Good Morning. Hello. How are you? #1442
RIP turtle, Attic studio work, gardening, oscars, playgrounds, falling in love as often as possible, Tom & Jerry's shooting
Good morning. Hello. Hi. Happy Monday. Heck yeah. Who doesn’t love Monday. Jane and I were not too tired, which was nice. I’ve still been sleepy the last several days, while getting plenty of sleep. I was pretty nervous about today. But I woke up before my alarm.
Was having another “trip to LA” dream, only this time I was about to miss my flight to LA. Been like eight years since my jetsetting years, and I still have anxiety about missing flights. Good reminder that I really do need to go to LA and see my friends, though. I miss that place, weirdly.
A bouncer got shot at Tom & Jerry’s, my bar in New York. 3:30 AM. Kicked out some drunk guy, and the drunk guy shot him. Bouncer is dead, drunk guy is unapprehended. I cannot convey to you the number of times I have been at that bar at 3:30 AM, though less so on the weekends. I am sad. Bunch of friends are headed there Wednesday night to show their support. Wish I could go. Miss that place. More than I miss all of LA.
Listening to the new(ish) Lauren Mayberry album, maybe the fifth time, in a hope I can find myself to love it. Reader, I do not love it. Love Chvvrches, don’t love this solo album, but I do wish Lauren Mayberry solo success. There is one truly great song on this album, but I don’t remember which one it is. I’ll get to it.
Decently productive weekend, considering I accidentally ordered more 3/4” pressure-treated outdoor plywood (which I used in the Storage Facility Coming Soon billboard) instead of OSB subfloor, so I only had six pieces of flooring left to install. But I installed them all, good for me. Also figured out what that plumbing vent was for, in a part of the house that has absolutely no plumbing. It was for the ice maker in the fridge. Gonna need to re-route that a bit, it is sitting in the middle of the drum booth. I do not anticipate using the drum booth very often, I suspect I’ll mainly record drums in the big live room, but it is nice to have a drum booth option. So I demo’d 10 bays of subfloor and old insulation, cleaned em out, took photos and documented, added the Safe N Sound, and cut all the new subfloor and tacked each piece in with only a couple of screws, no Avantech seal, so I could pull ‘em back up and show the plumber the situation. Shouldn’t be hard, except it might mean another roof penetration, always a drag, and I don’t know exactly where the solar panels are, so bit of a crap shoot still. Unless a plumbing vent can angle back on itself? I doubt it. But who knows. Maybe.
HVAC guy came by and we discussed redoing some ducts, moving the intake register for the master primary bedroom (also in the way of my beloved drum booth), moving a fan for the primary bathroom, and whether or not I could get a new duct for the oven range hood. Sadly the answer is no, I cannot. I am going to have to go ductless. Because the hood is 800cfm and if you have over 400 cfm you have to introduce fresh air into your house because of negative pressure build up. This particularly aspect of building code is causing my wife a lot of grief she does not understand why the building code cares about negative pressure in a house. I theorize it has something to do with fire and doors. No idea. But Emma has been obsessing over it for days. We thought for a while we could get around this code by putting the duct in, and just buying a new, sub 400cfm range hood, thus avoiding this particularly pernicious code snippet, but no, because the duct run would be over 50 feet with three bends, too much for a <400cfm hood, which means you’d have to add a duct fan, which means now you’re over 400cfm. Boom.
There remains the option of paying the extra $2,500 ish for installing an integrated air intake into the HVAC unit, but I dunno, man. No one uses this stove. And I do kinda feel bad for someone in, like, ten years when they do a bunch of cooking and have to use a ductless range hood? But do I feel $2,500 bad? I don’t know.
I cannot convey to you how much brain power I have spent on this problem. I’m sorry you have to read so much about it.
Did some gardening, refreshed two and a half beds, planted the lettuce seeds, tended to my seedlings, which are sprouting. Lowe’s no longer sells my brand of dirt, which coincidentally also just performed amazingly in an Epic Gardening Youtube dirt shootout video, validating my belief that it was the best dirt. The same brand makes a new, different organic container mix, but one of the bags had a hole in it and I poked around inside and it was obviously not the same mix, no perlite. But I bought three nonetheless, and three of another brand which did have perlite, and I added them both to the Coast of Maine brand organic soil I bought from the local shop (this is a local shop for local people). It’s not the same, maaan. I miss my dirt. There are, apparently. 5 bags left at Walmart. Hopefully they get more.
What else. Since I was out of flooring, I joined Emma and Jane for a cookie delivery slash playdate with some friends of ours at the playground on Sunday, for, like, three hours? Three ours of just sitting in the sun, shootin’ the shit with adults, watching kids make themselves sick on the spinny thing. It was great. Another one of Jane’s classmates showed up, and we talked to her mom for a while too. Felt like a real member of a community.
Did not watch the Oscars yet, though my friend Cass tells us in our Slack group she got to sit in the front row the whole time because the celeb she was covering spent most of the show at the bar so that is exciting. Will probably have to watch that. Managed to see most of the best pic films before the ceremony, though I paused The Brutalist at the intermission a week ago and haven’t had the wherewithal to finish. Did see Anora though, it was great, even if that girl grated on me after a while and she probably shoulda seen the writing on the wall a bit earlier, but that’s love, man, that’s love.
Was thinking about how when I was younger I was falling love all the time and I co-opted this life mantra from my friend Lele: “Fall in love as often as possible.” It was so great and easy to fall in love all the time I didn’t understand why everyone wasn’t always falling in love. And then, oh, fifteen years later or so, this very morning, while unloading groceries from the frunk, I realized that a pre-requisite of falling love all the time is that you always needed to be meeting new people. That’s it. That’s the answer to the mystery. Most people are not meeting new people all the time. Bit mystery solved.
I would like a medal that I have not played the fruit came in three days. Emma is now addicted, though. It’s like strep, ripping through this family.
REM reformed during an REM tribute concert in Athens this week, and I think this is exactly why esteemed actor Michael Shannon has been touring America as REM for years now. He knew that if he just kept at it, eventually, inevitably, REM would all show up on stage. Man talk about massive indie cred, being at that show.
I would like to take a moment of silence for one of our large box turtles, who died a week or so ago, along the path between the houses. The Neurodivergent-Affirming Pediatric Speech Therapist told us last week she thought it was dead, but Emma was like “nah it’s just not moving cuz it’s cold” but then this weekend confirmed that the turtle is, in fact, dead. Very sad. We love our turtles.
I would also like to congratulate Jane who went two whole days without iPad: one day because she was incorrigible the night before, but the second day just because she was so busy hanging out at playgrounds and being outdoors all day. This did not, however, wear her out, and she literally stayed up longer than I did last night. Crazy. And only one more day of the foul-smelling antibiotics for strep, which she has mostly taken without (too much) complaining.
I will be so excited for that to be done.
Justa mix for you today. Love the new Bartees Strange, or at least more than half of it. Some old hits with Jackson Brown, Neil Diamond, This Mortal Coil, The Wendys, Ladytron because I keep dreaming about them. Enjoy the new Mike Posner. Just discovered this band Big Blood, spun out of an old Boston band Cerebrus Shoal that I dimly remember and saw once or twice. Very much like them. Oh yeah and I put this fantastic Reindeer Section song on here, man, I miss that band, their more popular band Snow Patrol does not not quite deliver the same twee Scottish pop fix.
Let’s have a nice week mmkay?
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Thanks for reading.
And hey! Maybe buy one of my books!
Good Morning, Hello, How Are You vol 1.