Good morning. Hello. How are you? #938
More chores of the home and work variety, email is so Gen X, emissions tests for EVs, life insurance shopping, bitching about Apple, I think my daughter might be a satanist.
Good morning. Hello. How are you? I am good, I am utterly sick of this heat. So tired of it. It’s killing my tomatoes, because I was too lazy to put shade cloth on them, again. It’s oppressive and tiresome and makes it hard to do anything outside and it’s been going on for weeks and it’s going to go another week or two at least. We did get some rain yesterday, thank god, that was lovely. But just.. this heat. It’s terrible. Not to be confused with This Heat, the Gong spinoff band. They’re just fine.
Got a lot done yesterday. Got my portion of a presentation for an all hands meeting on Wednesday done. This involved wrangling slides from, like, ten people and you know how that goes. Kind of amazing how many people don’t really look at their email anymore. Engineers who do all their shit in job ticketing systems and Slack and don’t have any reason to expect the CEO to randomly email them asking for slides. Hadn’t thought about that before. Email. So Gen-X.
Called the gate people to get our gate fixed since the UPS driver broke it. They said they’d come out and fix it but I should text them some photos of the gate system so they knew what to expect. So here is a photo of our gate electronics, if you could diagnose it for me and tell me where I’m supposed to turn off the beeping alarm other than unplugging it and the battery, that would be great, thanks.
Got the registration bills for the Lightning and Janet’s Mach-E, even though both of them are less than a year old, and I have to go do emissions tests for them, even though both of them are electric, and there’s an “electric vehicle tax” on both of them which sucks balls and seems to be a bit dodgy but I guess when you pay for your roads through gas tax how else are so you supposed to handle this.
Emailed the fan people and they are sending me a new switch assembly for a Piccolo indoor/outdoor fan in black for free of charge so that was very nice gosh I love old school customer service departments run by a single person named Marge that are human and answer you quickly. They are a rarity but when you find one, it really is the best. If you ever need a ceiling fan, let me recommend CRAFTMADE to you. Great company, as far as I can tell. Of course they probably donate to Republicans and the Chamber of Commerce and all that crap so, you know, still Capitalism, but they are very nice in their repair department.
I got the XT9 router in the mail and tried to add it to the network at the new house and it wouldn’t add and now I gotta do some deep troubleshooting and man I hate doing that shit and I am, like, $600 deep in routers now and it is very, very unpleasant.
Oh! I did buy some life insurance finally, though. Well, I haven’t signed the policy but it’s all set. I did it at Policy Genius, because I saw an add on Youtube on one of my pastoral homesteading home improvement channels. Only one company would insure a 50+ year-old overweight ex-smoker with high cholesterol and high blood pressure, but it’s not a terribly expensive policy and it goes for I think ten years or so, which is plenty I just need this thing to get through the next few years. I don’t want to sound like an ad or anything but Policy Genius was really quite simple, even though it does involve a phone call in the end, but, just like CRAFTMADE, it is an adult human that calls you right away and is actually very helpful so it was not too bad. Strong recommend.
Life insurance. Man.
The Apple Notes.app crashed again this morning, but now that I think about it, it didn't crash yesterday morning so I will amend my statement about Apple Notes being absolutely terrible these days on new Apple Silicon and in Ventura. It’s just mostly trashy. There used to be a “send feedback to Apple” menu option in every Apple app and I used to use it all the time but somewhere along the line, Apple quietly removed the option from the menus. Because why would a four trillion dollar company need to hear from its users. We do not matter, the Mac does not matter, it only exists because it is needed for engineers to develop iOS apps and one day they are going to announce that they’ve made Swift for the iPad or some shit and that will be the end of it. They have more important things to do than making bicycles for your mind, like giving Lionel Messi a billion dollars. Whoops. Sorry. Two billion.
Opinion: you’re still a policy failure of a billionaire even if you’re really good at kicking a ball.
Last night Jane came up to me and asked if we could do bed party again — our recent party innovation where she acts chaotic and jumps on the bed a lot. It was a failure the night before, degenerated into her trying to kick me repeatedly, saying she wanted to be unkind. But she came up and said sorry and that she would be good tonight, so I said okay and we attempted to do bed party again but we didn’t even get to it for ages because she decided that her clever technicality of saying she would be kind during bed party meant that she didn’t have to be kind before bed party, and she was so upset that I did not accept this legal loophole. I tried to explain to her that I have to want to do it and I don’t want to do it when she’s being unkind. It’s weird how she absolutely refuses to acknowledge that you have to convince people to do things. She wants to be able to dictate them, and not ask.
Eventually she got me to do it because she got nice enough and kept saying she wanted to do “chaos and learning” and who can turn down that combination. So we learned about habits, the power of habit. That habits have two magic powers: they make doing things you don’t like easier, and they make it so you can get a ton done without feeling like you’ve done much work. She liked that idea. But then she said that not all her habits stick and I said, yes, that’s true, especially with kids. We talk about how when kids have a habit for a while, and then it goes away, that they’re going through a phase. Like she went through a phase of grabbing the kitty’s tail, and now she doesn’t do it.
“I’m going through an unkindness phase,” she pronounced.
That you are, Jane. That you are.
DDJP was nice, though. I played “Super Bass” which, my god, I hadn’t heard in years, and I forgot about the absolute, utter brilliance of the chorus of that song it might be the greatest chorus ever. Super Bass, man. What a tune. Then I was playing “Call me Maybe” and she said “I don’t like all this daddy music.” And I said “this is not Daddy Music I am playing you things I think you might like. If you think this is Daddy Music let me play you some actual Daddy Music.”
And, weirdly, she said “okay,” so I played the first Daddy Music that popped up, which was Cold Cave and Mark Lanegan covering Joy Division, I mean, that’s some pretty Daddy Daddy music right there.
But weirdly she did not mind it too much, so, you know, live and learn.
Maybe I should just start playing Non and power electronics for her. She does seem to have a “Might Makes Right” sort of “Do As Thou Wilst Shall be the Whole of the Law,” Satanic Temple sort of thing going on.
Less Taylor Swift and more Whitehouse for you, Jane.
Justa mix for your today, old and new. Can we talk about the imminent new Cindy Wilson, formerly of the B-52’s, solo album? Because three songs have been released in advance so far and they are all awesome. Cindy Wilson, man. Awesome. Gave the new Clientele a listen there were three poppy songs I loved. And I am not the world’s biggest Big Thief fan but I like this new track. And I just bought the Lush “Sweetness and Light” 12” so you get to listen to that too. Fun times.
Talk tomorrow!