Good Morning. Hello. How are you? #1447
Gardening, attic work, last-minute work trip, teenage film canon, taking on big cookie, projects and satisfaction
Hello, good morning. Good day. Stupid daylight savings time. I don’t particularly care whether they pick standard or DST, but I would like this to stop, please. It’s one thing to have it be pitch black still when you wake up at 6:30, but that’s tolerable, because eventually it will get better. But to have the daylight, then have it taken away? Yeah, fuck that.
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We are listening this morning to Cindy Lee’s 2024 masterpiece Diamond Jubilee, out now on vinyl. Took months after the release of the record for it to get a vinyl release, six months from placing the order to receiving it, two weeks from shipping to arrival at my house, but it is here now and it is glorious. Nice gold vinyl, too. Here I will take a picture of it for you.
Hey lemme ask you something: Imagine you are an eighteen year-old film nerd. And you just got a new significant other who doesn’t know much about film and this is your moment, they want you to teach them all about film. You are eighteen. It is 2025. What are the “must-see” films for this generation? Where do you start? Do teenagers still make other teenagers watch Monty Python? No, right? Star Wars? Feels like maybe a no? Godfather? I am curious!
So I gotta go to New York. In, like, two hours. I will be there through Wednesday. Now, I am all doe-eyed and optimistic and I would love to tell you that I will keep writing GMHHAY while I’m on a two-day work retreat, but if I am being honest with myself, that is a crap shoot at best. So if I disappear for two days, don’t freak out, man. Don’t freak out.
Good weekend, mostly, aside from being plagued with exhaustion. Do I have strep again? I do not have mono. My latest is that I have Epstein Barr. That’s what Stevie Nicks had at the height of Fleetwood Mac fame, right? Man. That must have been a trip. I am kidding, I don’t think I have Epstein Barr but god, I am sick of being tired. I got some energy for, mmm, two three days after the antibiotics kicked in from the strep, but then… poof. Exhaustion again. I could go back to sleep right now, that would rule.
It does not help matters that I am getting up at 6:30, of course. I plan on spending a good chunk of this trip to New York sleeping.
I got some gardening done, well, mostly bed building, adding new soil into the Birdie’s Beds, refreshing the nutrients with new soil and compost and amendments. I have four of the 13 beds rebuilt. Four of them have some overwinter crops in them still, so I can’t touch those, so six more to go. I try to do one or two beds a weekend. That part of the weekend was lovely, actually. Jane helped for a little bit, which is always the best, so cute, but also you can’t get much done, but you love it and it’s like parenting in movies or something. But then she got bored and got out her sidewalk chalk and drew pictures of rainbows and kittens while I gardened and that is also great.
Rest of my free time this weekend was spent in the attic, working on the studio. Got four pieces of subfloor done, which, let me remind you, involves pulling up the old subfloor, pulling all the nails, cleaning out the bays, adding new insulation, putting new Avantech down, the new subfloor, then screwing it in. It is so laborious.
BUT I did do one piece of floor in an area of the attic that currently has no subfloor, just open rafters and oh my god it was so much quicker. It was a glimpse into the idea that maybe not every single task of building this studio will be slow and laborious. Maybe one or two things will go quick.
While working in the attic, just as I was getting started Saturday, I got a giant sliver. About a half an inch long, right into the finger below the finger nail. I got this sliver in the two minutes of working I always do before I remembered to put my gloves on, which I am really good at wearing, honest. This sliver sucked. I got about half of it out pretty easy with tweezers, but it broke, and the other half remained lodged within my nail. So I had to get an X-ACTO knife and these amazing super thin tweezers Emma had, and cut my nail open about a quarter of an inch deep, carving out a pie-shaped wedge from it, as it bled everywhere, super fun. Eventually I got it all out. It was… not pleasant.
Jane and I did our weekly Daddy-Jane breakfasts and on Saturday we ran into one of Jane’s friends, a girl we met ages ago at a breakfast. And they were so happy to see each other. Then another friend of that girl’s coincidentally arrived, with her dad. And then another dad arrived and he had three girls, who all looked the same age as Jane and her friends, so then there were six girls at this restaurant, all about the same age, and let me tell you it was chaos. Also I wonder about that fourth dad did he have… triplets? Are those a thing that happen in the real world? That dude must be tired.
Jane took a sewing class in downtown Pittsboro and she sewed an apron and Emma and I met her after class and went to the cute touristy-but-not-open-on-sundays Soda Shoppe, right in the cute, touristy downtown of Pittsboro. Then we wandered around for a bit looking at all the cute, touristy stores. Then we went to a new playground and the new corporate housing development that will soon house a Disney neighborhood. I like sitting at playgrounds with my wife. We can have nice conversations with each other while our kid runs around. You barely have to watch her.
It was windy, and I kinda wanted to sit in the car. We debated it, it would probably be fine, but of course if something happened, and some other parent saw it first (the playground was one of those ill-designed, non-panopticon ones where you can’t sit in one place and watch the whole thing) and needed to get you, they wouldn’t know where to look. We decided it would probably be bad parenting. Only a minute later we realized the parent of the girl Jane was playing with was sitting in her car. Maybe it’s fine? I dunno, man. The Judgement of Parisents. Hrm that joke may not land.
Been working on a project I can’t really talk about yet, but I did write a great passage in my personal journal about projects and satisfaction that seemed mildly sad but also dead-on accurate, and I figured I’d share it with you. The personal journal these days is mostly teeth-pulling because I just say the same things over and over. But this was a nice little gem:
That whole project is weird I am very proud of it and it is funny and great and I'm pleased but... does any of it cause or give me any pleasure? Pleasure is so fleeting. You can do the greatest thing in the world and it will only make you happy for a few seconds once in a while. Be cool to have some minstrel walking behind you all the time reminding you of awesome things you did, forgotten things, so you can have a little laugh about them. “Hey remember that time you flushed your last dollar down the drain at that bar?” “Oh yeah. heh heh. That was pretty great.” “Hey remember that time you saved that girl’s life?” “Oh yeah, heh heh. That was pretty great.”
I was walking into the grocery store yesterday and there was a girl scout troop and they were selling cookies and they had Carmel Delites in stock. Now, this is deeply problematic for several reasons: 1) We were told explicitly that Girls couldn’t sell cookies in front of that chain of stores but here are girls selling cookies, 2) I couldn’t get any more Carmel Delites for our troop, so wtf? I am going to have to sue the Girl Scouts.
Take on “Big Cookie.” This is going to be the thing in my life from here on out.
I don’t have a playlist ready today and I gotta go to the airport soon(ish) so I am just gonna gave you the Cindy Lee album today you should listen to it it is great:
Byeeeeee.
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Thanks for reading.
And hey! Maybe buy one of my books!
Good Morning, Hello, How Are You vol 1.