don’t care. So I need to let the lawn guy know he can go ahead and mow it now. Except they stuck all these rocks in it, to keep cars from parking there, which is useful but also makes it impossible to mow? So I need to figure out if I am going to move them or what. That is a whole thing.
I’m into the ridiculousness of owning this house but man it is going to be a lot of work.
So this is what I would like: I would like to take all of my old band T-shirts, or a bunch of them, and make a suit jacket out of them. Like, say, take 10-15 shirts that are black with white prints on them, and cut out the shirt fabric and then sew it into new fabric, and then use that fabric to make a suit jacket. I don’t know how to get this accomplished, though obviously it is “doable.” Seems like it would take a bit of artistry so it’s not a straight up mechanical endeavor that I could send off to Hong Kong or something. If you have any ideas how to accomplish this, I am all ears. It would be so great. Maybe I could get three or four of them.
The pest guy came by last week and said there were six giant black snakes in our bushes in front of our house. He pointed at one and there was a snake sitting in a bush with its head sticking straight up, just looking out at the world, taking in the view. It was so weird. I don’t know why I didn’t take a picture of it. It was amazing. I think Jussi took one. I will try and get one for you.
This is why I started Friday’s entry off with “snakes.”
None of them copperheads, though. Just friendly neighborhood good snakes. Five of them. Three feet long each. Just hanging out.
I feel like I am over my writer’s block I had on GMHHAY last week. In fact, this week I have an overabundance of topics and it is somewhast paralyzing. I was coming down the stairs the other day and the in-home speakers were playing XM Radio First Wave and they were playing “Gone Daddy Gone” by the Violent Femmes, and I was thinking about how much I loved the Violent Femmes and that album my junior year of high school and wouldn’t my high school self be amazed to learn about my life now, and satellite radio now, and that people still listened to the Violent Femmes and, and, and… You know, we have those moments from time to time, the “go back in time and tell yourself this is what was happening” and wouldn’t you be amazed, etc. etc. But what really struck me was how mundane the scene was. Just walking around my house. Listening to old music. But still, if I could describe that scene with any accuracy, I’m convinced my 16 year-old self would be stunned. Just at the concept of being out of Alaska, for starters. Of owning an actual home. Of satellite radio what a mind-blowing concept. I dunno. It was a moment. A little moment of happiness. Of domestic happiness.
I guess my 16 year-old self woulda just been pretty amazed at the concept of happiness in life. That I would ever feel… serene.
Anyway.
Daddy Jane dance parties this weekend had mommy and Jussi as guests. I still ache to go to the new Man Ray, but I gotta say, Daddy-Jane-Mommy-Jussi Dance Parties were pretty lit. Not a terrible replacement.
Moody and Quiet one for you today. My spotify Release Radar is getting to be an absolute joke. It’s all stuff I’ve never heard, artists I’ve never heard of, and skips major releases by bands I love. Like it doesn’t have the new Daughter in it at all wtf. It’s getting pretty annoying. I smell payola. Lina Khan put your ardor to productive use.
Until tomorrow!