Good morning. Hello. How are you? All well? Did you have a nice long weekend? Man, it has been a while since I talked to you, huh. Skipped Monday, did fiction on Tuesday. It’s Wednesday! I haven’t written to you guys in five days. I’ve missed you. Did it rain your entire weekend? It’s rained every weekend this spring here in NC. I don’t mind it so much, I am doing a lot of gardning and I haven’t really sorted the irrigation at the new house, and I seem to have some broken drip irrigation in my peppers bed, so I appreciate the rain. But it is bumming a lot of people out and I do have to admit it would be nice to have some sun on a weekend.
Ailment check. Arthritic fingers still here, voltaren is doing barely anything. I mean, that’s generous. As far as I can tell, it’s doing nothing. Tennis elbow still here, slowwwwly improving but we’re we’ll into two months and it’s still uncomfortable to crush a soda can. Neck is a lot better, thank you trigger point shots, excited for session three in two weeks. New ailments! I wounded my right thumb, underneath the nail. No idea how I did this. Maybe grinding, though I had gloves on, maybe gardening. Probably gardening. It stung like a mofo for two days but seems died down now. Ditto my new strained abdomen muscles which, I dunno, maybe from heavy lifting but I didn’t do anything too too insane. Who knows. I was feeling pretty broken for a few days now but today I feel okay. Only ailment that seems unimproved is the arthritis. WOOOOO.
Utter dejection check. I don’t know how much I’ve talked about this but I have a vision for my next company after Nimbus. It needs like a boatload of money to get started, so it’s sort of my plan if Nimbus knocks it out of the park and I find myself with a guilt-inducing excess of money. Kinda a win-win. Anyway it involves “solving recycling” and I have it pretty well worked out and I want to tell you how great it would be, except…
Yesterday I learned about a new study that basically says that all plastic recycling is probably terrible and actually making things worse because in the process of prepping the plastic for recycling, you have to wash it a lot and that washing sloughs off tons of microplastics that inevitably make it back into the environment and continue the inexorable process that is happening right now of covering everyone and everything on planet earth in a thin coat of plastic. Plastic is a catastrophe, it has a decent chance of being the undoing of humankind and the way we are recycling now is not helping.
The middling news in this is that in this study — which took place with a recycling plant’s cooperation, at one of the newest, most high-tech recycling plants in America — filtering the ater does help. The bad news is no plants currently filter the water enough. BEST CASE, is that every recycling plant in America needs to up its filtering game by, oh, 500-600%, which is never going to happen, and then test its water and most likely never let it re-enter the ecosystem. Haha yeah right.
I did already factor water toxicity into my recycling plan, and I knew already that the best water solution would involve massive filtration and a closed-loop system, but there are additional complications that this study adds to my plan. It’s not clear distillation will help. Or even evaporation. But that’s peanuts. The real problem is that no recycling plant on the planet is currently doing it this way.
And the data is so new — only one study so far. It is reliable, but it’s so new that it is probably not going to make its way over to influence the current negotiations on a global plastic treaty. It is unambiguously good news that we are, as a species, currently negotiating a global plastic treaty. It is unambniguously bad news that the current negotiations are probably off by an order of magnitute, at least, with what they are aiming to accomplish. And that’s before Joe Biden ( best case) and the plastic industry get their hands on it and water it down. And pollute that water in the process.
Learning all of this yesterday floored me. Like made me feel like it was utterly pointless to do anything. We are so fucked as a species. And there is no opting out of any of this. And there’s a good chance this news fucked this emotional nlifeline I had, this big-picture life plan that at least included a possibility to do something about it, to help, to improve things. It’s been a while since I’ve been that utterly shattered and felt that hopeless.
But mid-day I at least had the rough shape of a modification to my recycling plan, but I suspect it’s put the whole thing out of reach of what I could conceivably make from Nimbus. And I’ve always known that this plan needed to be self-funded, because no VC will get it, no VC will invest the amount of money needed, with me, to get it to an MVP level where people can see the whole project and understand it and the whole thing becomes “investable,” or more likely “grantable” since the whole thing is gonna be a non-profit or at least a B-Corp. So now I have no idea how to pull it off, even if I can solve the new terrible, very depressing, awful-for-humanity complications this introduces.
So that is somewhat depressing.
Still not really over that.
All right. Anyway. Thank you depressing study for not crossing my path until Tuesday morning and not ruining my weekend, which was really lovely. Wall-to-wall chores. Just the fucking best.
Watched the Succession finale and I am so glad that show’s over. I mean, sure, the finale was good. I should clarify that the acting is phenomenal and all of them deserve awards. I got no problem with that. Cinemetography good though a little too Galactica wiggly. Editing top notch. Sound top notch. Ditto music (except I find Brittell’s techno bass on the title credits increasingly grating as the years go by).
I just feel like the plot is a weird skeleton on which to hang set pieces and has absolutely no bearing on what actual normal rich sociopaths would do in these situations. They had this whole, taught ten-days-in-their-time season then skipped ahead months for the finale. They broke unwitten rick-people rules and brought up certain things from their past that they just would not bring up. They were more flip-floppy than usual. The entire presidential subplot made no sense and went nowhere. Ewan had a great big speech last week but his whole Greenpeace thing just went away. Not a single shareholder wobbled from the (presumed) previous vote. It felt like a plot that existed because it had to exist. The winner had to be the winner because no other winner would make sense in the setup they made for themselves.
Never mind the whole thing is an exhausting slog of watching terrible people be mean to each other. I guess we’re supposed to feel better about ourselves and find these small people funny but I do not I just get anxious and depressed. It’s a good show but my god am I glad its over. Also it was too fucking long. I know this is an unpopular opinion. And then I was just low-level angry the rest of the evening becase all of social media was raving about how great the finale was. I am now hoping to never think of this show again.
Made good progress on the workbench revival. Metal bench portion is stripped of all paint and rust, using a combination of grinder, drill with grinding wheel and Dremel. It is primed and painted. Looks great. It is now sitting on top of its table top, upside down. I need to align it to the center perfectly and screw it in. Then I can work on the tabletop, planing down the edges, routing a curve onto them, then sanding it, then adding the first coat of tung oil. I think I can get this thing done by Friday maybe? Fingers crossed.
Got a lot of (picture) framing done at the new house. Nothing’s hung, but the art is chosen and almost all of it I could get cheapo frames off of Amazon and Amazon’s evil I know I know but $50 for a frame vs $500 sign me up. I feel bad but I am not in the position to spend somethling like $8000 on framing for a guest house. And wow, most of the frames look amazing. Really is something, the radical improvements in the premade framing industry.
Gardening was swell. I trellised the tomatoes and cucumbers. Harvested half the radishes. Replanted the peppers cuz the entire bed failed I am not sure what’s up with that I think it was an irrigation issue but there’s been plenty of rain. Maybe it’s the soil? We’ll see if this second batch takes. Garlic and wheat are ready to harvest but it occurs to me I have no idea how to actually harvest wheat. I guess I thresh it like that cool dude on the cover of Depeche Mode’s A Broken Frame. The beets failed completely I think the squirrels are getting into the hoop house. Which is fine because that ship has sailed and we’re now going to move everyhting over to a greenhouse at the new house. Except there are some regulations I need to sort out, I have learned from my contracting partners. Percentage of the lot covered in impermeable ground cover. Setbacks from septic. I think it can all be sorted, hopefully, but it is complex. We are still working on it. Spinach also just didn’t sprout. Come to think of it a lot of shit didn’t sprout that’s weird: Peppers, spinach, carrots, beets. But, then, tons of shit did: lettuce, arugula, radishes, cucumbers, shallots, tomatoes, all the herbs. The beans are doing middlingly. Maybe its a sun thing. I don’t know. I am not overstressed about it, it’s a transitional year. The potatoes at the new house are killing it. I planted some more tomatoes over there this weekend, and a watermelon, and some luffa, and I mounded the potatoes.
We had a potential tenant for the old accupuncture studio beneath the new house, and I was very excited, because she was an LMT and two of the neighbors were clients and spoke the world of her and how great would it be to have an LMT in your neighborhood, but in the end she decided it was too far from her current office and that her clients wouldn’t want to go that far, which was confusing since two of our neighbors currently go that far to her current office. But I was also getting stressed because though the office is in the basement and far from things, I am planning a lot of work on the house and it would probably be really noisy for a bulk of this year. I was gonna tell her all that but I don’t yet have a sense of timing, so that would have been dodgy.
I got my third HVAC estimate and this guy was good and noticed two very large problems that the other two estimators did not notice, but then still managed to come in about a grand less than the other two, so that is mysterious. The metal beams in the house are making it hard to move ducts and get to vents in the center of the span, thus in the center of the attic room. I do plan on building up the floor, but will it be enough? Also apparently the furnace on the HVAC unit draws air from the room it’s in right now, and once that room is inside the conditioned envelope it needs to draw fresh air. First guy told me we could duct it, no big deal, but the second guy said no, it would need a new furnace. Also the estimates for a 1.5 ton minisplit vary by more than 100%. It is nuts.
Apparently I gotta do the roof before the spray foam, but I need to do the HVAC work and the plumbing work before the roof, because I’ll be making some new holes and closing some old ones. So right now the order of operations looks like plumbing, HVAC, roof, spray foam. Then I can do all the manual labor in there for a year.
I still haven’t gotten an electrical estimate.
Other weekend tasks: three runs to the hardware store (had an epiphany that every home improvement project ever requires at least one hardware store run and this is true of professionals not just me and is not a failure and I should just embrace it and be thankful there’s a good one half mine away). Two Walmart runs. The first was very successful, they had everything I needed that is a rarity. Oh except buckets. I need more buckets. Took out the compost. Did not move any grape plants to the new house. Bought a new rose bush and planted it at the new house. Got my drill press assembled and on its stand. Got the wall racks hung in the new garage.
I was robbed of my first place in the Pearl League in Duolingo at 11:39 PM ET Sunday when I was planning on doing a quick top-up to ensure it and I am pissed. I figured these leagues ended at midnight Sunday. But they do not. I will not make this mistake again.
Several days of Daddy Jane Dance Party. Last night we did one with Aug, who was gone for the weekend but is back. He introduced us to Tristen, who was great, and Freya Beer, ditto. We danced to Don Lennon and the War on Drugs before settling into the hits. I got her to choose “Call your Girlfriend” over “Dancing on My Own” so that was nice. Other days we watched the new Duo Lipo, more Linda Lindas and Garbage, a Billie Eilish live in Rio thing that made me realize she’s way more engaging live than I realized, BlackPink who are just insane and great and we both love them, Doja Cat (she loved it), Haim, Tkay Maidz, Shabazz Palaces, and Elise Trouw. All good stuff. On Saturday night, for the second time in her life, she got very obsessed with the history of Manchura and Mongolia, as I was watching a youtube video on the topic. She kept making me pause it and look at maps. And when it was over she was totally ripshit and no other video would do nor would she go play she just wanted more maps of Manchuria. This seems a complete coincidence from the last time she got obsessed with Manchuria? I think? Odd coincidence.
Modern classical for you, pretty mellow, not too terribly atonal. Maybe a little bit atonal. Quite enjoyable.
Sorry for the long one. Lots happened! Until tomorrow.
THANK YOU. I felt like I was the only one who felt like this entire past season of Succession has felt uneven and full of seemingly portentous plot threads that went nowhere. The actual ending didn’t feel like it amounted to much, thematically. Shiv’s decision felt not just out of character, but somewhat inexplicable given what they had set up earlier in the very same episode. The whole thing kind of felt a bit like the creators had sort of lost interest in continuing anything that they had set up and we’re just in search of an expedient conclusion. Meh.
i am so glad succession is over too. it was a better show when it was more funny/absurd.
i love framing things! and the only time i spend any “extra” money on it is by having a mat cut. cheap frame + professional mat = beauty.
if i think about plastic too long i get so depressed. would a corporate tax credit for companies who stopped using plastic do anything? would that legislation even pass? 😞