Good Morning. Hello. How are you? #1495
Gardening with Jane, studio work, two automotive complaints, perhaps regional.
Good morning good morning boy I do not want to do this today.
We are listening to Water Damage, an Austin-based drone supergroup featuring the indomitable Thor Harris on drums. Thor also has another new album out this week under the Thor Harris and Friends moniker. We are going to listen to that next. Thor quit the Swans, I think? I think he’s not on this impending last Swans tour? One more tour may as well finish up the run. But what do I know.
I am tired.
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Excellent weekend, though. A+ no complaints. Just lovely all around. Lovely weather, just enough rain to keep the garden happy. I finished up Emma’s new workbench and we brought it back over from Chore House and Emma spent the weekend in her happy place organizing things.
Lovely Jane times, we did our usual breakfasts and on Saturday she did a woodworking project in my workshop until she got frustrated with it. Then she helped me shred cardboard, which is something she used to a lot of when she was younger, but it’s been ages and it was so fun. I would cut the boxes into little rectangles, remove all the tape and labels, and she would feed them into the shredder.
Then she helped me garden which was the absolute best, oh my god, just so cute. She got really into it and we planted a bunch of pepper plants, and basil plants, and some watermelon plants (into the ground, we’ll see how well that works). She would dig the holes and learned how to pop the seedlings out of the tray by sticking your finger in the hole in the bottom and tipping the seedling into your hand, she loved that. Then putting the dirt all around the plant and then doing the two-hand press down to get it all firmed up. Then the mulching, which she loved, and was a nice full-circle thing, you know, after having made the mulch in the cardboard shredder.
(Yes, I use brown, un-coated cardboard as mulch. I remove all the tape and stickers. I have been doing this for years. Is it killing us? Slowly? Maybe. People say it’s fine, but what do people know. I should ask RFK Jr. then do the opposite.)
But the cutest part was her little labels omg just the cutest.
Saturday evening we did BBQ and ice cream at the new, excellently named Chapel Chill gotta love that place. Our third time there, every time it is more crowded. Is that growing awareness of a hot new ice cream joint, or is it the weather? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Also we found a new ice cream joint Sunday night, might have to try that soon.
Sunday Jane and I did breakfast then took her to the playground to meet her friends. Been ages because of rain… three weeks?
Emma took over and I headed back to Chore House to do more work on the studio. Between Saturday afternoon and Sunday I got maybe nine hours of work done? And I got a lot done! I got all the construction debris removed and taken to the collection center. I moved all the furniture out of the way on the floor so I could replace that part of the floor. And I got about 100 square feet of floor done — old floor pulled up and demo’d, old fiberglass insulation removed, cleaned up, the joists scraped down and all the construction adhesive removed with my Corbyn Dallas Multitool, vacuumed out, then new Rockwool Safe n Sound put in, then new joist adhesive, then new OSB, screwed in.
(I did not take any pictures of this by the way. I remembered once I was downstairs, just after having done six treks upstairs to bring down my big construction tubs of debris and I didn’t feel like going up a seventh time).
I did my first row of new flooring from one side of the house to the other. I did a super-complicated piece inside the eaves where I had to cut around an HVAC duct. For good measure, I got one piece done on the next row. I was very well-chuffed.
Which was good since on Sunday I had the fear, man. I felt a little nauseous, so did Emma, so maybe it was something we ate, but really it just manifested in political anxiety and sadness. I am usually pretty good at avoiding that on Sundays through manual labor, but not this week. Whole time I was doing the attic work, I had the fear.
Today I have two automobile-related complaints for your consideration. They are perhaps regional. But I suspect you have felt them at one time or another:
1) Okay not a complaint but more of a WTF. WTF is up with people putting “student driver” stickers on their cars when they are obviously not student drivers. I saw a middle-aged woman driving one today that said NEW DRIVER. There are two logical explanations for this: that someone else that drives that car is a student driver, and that it works to help keep people from tailgating. I don’t believe either one of them. I certainly don’t believe the latter because no one cares, not their problem, and I have observed the world. I do not understand this phenomenon.
2) If I were ever to run for president, my platform would include (along with, you know, no fascism and genocide) a new law that makes it so either everyone can tint their front windows or no one can. The current law is bullshit. In North Carolina, you cannot have front-tinted windows. Unless you get a medical note. But I swear to god, like 25% of the cars have illegal front-tinting. This is a real Seinfeld-with-the-key-duplicating thing, old Gen X reference but that’s okay you guys are old too. Kids can’t handle the GMHHAY. These people have tinted windows either because they know an inspection station that will overlook it, or because they know a doctor that will give them a fake note. I suppose it is conceivable some of them forge a note, because it is not clear to me if you need to present the note only to the inspection station, or to the state. The former seems not that scary in terms of forgery. Anyway, it is insanely widespread, and I am bitter about it because I am a law-abiding citizen. Bullshit. Everyone gets tint or no one. Also the dubious cop-related reasoning behind no tinted windows can go screw.
(While writing item number two there, I realized you could toss in a throwaway comment about fascism and it can stay kind funny but as soon as you throw in genocide too, well, then the whole thing becomes a bummer. Was thinking about that this weekend, thinking about the Rohingya and Rwanda and Yugoslavia and how I was aware of them when they were happening but I was not as… utterly paralyzed with horror. And the difference, of course, is the complicitness of our own government in this one. And the new one we’re perpetuating in Africa right now thanks to Elon and his Pepfar cancellation. And I suspect we’ve been complicit in other ones, somehow, that I missed or didn’t think about or blocked out, or fell for the governmental whitewashing. But, scrolling down this super-cheery list of genocides, I don’t see any others in my lifetime that the US actively supported. You can argue we should have done more to intervene to stop these (and I do!) but we weren’t the perpetrator. And right now: two of them. Fuckin fuck fuck.)
Sorry sorry sorry. Mondays, man, I am cranky and tired. Even Jane was complaining about Mondays this morning. “I don’t like waking up at 6:50,” she said, quite reasonably. Three more weeks of this shit, all 4-day weeks. Plus I got today done.
Eleven more days. I can handle it. I am a grown up.
Thanks to this new Water Damage album, we have a drone playlist ready for you today. Maybe it’s best we all go back to bed and listen to drone music. I think that could help substantially.
Until tomorrow, friend.
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Thanks for reading.
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Good Morning, Hello, How Are You vol 1.