Good Morning. Hello. How are you? #1420
Weather turning, rough parenting weekend, attic work, giant yellow door stop, enjoying the band-aid organization, Razzlekhan update
Good morning. Hello. Monday. Gawd. This is going to be unpleasant. Due to assorted illnesses, weather and end-of-quarter, I haven’t had to wake up at 6:30 in over a week. But I did it this morning. And for the last half-hour of that sleep, I was all restless and paranoid I’d oversleep, so call it 6AM. This is bullshit. I demand to speak to management. Plus I gotta work. Plus I gotta go to a meeting out in the world today. Absolute bullshit. I just wanna go back to bed.
The good news is the weather has turned, doesn’t look like it’ll be below freezing at all this week, and will be over 60 on Thursday. Thank god. I was starting to lose it.
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We are listening to the “new” Aphex Twin, Music from the Merch Desk (2016-2023), which is a compilation of the music he would sell only at specific shows, which was a pretty great idea. The problem with this whole enterprise however is that buy 2016, the Aphex Twin was pretty boring live. Early shows had some glorious subversiveness to them, but the last time I saw him, mmm, shit actually I guess it was earlier than that, maybe 2014 or so, it was boring AF. So actually who knows. Maybe his live shows were awesome by 2016 again. The album is two hours long and goes “bleep” and “bloop” a lot.
Got a lot done in the attic this weekend. Redid the floor for 117 square feet of the attic. This means I tore up the old floor, pulled out the old insulation, put in the new insulation, and put down new floor. I am getting pretty quick at this. I mean don’t get me wrong, pulling up the old floor is still pretty laborious: pulling up all the old nails with a nail-puller sucks. But I am a lot quicker than I was two weeks ago when I started. I think we have about 350 square feet done now.
I also got a slick toolbelt and that helps immensely, not having to get up and go get a tool every time you need it, not leaving tools in your pants that then get taken home and forgotten. And I got a table to put all the power tools on near my workspace so I’m not traversing the attic every time I need a Sawzall or something. Little productivity improvements.
Started dealing with the drier duct, which right now just pops right into the center of the room. Gonna run it in a joist over to the side, and it’ll come out to the outside inside the (new) bathroom. Also ran into a bit of a problem with a romex wire I needed to place into joist notches, but it was not running in an outer third of a joist, so I had to sort-of shimmy it over to the correct spot, NBD, I am getting good at this.
Oh and I demolished two wall frames the old owner had put up in.. I dunno, a 1% effort to finish the place? Very weird. Anyway, they’re gone now and you can sort of start to get an idea of how big the place is gonna be. Shit I shoulda taken a picture of that for you sorry.
My home-made jig for cutting pieces of plywood in half was about 2 degrees out of level and I was so ripshit. I measured the thing with a level! Then I realized I had used the garage floor as my floor to make things level, and the garage floor, like all garage floors, is not level, it is sloped to drain. Stupid. So I cut about 10 piece of plywood in not-quite-half, slightly out of alignment by about a half inch. The floor was never gonna be sealed perfectly tight with every tongue in every groove anyway. Shen you order plywood 5 sheets at a time, they inevitably mess up the tongues and grooves and the only way to really make this work is to order giant pallets of sheets at a time, which is not feasible in my situation. Also the joists are not a perfect sea on 16-on-center lines, the house is more like several small, boxed rooms joined together. Just yesterday as I was finishing up, I encountered an 18” joist bay not weird at all nope. The builder papered over his sins, but I am exposing them all. It is not pretty.
Emma, Jane and Janet came up for a tour and overview of the work this weekend, that was nice. My wife has a good design eye, and there are several design contraints that we will need to work through. You know, in the future. When the floor is done. In, like, a year. But I wanted to get her thinking about it. She already got me questioning a few of my decisions. Which is sometimes frustrating, but of course always leads to a better product. It’s good to be able to defend your decisions in the face of skepticism.
Let me tell you about a few small domestic things that are bringing me happiness this week:
My giant yellow rubber doorstop. I have this gate at Chore House that I have been using a lot lately because its how you go from the driveway to the garage when you don’t want to open the big garage doors and let all the heat out. But the stupid gate is so brokedown — it rubs against the concrete, it swings shut of its own accord. I had a little clear rubber doorstop keeping it open but it kept getting lost. Jane would kick it or something and it would disappear into a sea of leaves or mulch and be unfindable for a week and I would be carrying some giant pile of supplies and be stuck at the gate and it drove me crazy.
So, yeah, $10 but I obtained this giant yellow rubber doorstop and it is marvelous and boy you’re not gonna lose this and it makes me very happy.
Imagine if Donald Trump or Elon Musk could find happiness in such simple pleasures.
And then shoutout to my band-aid organization. Longtime readers will remember this one, but it really was an amazing brainstorm. Blows the latest AI model out of the water for useful innovation.
This weekend Emma needed two band-aids and I needed two band-aids and so I got to use my band-aid station four times and my god, just so great. Do you know how much annoyance four separate trips to the big messy bin of band-aids would have caused me last year? Like six ounces of annoyance, at least. But this year? Joy! Band-aids mean joy!
Marie Kondo eat your heart out.
Finally, I owe you guys a Razzlekhan update, remember Razzlekhan? She and her husband perpetuated the largest theft ever in the history of mankind (aside from, you know, capitalism). She went to jail for a bit, but mainly he took the fall. She is out on bail, wearing an ankle monitor. And she is back to her kooky insanity, making amazingly bad-but-great music videos like “Diplomat Pu$$y” and “Razzlekhan vs the United States.” She keeps saying “The Netflix Documentary didn’t tell the truth you’ll get the real truth here” but then she never tells you the real truth. She has a lot more views on her videos now than she did before the hest — like 2-3k vs 2-3 hundred before. But nothing, like, viral. She seemed to have a bit of success on Tiktok talking about the logistics of ankle monitors, but i guess that’s dead now (how dead is TikTok at the moment anyway? I know you still can’t get it in the app store, but the servers are working, right? You can still use it, right? Weird how that issue just disappeared. And weird how no one is sending around any TikTok links of late).
Anyway, it brings me joy she is back. I also have MANY questions about her artistic collaborators. And how she is paying rent. And what she’s got against vocal pre-amps and compressors, even fake ones in her DAW.
Jane was rough this weekend, real pain last night, I had to do the against-her-will toothbrushing thing I still have to do once every couple months when she gets too insanely belligerent and recalcitrant. She spit on me when I was done. Of course she doesn’t know the deeper meanings of such an action, and it just made sense since her mouth was full of toothpaste, but that was fun. And earlier in the day I gave her a choice between two routes home in the car, she said “you choose,” I proceeded to choose, and then within a millisecond she was full-on screaming that we should have gone the other day, and would not under any circumstances, even hours after the fact, acknowledge that she had any hand in that decision. It was… a lot. Oh there was a whole handwashing incident too. She touched poop on the playground — I am gonna give her the benefit of the doubt and assume she was trying to move it out of their play area — and absolutely refused to wash her hands afterwards. So, yeah, two forced hygiene operations this weekend. Super great, feel like a top-notch parent here.
But, you know. You should still buy her Girl Scout cookies, so I am not the only one who, in a single sitting, eats half a box of Toast Yays, that aren’t even the best Girl Scout cookies.
Thank you in advance.
Here is a cute picture of her from our breakfast yesterday.
Here. Have a psych playlist today. Man this was a long time in the making, which is weird because I feel like I listen to a lot of psych? Who knows. Anyway I don’t remember most of these songs cuz they were from so long ago, except for the Speaker Bite Me one which, gonna be honest, not the strongest track in this bunch, which would probabaly have to be the Party Dozen or Tarentel tracks, not that I remember. Huh maybe I should listen to this playlist today.
Okay love you bye.
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Good Morning, Hello, How Are You vol 1.