Good morning. Hello. How are you? #886
RIP Heather Armstrong, Ikea trip, government shutdown, map game
Good morning! Hello there! Happy Friday. How are you? I am good. I am home. Home is so awesome. I have to leave home again Monday. I am not happy about that. But at least I get to spend the weekend doing some quality gardening and housework. Killing lawns, mostly. Lawns are very hard to kill. Gotta cover ‘em in tarps and cardboard and shit like that for a year. It’s ridiclous. But one day we will have beautiful no-grass gardens at the new house. It is going to rule.
We are back from Silver Spring and the Sisters of Mercy. Thank you for your patience regarding yesterday’s concert review interlude. There was a lot more I could have said about the Sisters of Mercy, but you gotta draw the line somewhere.
When we were driving to Silver Spring, we went through DC on this wacky parkway I had never been on, over on the west side of town. And then we took Alaska ave to Georgia Ave, up to Silver Spring. I gotta say, Alaska ave got shafted. It is way too short. Whole road is maybe seven blocks long. I mean, come on.
We also went to Ikea. That was great fun. We spent a ton of time debating which automobile to take on this trip, actually, because of the Ikea run. In the end we took Emma’s ICE Mazda because of charging time concerns, which is a bummer, but we did manage to fit everything we bought at Ikea in the car. There is a lot of furniture assdembly in my future but that’s okay because it all comes with beautiful, big, cardboard boxes which I need to kill off my lawns. We had Ikea breakfast, which is good, but no meatballs, alas. There was a very nice gold bar cart I want for the new house but it was too heavy for me to lift with my tennis elbow, which is still not any better and I am getting very sick of it and I may soon take my doctor up on that offer of a steroid shot.
I should say, thank you for your birthday wishes. Every year Facebook birthday wishes a little bit differently, and this year the way they seem to have decided to handle them is to just not tell you about them. So as we were in the car driving home, oh, four days later, I was scrollng through Facebook — something I do not do a whole lot day-to-day normally — and it was suddenly deciding to show me random birthday greetings in my timeline, that it had never given me a notification about. What the hell is up with that? I am genuinely confused. If it had given me some alerts, I would have gone up there and read them. Seems… counterproductive for all parties involved.
I am going to change up my map game, starting Monday. I always get one or two wrong, maybe a brain fart here, a brain fart there, buy by and large, after a year of daily practice I am completely comfortable with my knowledge of the location of the countries of Europe, Africa, Asia, Central America, the Carribbean and South America. So, starting next week, I’m going to do the map games on Monday, and if I get all of the countries right, I’m gonna skip it until the following Monday. I seriously spend maybe 10 minutes a day on the map game, and that adds up! Time to reclaim some time in my life and call the “learning where all the countries are” personal project a win.
I only met Heather Armstrong a few times in life, back when she was still the world’s pre-eiminent mommy blogger. As a relentless life blogger myself at the time, we had some things in common. But she was a mom, and even though she was younger than me, she was a “grown up,” blogging about real life, while I generally blogged about rock shows, sex, drinking, and depression. It was that last one, though, where we clicked, where had overlap. I respected what she was doing very much, it felt like we were a bit siblings-in-arms about the whole life blogging thing. I was jealous of her fame, but of course then, as now, I spent considerable effort making sure I didn’t get too famous with my life blogging. At any rate, I liked her very much.
Later in life, she got TERFY and she got more sad and seemed somewhat aimless and putting aside the unacceptable politics for a moment, I very, very much understood that and felt sympathy for her. We were never close, she probably wouldn’t have remembered me, but I kept tabs through the years and her political turns made me very sad.
But I also very much understand depression in your forties. I feel like “mid-life crises” are coming earlier and they’re coming harder. There were a few years there in my forties where it was hard. I’m sad she chose the path of suicide because, as cheesy as it sounds, it gets better. My fifties have been so much happier than my forties. Maybe I lucked out having a kid so late: maybe children bring us happiness even as they bring us misery. I don’t know. I don’t know. But I’m sad that we lost her. I had an inkling there was a redemption arc in her future, but now we will never get the chance to see it.
Farewell, Heather.
So I guess the government’s gonna shut down in a couple weeks. I don’t really see any alternative. Joe is a good deal maker, supposedly, so they tell us, but Kevin’s got no room to make any deal. Joe’s too much of a hidebound traditionalist to do what he should obviously do, which is mint the coin, then invoke the forteenth amendment and… just keep paying the government’s bills, while dealing with a court case that acutally might go his way at the supreme court because they’re a bunch of lunatics, but lunatics who generally get all hot and bothered for increased governmental power so who knows, it might even work. But he won’t do it. So that leaves the path Joe seems to be taking, trying to pick off enough Republicans from the house to pass a clean bill with the Democrats, but I think this is wishful thinking. I think that even though the Republicans have taken a shellacking with public sentiment the other two times they’ve tried this, that is no guarantee they’ll take one this time. And plenty of their caucus just hates any non-fascist government, so they’ll be fine with shutting it down. We are, in short, probably screwed.
Good times!
All right I am out of here. Overslept, I only have 30 mins until Jane gets up and I still gotta do my 750 words and my map game and my Quicken transactions and check Plex and the Qnap and my finances and do my Duolingo hrm I do not think I will accomplish all of these things. I am excited to see Jane I saw her a little bit last night but it was a mommy bedtime and of course the night before she was at Grammy’s so this morning will be our first time together since Wednesday morning. And we have a dance party tonight, that is exciting.
Justa mix today. New music mix. So much new music. I am so behind. Piles of records, endless playlists. It just keeps coming. I only listen to each album once or twice it is so hard. So hard. Every song on here is great! So many people out there are doing great things, making beautiful music.
Have a lovely weekend!