Good Morning. Hello. How are you? #1433
Lovely domesticity: making bagels, donating clothes, starting seeds, plotting duct paths and bathroom layouts
Good morning. Hello, there. Tuesday. Tuesday after a four-day weekend for me. Not psyched about being back to work. Jane, who loves school, was not psyched about going back to school. She was tired. She stayed up till 9PM playing theramin. Whaddyagunnado.
Attention Facebook readers: GMHHAY is leaving Facebook, migrating to Slack. This will be over a few months, and we’ll be completely off by March. I love you all. Please come join us in Slack. The invite link is in the comments below. If you’re an email reader, reply to this email and I’ll get you the link.
Ten more days, ten more days.
This week’s GMHHAY schedule, heads up: Today we will review the weekend and domestic matters. Tomorrow we will turn to SNL 50 and a few other media items. Thursday I will talk about politics, so be sure and skip that edition. Friday we will have, well, I don’t know yet, though Friday I do plan on telling you about my recent strongly worded letter to Nick Cave, so I’m sure you’ll not want to miss that.
We are listening to The Cure’s Songs of a Live World, new LP of about one-third of the live performance at the Troxy that so captivated the world a few months back. It is very good. I sure do like the Cure. A+ no complaints. Except it’s on black vinyl so I cannot put a photo of it into GMHHAY for you, alas.
All right! The weekend! Domesticity! As you will recall, I had Friday off and as you will recall, Emma has been in Boston since Saturday. Jane and I have been chilling, mostly getting along great, except at bedtimes where she doesn’t want to let me put her vision-saving, from-the-future eyedrops in her eyes, which stresses me out to no end. Actually, I did succeed all but one night, but my god, it was like pulling teeth.
Other than that, though, she’s been swell, my little buddy. We made bagels, we went to Walmart and Lowe’s Hardware and Lowe’s Foods and Lowe’s Foods again and the dry cleaner and — oh yeah I gotta pick up my drycleaning today. And we cleaned out my closet and donated about 50 dress shirts and 10 Armani suits that don’t fit me anymore and donated them to the Chatham PTA thrift store. Looootta Hugo Boss shirts, which I forgot are pretty good. Or were, ten years ago. Maybe I’ll buy a new one. I am down to one suit, one tux and tux shirt, and maybe four dress shirts. It is very freeing. My closet has a lot of space. Also donated about 10 pairs of shoes, including my 1991 vintage Chucks which I now regret already. But the rest of em? Good riddance. I kept a few pais: The Adbusters shoes that Benjamin gave me, and the Misfits flip-flops that I got from Garrett at the dawn of Uber. Billionaire flip flops. But the rest? Vamoose.
Walmart twice this weekend, both times a bit later than usual, so during the morning reduced distractions hours, but not right as they started, later into them, and on the weekend, so the place was, very interestingly, crowded during the reduced stimulus hours, which was very interesting. Lots of people milling about, shopping in silence. A glimpse into a different world, quite nice.
Walmart had plenty of non-organic eggs. Our two trips to Lowe’s Foods checked out the eggs: One had no Vital Farms, the other had plenty. I currently have 39 Vital Farms organic eggs in the fridge. I plan on using them to pay off our home loan.
We got breakfast at the local cafe on Sunday and they had an egg surcharge. We are so back.
Jane and I made bagels this weekend. She likes the part where she measures out the flour and puts in in the bowl. She likes using the mixer. She does not like waiting for proves, boy she does not like that one bit. Did not like the part where I rolled and shaped the bagels, but once they turn bagel-shaped, she got excited again. And she loves the boiling and the baking. They came out good! I put a bit too much vital wheat gluten in them which made it a little hard for some of them to stay closed (I use the long-string-of-bagel-wrapped-around-your-hand method, not the put-a-whole-in-a-patty method). But the extra gluten made them extra chewy and delicious, and we have been enjoying them for breakfast this week, it is just great. Thank you to my wife for recommending this pair bonding activity.
I also did manage to get some chore house work done. I got all my seedlings started, which is very exciting. They are cookin’ in the greenhouse, which I also cleaned up, got rid of most of the winter failed greenery. BUT so much from winter succeeded! I have ten amazing celery stalks! Ten amazing big bushels of broccoli! A ton of delicious carrots! But of lettuce and micro greens. Jane and I had a very good garden salad made primarily out of garden veggies and it was so delicious. Even if Jane just ate the tomatoes, which were store bought, alas (I have not yet mastered getting my tomato vines to make many tomatoes in the greenhouse over winter, because I am not skilled, confident, or even capable of pollinating them when the bugs don’t do it for me).
Also got some attic done, some of the subfloor in the studio. Only did about 80 square feet, but it is a difficult 80! I started in the back northeast corner where the bathroom is gonna go, so this is a whole thing, gotta figure out where the drain pipe is going to go. So I had to drill a hole in the ceiling on the main floor where it can go, then find the whole. Also there is a load-bearing all that needs to be moved, and a new floor put under the new wall, so it’s the slow process of remove old floor, build new floor, build new wall, remove old wall, rinse, repeat.
But the big challenge with that area is I need to decide whether or not the bathroom is within the soundproofed envelope. This is an extraordinarily difficult decision. If it’s not in the envelope, the bathroom needs two (very expensive) soundproof doors. If it is in the envelope, I gotta double-wall behind it, and I need to figure out how to keep sound from literally going down the toilet. Not easy! I had an idea I could put it in the envelope but enter through the vocal booth, which also needs two very expensive soundproof doors, but at least if you entered that way I wouldn’t have to buy two more doors. We are talking, like, $1k+ a door here, so it matters. But do I want to spend my life going to the bathroom by walking through a vocal booth? Seems weird.
So I got that part sort of sorted, at least as much as I need to do now, and kept going. Did four quick floor panels then got to the next miserable situation, an oven range hood vent duct that, as of this moment, goes right, straight up through the middle of the room. This will not do. I have been aware of this for a while. I had originally planned to just switch to a ductless range hood, since no one ever actually cooks in this kitchen. But everyone convinced me this was bad and that someday someone else would own the house and they would want some solid ductwork. So then I figured fine, i’ll run the duct all the way to the side of the house in the floor joists, and out the wall.
That was my plan going into yesterday. But then I pulled up the old floorboards, and look at this shit.
There is literally nowhere that duct can go. I was gonna go left in this photo, but floor joists. Can’t go down because those joist bays end in a steel beam in the middle of the attic. Can’t go up in this photo because I’d need to drill a hole. The floor joists are only 10” not twelve, which is shocking. If they were 12”, a four-inch hole or notch in them would be up to code and I could get the duct to the bay above, where the HVAC ducts run to the left all the way to the wall, but I don’t think that is feasible.
So this leaves heading off to the right. I think, maybe, I can possibly:
Resize the duct from 6” round to 6”x4” rectangular
See that weird “joist” that is only about 20 inches long that runs up and down in the picture above? I think I can cut the bottom six inches off of it and then lap and extend the beam hittig it in the middle, on the right, and extend it to the joist to the left of the vent and use a joist hanger.
Then I think the duct can turn 90” right into that very narrow (four inches or so) joist bay that runs 12 feet to the right and runs into a steel I-Beam
But the I-beam ends right there, and I think I could then change to a serpentine duct and get around the end of the I-Beam and continue in the (now wider) bay all the way to the south side of the house, turn up at a 90, and go out the roof behind the knee wall
BUT that would be three 90-degree bends, and in an oven duct you’re only supposed to go 20 feet or so once you have three bends. Never mind the duct resize or the serpentine portion. I think the resize wouldn’t be too bad, since the area only goes from 28”sq to 24”sq, so it shouldn’t be too noisy, but who knows.
And of course I am not 100% sure that pointless-looking 20” floor joist is actually pointless. So I’d probably have to get a structural engineer to sign off on it.
Which makes this stupid oven duct so fucking expensive and makes me want to just go back to ductless.
This literally kept me up last night, tossing and turning, dreaming of range hood duct routing and I did not like it one bit.
As an aside, one thing that sucks about the internet now is that for every building code question you ask it, you get an AI-generated response, and they are often — most of the time! — incorrect. So, you know, the internet is just giving all home-improvement buffs incorrect information about building construction safety and it is 100% going to kill someone eventually. Super awesome.
It is fucking hilarious how Silicon Valley bros rant about the media being broken while they break the internet and make it even more dishonest and even more useless than the “lamestream media.” Super cool. At least the Times never killed anyone by saying it was ok to use duct tape on oven vents.
Also had a dream where a very violent, very capable group of spies were after me and my friends because we had some zip jump drive that they wanted. Man, those guys killed a lot of cops. We should not have gone to the cops.
Then the spies turned into a giant man-eating ferret, which tormented that mall on Market Street in SF that had a Nordstroms in it and was upscale but also filled with homeless people. Killed a karen, ate her whole by the escalators. Giant ferret. Terrifying.
Hit the recycling center twice this weekend. Nothing special to report there, really. I will be going again today. Just thought you needed to know. I shudder to think how I’d do this attic job if the collection center still didn’t take construction waste, as was the case for eight of the ten years I’ve lived here. Really lucked out.
Also I gave Jane a bath, on Sunday, after I did attic work and she had a hard day of theramin and ipad. She agreed to let me give her a bath without complaining, which is special because the girl loves baths but loves complaining about them these days. But all she said was, and I quote:
“We can shower. The thing that sets me off though is your penis. Your silly silly penis.”
So while she was in the bath, and I was in the shower, I had to stay with my back turned until the glass fogged. Well all right then.
I asked her how she knew my penis was silly compared to other penises and asked her if she’d seen any other. No, she has not. Whew. Well, tell me if anyone tries to show one to you because that is not okay.
She just thought penises in general seemed silly. I mean, where is the lie? But did remind her that without penises, no babies. So then she ran around taking about how without penises there would be no people.
Or animals, I reminded her. Or animals.
Got a shoegaze playlist for you today. All new stuff. Love the new Andy Bell, both new singles. Not this one but the other one? 100% Stone Roses first album resurrected, so good. I guess this Drop Nineteens isn’t technically new but we have talked about that.
—
Thanks for reading.
And hey! Maybe buy one of my books!
Good Morning, Hello, How Are You vol 1.