Saturday gardening n stuff man titles are a hassle.
Hello! Good morning. How are you? I am GREAT. I got SO MUCH GARDENING done yesterday. It was rad. Jane and I shredded a ton of cardboard in the hot new cardboard shredder. I shot a YouTube video about the cardboard shredder because I love it so much. And because there weren’t that many good YouTube videos about cardboard shredding when I was researching it. Maybe this video will go viral amongst cardboard shredding enthusiasts and I’ll make $20. That’d be great. I haven’t actually finished it, though, so maybe not. I also assembled two Birdies Beds, which are the hip raised gardening beds all the cool YouTubers use. I shot a time lapse assembly video of those too. One hundred nut-and-bolts to tighten. Per bed. Two hundred total. It was tedious AF. They don’t tell you that in the YouTube videos. You can watch five or six YouTube videos about assembling Birdies beds, and they’ll all make it look so easy. Because everything is in time lapse. And it is easy. It’s just so boring. Life is much easier in time lapse mode. I knew this already. I spend a lot of my life thinking “I just need to get through this and things will be better.” I often chastise myself for living my life, because, you know, smell the roses and all that shit. But the paradox is that I am often right. Life is, at least for me, global pandemic and horror show politics aside, better. All those times I just time-lapsed through some misery to get to a period where things are better? I was right. Suck it, Buddhist monks.
The tomatoes that I split and thinned (not the technical terms, I am still learning) on Friday looked GREAT today. Much happier. So now I want to thin and split all the other seedlings. Except I think some of them you’re not supposed to thin? I need to ask Abby about this. This is probably a project for next weekend though: thin/split the other 72 tomato seedlings, as well as the peppers, probably the cucumbers (though they seem to have done it themselves), loofahs (ditto), watermelon (ditto). Not sure about the lettuce and spinach. Do they need thinning? I have many Youtube videos to watch about thinning. And master gardener Abby can help me.
Sun is shining, which is nice. I am profoundly torn about my activities today. I really want to go outside again. BUT I think we are getting to the point where it’s going to be nice for a good long time in a row. Supposed to get to 75 this week. No rain in sight. That is EXCITING. I want to go out into that garden and start putting soil into those Birdies Beds. Mixing some combination of old expired container soil, top soil, mushroom compost, vermiculite, perlite, blood meal and worm castings like some gardening mad scientist. I want to do that SO BADLY. But I have chores indoors boo.
I have to redo our Wifi. It is hot garbage. We’ve been restarting the router on the reg for moths now. It’s a good router in concept (one of those Nighthawk thingamajigs) but it’s never worked at 100% and now it’s just… decaying. I know this is technically not how gadgets work but… also it is totally how they work. I sucked it up finally, read all the Wirecutter reviews and went with the Asus Zen Wifi XT8 AX6600. Hopefully it lives up to its glowing Wirecutter review.
Oh programming note: I also got my podcast done. I will link it below, if you are reading this on Facebook. But if you’re reading this on my HOT NEW EMAIL, I will link to it RIGHT HERE. Because I’ve been told people like to have an image to break up their long text emails.
Topics on this episode include: Day THREE HUNDRED AND SIXTY FIVE. Quarantine with mom! Hotel life, Southern Village, Kitties, Jane, gardening, NFTs, studio reorganization dilemmas, Suburbia, Lady Jane, Tammy and the T-Rex, A Foreign Affair, Blanck Mass, Soul Soundtrack, Suckdog, Wedding Present, Gloria Record, Bailter Space, Dandy Warhols and Bebe Buell, Bowery Electric, Kindred Spirits comp, late period Peter Murphy, Dali’s Car, Indigo Girls, King Princess, Caitlin Pasko, Eddie Arnold, Nermin Niazi, Cold Meat, Michi Wiancko, NIck Cave and Warren Ellis, Yves Jarvis, The Hold Steady, Shintaro Sakomoto, John Bellion, TC and the Seaside Assembly, brijean, Art Feynman, Yoko Ono and the Plastic Ono Band, Umbrella Academy, SNL, Wandavision, Youtube, Uncollected Stories of Alan Garganus
I like writing this thing in the Substack editor. It is manifestly better than writing it in the garbage Facebook text editor, since Facebook actively hates people who write long text posts. Also, on Substack you get links! Sign up sign up! I can’t, however, tag people on Facebook in this editor, so it’s gonna be a bit of a ringomorale sending this post everywhere. Alas. Modern life is hell.
In my YouTube sesh last night (Emma’s turn again with Jane, before I start a three-night run tonight), I caught up on all the new posts that Scott Beale aka Laughing Squid has been putting up on his YouTube. They’re such perfect little pieces of Internet history. Back when things were… simpler? I know that’s a bit of an oversimpliciation - one of the videos shows someone “roasting” an internet celeb that has since been called out for sexual misconduct, for example - but. Well, they took me back. Also Scott’s a great editor: every video is two minutes, tops. Been taking me back to a… let’s say more innocent (with commensurate connotations of cluelessness mixed in) time.
Also watched some videos about setting up the Wifi, so I think I got that sorted. One was by a very good Philippine tech reviewer I’ve not encountered before and one was by this really weird Korean dude in a huge mansion who is pretending to be a Godfatheresque gangster and has mini-plots and whatnot, but within the 30 minute video is a relatively solid review of a WiFi mesh system. It was real strange. I also watched a Shelby Church video where she just showed her house and it gained 45,000 views. I mean, it’s a nice house, but. Kinda a boring video. But I think she’s really successfully tapped into the Gen Z real-estate curiosity? And a teardown of a Japanese-built Mikita impact driver built in Japan for the home market and comparing it to their for-export models made in Japan by the always-surreally-weird AvE. Fascinating stuff.
And then Emma and I watched an episode of Umbrella Academy. I like that show but it’s also a poorly written mess. I don’t know whether to blame the source material or the conversion to television. It definitely has some built-in challenges — too many main characters to give them each enough breathing room — but it defaults too often to the most tedious, trite psychological interpretation of each character’s logical feelings. It’s frustrating. But it’s good enough we keep at it.
If you were reading this in email form you’d have links for all of those. ;)
While I was tightening two hundred bolts, Taylor Swift’s “All Too Well” came on in the ole headphones and it occurred to me that Red is one of the albums the evil Scooter Braun (was gonna say Scooter Libby - are there any non-evil Scooters?) owns (or partially owns, after his profit-taking to the music-financialization machine that is as fashionably popular ATM as NFTs). This means we are going to get Red re-recorded and my god I am so insanely excited for that. It’s gonna be brilliant. Will it still have Snow Patrol guy (whom I like to think of as Reindeer Section guy but that’s just me)? Will State of Grace still just be a list of tired metaphors but still somehow a great song? Who knows! It’s gonna rule and I cannot wait for it.
Enough rambling, Rick. Time to get the new Wifi set up. Let’s edit these videos and post the GARDENING VIDEO YOU ARE WAITING FOR. I’ll save my scintillating shredder review for later in the week. We all need more shredder content in our lives. Any lucky for you, my FOURTH SHREDDER just arrived. It’s in a box in the garage just waiting to be set up and put through its pine-needle-shredding paces. But i am saving that till next weekend and it is SO HARD. Gotta mete out the shredder content. Don’t want to blow your wad.
Have we talked about that metaphor? Blow/shoot your roll/wad/etc? How it should be a perfectly innocent metaphor about spending all your money at once but every single one of the iterations of it has ejaculatory connotations and there has to be one version that is still allowed in the corporate workplace but for the life of me I cannot figure out which one ISN’T dirty? Could use some help there.
Okay let’s do a mix. I swear I have lots of genre mixes almost done. I added a ton of songs yesterday. Have a good system going where I heart tracks in Spotify as I listen to stuff and then add them to their appropriate playlists when I get back to the computer. It’s decently friction-free. But really the only mixes that are fully fleshed-out are the “jut a mix” ones and the moody and quiet ones. But many more are SO CLOSE. And it’s a sunny Sunday so no moody and quiet mixes today. So we get just a mix.
I hope your Sunday is great. I hope you get some gardening done, or whatever it is you like to do instead of gardening. Balance that work-life balance, yo.