Good morning. Hello. How are you? #937
So many great chores. A great website to buy traffic signs, smoke detectors, new Doritos flavors
Good morning! Hello there, how are you? Have a good weekend? Get some chores done? Chores! Woo! Yeah! Chores! Heck yeah. Did I do some chores? You bet your chorin’ ass I did. Chores.
I pulled the cardboard off of one section of the grass I was killing at the new house. I put the cardboard down in April because I wanted to kill off the grass so I could use this little plot for gardening. I can’t believe how well it worked. Not only was the grass dead, it was disappeared! In less than four months. Really remarkable. Look at this:
And then I moved all that cut brush over there from the other yard on the other side of the garage. Got about 20 chigger bites, probably some ant bites, in the process. I guess chiggers love piles of cut brush. I was wearing gloves, too. But I wasn’t in full outdoor, brush-cutting protective clothing, had shorts and a t-shirt on. Now both my under arms are completely covered in itchy, inflamed insect bites. Live and learn.
Also got the final positioning of the greenhouse laid out, marked it off with survey tape, measured from both of the septic tank covers. I found another one in the brush, in a very inconvenient place, so the greenhouse has to be closer to the driveway than I wanted, thus reducing the useful gardening space in front of it, but I don’t think there’s really a choice and I have plenty of other options for expanding gardening space. Gonna go with the orange flagged tape in this photo:
So then I made this whole Keynote presentation for Ricardo to plan out the various contractors we’ll need, and he got the excavator ready to go. We picked out the material for the wall the greenhouse will sit on. We did all this in his pool with Emma, Jane, his wife, mother, sister and our neighbor Levi. Nice pool soak after getting 30 chigger bites, can’t complain about that.
I got the tiger tapestry hung in the new house. The tiger tapestry is a painting of a tiger made by my great aunt Chervence, that hung in my grandmother’s house in her living room when I was a child. It’s been hanging in my secret CD room off of my library for years, which looked really cool but didn’t really get the attention it deserved. And since I got that sweet tiger statue at that estate sale, I figured we could use a tiger corner. Coulda sworn I took a picture of it for you, but I guess I forgot. I’ll show you tomorrow. It’s sweet.
I checked in out he current garden, the squirrels are eating all the tomatoes again which sucks. But the new cucumbers have sprouted, the carrots are doing great, the beets have come in, the beans are a’ beanin’, the peppers are producing. Really, it’s the hoop house that’s a failure, which is a shame. I had high hopes for that thing. I wonder what I’d be doing if I didn’t have the new house. Would I be trying to patch up this hoop house? Considering covering it in chicken wire? Squirrels, man. They are relentless.
Other than that, lotta first passes at chores, but rather than completing them, learning about new obstacles. I tried to add a node to the wifi at the new house to cover the back yard and pond, but it turns out you cannot mix XT8 and XT9 Asus mesh wifi systems on the same system, who knew, and I brilliantly have different systems at each house boy that was really dumb. I was gonna go with Ubiquiti at the new house, but it was right in the middle of their big security breach and utter failure as stewards of your personal data, so I passed. Now I have incompatible nodes at each house, bah. I smell a large bout of eBaying and network maintenance in my future. My favorite.
The gate broke at the new house. UPS left a package at the gate, and when I drove up to it, the gate opened, hit the package and jammed. Lovely. Old owners only gave me a phone number for the gate company. It was disconnected. This will be… a process.
I tried to repair the switch in Emma’s fan, which does not switch, so we can’t put it on the highest setting in these trying heat times, the whole module needs to be repaired. So then I had to go through 20 pages of fans on the manufacturer’s website to find the right model so I can email them and ask for a replacement module. Actually, now that I think about it, I can just swap it out with the one in the guest bedroom, the fan works, it just doesn’t go to high speed. Okay never mind, that was dumb. I’ll get that done next week.
Oh god, and then, smoke detectors. Our house is ten years old, all the smoke detectors are failing, there are eight of them. They’re wired in, have a specific wiring harness, which means unless I want to make this job even more miserable, I’m sticking to the first alert ecosystem. First Alert makes a bajillion different smoke detectors, but they do not make the one I want, which is a dual-detection system for smoke, plus carbon monoxide, all in one system. So I got a mix of dual-detection smoke detectors and dual-detection smoke/carbon monoxide detectors, and now I’m going to have to tediously go around and replace them all. For the hell of it I also got one HomeKit compatible “smart” one so, you know, if our house burns down while I’m on traveling (hahaha yeah right), I can be notified.
Smoke detectors, man. So complex.
Other weekend events: Roy ate a ton of thread and barfed it up in a giant black puke pile.
Jane threw a fit where she really, really wanted to kick me and kept at it for, mmm, gonna say five minutes before she finally ran off and locked herself in the bathroom to calm down.
Emma joined us for bedtime last night so we had our first family bedtime in a while, that was nice. Daddy Jane Dance Party was a group activity, always a treat.
Took out the compost, made the waffles, refilled the pill container, got groceries, repaired my truck ramp, merging it back into a single ramp instead of two, tried to rip Shoplifters (2018) but it failed, which is weird. Listened to three Yo La Tengo records…
I organized the Accounts Payable invoices folder for the pool contracting company, putting every invoice in a folder titled year-month-day - payee - project - amount - invoice number
and boy was that hella satisfying, let me tell you.
Oh! I ordered traffic signs. Man, this is a great site: RoadTrafficSigns.com. Such endless possibilities. Very into it. The neurodivergent-affirming pediatric speech therapist moved a bunch of stuff in, and I ordered some signage to make their parking spaces clear and the path down to her office. Street signs. You know what I’m gonna do? I’m gonna buy a bunch more to mark where underground things are like gas and electric. Little signs down on the ground. It’ll be so cute. Street signs!
While I was at Walmart on Friday there was this guy standing in front of an end cap display of Doritos, looking indecisive. I couldn’t figure out how you could be so indecisive about Doritos, but then I noticed there was a new flavor of Doritos: Pineapple Jalapeño. So I stood next to him for a second, stared at it and said “Pineapple Jalapeño. My god. Welp. Gonna have to try that, I mean, how could you not, right?”
And it totally snapped him out of it and he said “yes, right. Totally.” Like what was he thinking even doubting he had to try this new delicious capitalistic abomination.
He grabbed two packs.
You’re welcome, Frito-Lay.
Miss you as a client, ta.
This weekend Jane learned about the various organs of the body — did that herself, through YouTube. She’s started reading a computer book, so we covered Moore’s law and she asked me lots of questions about telephones when I was a kid. She also watched a video dipping her toes into economics and boy am I excited about that. She asked us what capitalism was and I didn’t give a whole speech.
Very proud of myself.
Got a covers playlist for you. A little surprised I have another one so quickly after the last one, but who can predict the weird sacred mojo of playlist growth.
Talk tomorrow. I was thinking of digging out another piece of fiction and starting on that, but… ehhhh, we’ll see. No promises.