Good Morning. Hello. How are you? #1388
An old friend SV pilled, gardening and carpentry and networking chores, Thanksgiving prep, interest rates are never going down, huh.
Hello hello hello looks like I’m writing today after all. Good morning. Hello. How are you? All well? Nice weekend? I hope so. Mine was swell, thanks for asking. Looks like I am writing a GMHHAY today after all. Why not. I miss my computer after a few days, I’m not gonna lie. Plus I wanted to do a little work, ha, god, I am so bad vacations. I just stress the whole time about how much time I have left and whether I’ve gotten everything done. Neurotic. Woo.
Seem to be battling some sort of fatigue, been excessively tired these last few days, despite no sleep and no drinking but hey whatever that’s life. Got a lot done anyway, cuz I am a badass.
Thrilled to see most of you store your cans upright in the fridge and not one person wrote in claiming to use the weird dispensor functionality built in to 12-pack cans. Thank god. You guys are my people.
We are listening to the new Kim Deal this morning, Nobody Loves You More. It is exceedingly uncharacteristic of her in its instrumentation, but you can hear her style in its simple-but-catchy grooves and the lyrics. I like it. It is growing on me by the song. we are on track three now.
Bit late to GMHHAY today because I decided to do all my other morning internet tabs and tasks first, because it’s vacation, maaan, there are no rules. Did my countries flashcard games, got everything right on all continents, including First People’s reservations and North American Tribal regions, so go ahead and top that. Check revenue and bank balances at work, checked the Plex server - still all messed up but I think I am making some progress. Checked Discogs, there was an original pressing of the Wings of Desire soundtrack for sale, reasonably priced, in America, so had to pick that up, god, someone free me of this record collection tyranny. Checked the solar output on both houses, our stonks, my place in line for a Decware SE84UFO, will be about two years I don’t know why I check this with any regularity. Checked Emma’s Google photos for new pics of Jane to archive. Did my Quicken transactions. C
Checked the Unifi network, did you know you can make apps out of webpages with Safari on the Mac and they are so good? I used to obsess about this: I don’t want a web app for Gmail or Monday, I want an actual app. Well Safari now has this built in. It is so good. You just go to the little share box, top right, and select “share to dock” and it makes an actual app out of the webpage: app icon in your Applications folder and everything. It is amazing.
Just back from dropping off Jane at the school — she has school today and tomorrow but not Wednesday which seems reasonable given that half of America is traveling but also a giant pain for yours truly but I will live. After dropping her off I did the thanksgiving grocery shopping: I buy fresh turkeys so I don’t have to do all that ringomorale about how long you need to thaw. Expensive indulgence but, you know, I cook meat like twice a year might as well indulge. The organic butter situation in NE Chatham County, NC is bullshit, let me tell you. Harris Teeter has some, but they only sell salted, those heathens. Butter is so insanely expensive. Walmart organic butter? seven something a pound. Lordy.
I have been sort of half-heartedly waiting for the interest rates to drop so I can do some mortgage shit and it occurred to me this morning that there’s now a good chance interest rates are never going down. I mean, sure, these tariffs may or may not impact inflation — people overstate that case, Biden kept all of Trump’s old tariffs, etc. etc. But I see literally nothing in all of his started policies to get inflation down, and without a drop in inflation, Jerome ain’t dropping rates, and Jerome ain’t leaving for two more years and has said he intends to stay his whole term, and then you have midterms, and in any case, that’s two years and it will be hard for Trump to actually force his replacement nominee to actually drop rates. And if they succeed at all at any of these mass deportations, prices go up. If they succeed at all in their tax cuts, that’s like a stimulus, prices go up, or at least not down. Dude says he wants interest rates to go down but aside from bullying, I can’t think of a single proposal of his that would have that effect. So I think we’re stuck with this for a while. Which is a bummer. I miss cheap money let me borrow some money at like 1% interest please k thanks.
Replaced this Ring doorbell at Chore House as part of my new network process, hate Amazon, hate cloud storage of video from my home, using Unifi now. No real problems, but that whole wall by the door is pretty beat-up from several doorbell/keypad experiments through the years. Need to figure out a way to get a sample of the house color to take with me to the Sherwin Williams store. Interesting challenge. Do I saw a small piece of the house off somewhere you can’t see it?
Besides the doorbell I got some progress done on the miter saw stand — hope to have that done, or at least functional, before thanksgiving. All the bases are built, 4 out of 5 of the table-tops are cut to shape, will finish the last one today. In my head, I desprately want the miter saw stand done this vacation so I can turn to the studio construction we are almost there.
Except also today is the day the fiber company is making my fiber optic cable, six strand, outdoor rated, LC-terminated, for me to run between the two houses, and that is going to be a whole thing too. I doubt I can get BOTH of these large projects done this weekend but it would be so amazing if I could, boy, I would be so happy. But i won’t. But I sure wish I could.
Also bought a bunch of Cat 6e outdoor cable to run in tandem with the fiber, to pop out of the conduits every once in a while so I can run it up a tree and stick an outdoor Unifi hotspot, so we can cover the whole property with internet that is going to be just swell, just swell, let me tell you.
Been down in the low 30’s at night this week and oh my god, can I say I absolutely nailed it with the pump house winterization? Thing hasn’t gotten below 50 all week. Amazing. Greenhouse is a lot harder to keep warm, I mean, look, I know greenhouses don’t really hold heat at night too well, but I was hoping that all the black stone and black raised beds, and all the water in jugs and all that would keep it warmer than it turns out they do. So I have to augment with space heaters, which is a bummer, but they are working. So far.
Oh and I finished the black bin organization, getting rid of all of my decaying Sterilite bins, god, plastic is the fucking worst, I hate it so much, I wish there was some other, any other, sturdy, lightweight material for bins. Wood is too heavy, I am too old for that shit, Cardboard rots. It sucks. Sucks. Anyway, here is a picture of a disgusting amount of plastic, I am the fucking worst:
Old friend of mine, stuck in Silicon Valley, lost to the world, lost to actual common sense, posting on Threads about how he has done a “deep dive” into “elite” schools and, you know it’s gonna be a problem right off the bat, this dude’s weird-ass focus on “elite” as a word that means something. And he goes off about how the real problem is they got woke and care too much about, um, let me see if I can get this right, “diverse viewpoints instead of free speech,” which, of course, is hilariously contradictory. Its so sad. Dude made some money off of Facebook — nothing plutocratic, not materially more than I made in my sinful tech days, but dude thinks he’s some sort of Public Intellectual now and, more sadly, just so sadly, he thinks he is “one of them.” Dude actually thinks his peers are the billionaires who would quite literally feed him to wolves and write a think piece on Substack about why it was ethical to do so. Nothing particularly new or different about this guy, but a product of my exact time in NYC tech and SV, he was bicoastal same years as I was, straddled both tech scenes, etc. So, you know, there but the grace of god go I, or, actually, there but a lick of fucking common sense go I. It is truly amazing to see someone do a “deep dive” analyzing the “problems” with some institution while not realizing how utterly fucked are the institutions to which they are beholden.
Hrm we need one more picture here. Pallette cleanser from the taint of Silicon Valley.
Jane, Jane, Jane, let’s see. She is very excited about thanksgiving. “I think Thanksgiving is going to be my favorite day in November,” she told me this morning. She has been a bit of a pill of late, it’s a little hard going. We are trying to get her to understand kindness but, man, she’s definitely not one of those kids who is just an angel out of the box. She does have empathy, but only if you are showing visible sadness, like crying. She doesn’t process the golden rule or what other people are thinking. But, really, worse than that is when she rebels she just goes silent, so you can’t have a discussion and parent about why she’s not, like, brushing her teeth or something. Just completely ignores you, doesn’t explain herself at all, engineered to frustrate. And then when she decides to try and say hurtful stuff to you about you being the worst parent or something. That is always rough. Emma got through to her, though, asked her if she really thought about what it would be like if Mommy were dead and it all clicked and she started sobbing and, Emma said, she gave her first genuine apology ever, distinct from “sorry” as a magic word to get what you want. I wish I could have seen it. I have, thus far, been unable to replicate it. Alas.
She went to a birthday party at a ceramics place called, brilliantly, Glazed Expectations. I said it shoulda been called Glazed and Confused. She took a cat ceramic and painted it like our tabby Keely, and it is so cute. They have summer camps. She is pumped to do some actual glazing and ceramics. Gonna be great. Some day. When summer comes and I don’t have to get up at 6AM.
All right well I am overly-relying on the new Red Hot compilation, TRANSA, but I have a covers playlist for you today. My god, there are some amazing covers on here: Sharon Van Etten doing Sinead, Rachika Nayer, Julianna Barwick and Cassandra Croft doing the first truly original cover of Song to the Siren since This Mortal Coil, and Julian Baker et al doing a super solid Belle & Sebastian cover. This week in my car this C Duncan Cocteau Twins cover came on: brave and inspired, covering Cocteau Twins, almost never works but it worked here. M Ward doing one of my favorite 80’s hits, Godley and Creme’s “Cry,” and BRMC covering his dad, which always chokes me up, every time I hear it.
Will I write tomorrow? No idea! Oh! The cliffhanger! The excitement. ‘Tis too much, tis too much.
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Thanks for reading.
And hey! Maybe buy one of my books!
Good Morning, Hello, How Are You vol 1.
Cry … an all time favorite. My pal went to M Ward at Cafe Carlyle on Friday, need to see if this was in the setlist