Good Morning. Hello. How are you? #1531
Summer camp control freaks, Live Aid's 40th birthday, recording studio floor work continues, gardening, chores chores chores, turtle dock!
Good morning good morning. I’m awake! Up early because Jane has camp. And boy howdy this camp has rules. Pay ‘em a fortune to let them boss you around. Park here, don’t park here, even though the busses aren’t in use in the summer. You must arrive exactly between 7:55 and 8 AM no we are not opening the doors a minute early. You must show ID to take your kid out of camp. All of these rules would be, like, well, tolerable, if not still annoying, if, you know, all the other camps around here did them too. But they don’t. This is one person’s control freak journey. Best part is they sent out an absolutely sociopathic instructional email, wherein they used the first-person “I” throughout, about camp leadership, then signed the email with three names. Bet two of those names just rolled their eyes.
So I had to stand in freakin line at 7:50 AM with a hundred other disgruntled parents, in the summer heat, with nowhere to park even though there is a giant parking lot right next to the line, that we are not allowed to use for no reason.
Bullshit.
ANYWAY. Excellent weekend otherwise. For a brief moment yesterday, I thought to myself, “oh man I might actually be happy in life.” Then I remembered, well, you know, the world. And it did not, like, crush my happiness completely, not exactly. It made me feel a little guilty for it, of course, but only a little. It made the happiness… well… more seasoned, more deeply felt. More fleeting, more rare.
So, you know. That was kinda nice. For a while.
Important update from past issues: It was not, in fact, Natalie Imbruglia that dated Ethan Hawk. It was Lisa Loeb. Which means I gotta go listen to that song now. GMHHAY regrets this error and apologizes to all parties involved. Thank you to GMHHAY Slack for alerting me to this.
Join the GMHHAY slack! Reply to this email and ask for an invite if you’re a human who likes chatting with other humans about topics such as these within!
We are listening to the new Midwife album, a collaboration with a gentleman named Matt Jencik, whom I do not know. Album is called Never Die and I like what this Matt Jencik fellow is bringing to Midwife’s prolific schtick. It feels a good collaboration. Let’s Google Matt Jencik. Seems he is a solo artist. Excellent album covers. Will check him out some time. Thank you to Bill for alerting me to this record.
Chores chores chores! What a weekend of chores! I floored a 20-foot by 4-foot section of floor in the attic, deep within the eaves. Floor that will never be seen, much less walked upon. Floor that will, for the rest of its days, have a bunch of HVAC ducts sitting on it: HVAC ducts what would sit just fine across bare floor joists. But this is going to be a recording studio. In an attic. And attic soundproofing is very hard and mostly impossible but the way to make it work at all is to have as few holes as possible between your floor and the rooms below. Which means flooring to the edges of the walls, everywhere, even in parts you’re not going to use. Sealing the gaps.
Part of me is so annoyed I am spending, oh, maybe two months flooring a section of the attic that no one will ever see (except me, there will be some sweet storage back there. And maybe an occasional HVAC technicion). But my OCD loves it. And it is “the right thing to do.” I think I have said this before, but it is a glory, a gift, when your neuroses can be passed off as craftsmanship.
So. I crawl into this tight space, between a bunch of ducts, into an area where I can’t stand up, can barely sit up. I then scrape all the spray foam drips out of the bays, and especially on the joists so I will get clean attachments to other wood. Then I use a sharpie and mark where the Cat-6 cable that runs to the primary bedroom rests on the joists. Then I push the cable aside, and use my router to rout a gap into the joists for the cable. Then I lay the cable back in the gap. Then I use Simpson Strongtie NS1 Nail Strike Plates to cover the cable. Then I vacuum out the joist bays. Then I use spray-foam-in-a-can to seal up any gaps. Then I let that dry while I cut 2×4s to length, the same length as the joists, because weirdly this special area in the eaves of the house has joists that are shorter than all the other joists. I think it’s because this part isn’t actually above the house. It is the overhang, outside.
So I cut the 2×4s to length and then come back and lay them on top of the joists, and secure them to the joists using 5” lag screws (can’t use lag bolts cuz I can’t have protruding heads). Then once that is done, I add 3 bats of Rockwool Safe n Sound to each joist bay, the first layer of my insulation. Then I cut OSB to size, place it (which is a total pain because there is an HVAC refrigerant line running through this whole section that does not have a lot of give in it), and screw em in, one by one.
I did five of these. It took all weekend.
But it is done.
There is a whole additional floor process after this, caulking and adding five more layers to the floor. But you will hear plenty about that in the future. I assure you.
I am now done with the subfloor, first layer, in two of the four shitty areas of the attic. One of the other two is gonna be easy, and I have already begun prepping it. The other is going to be the hardest bit of the whole project. I am saving it for last.
Other weekend chores: I finished the project replacing the turtle cam with the 4k turtle cam. Did the project last weekend but experienced some hiccups but it is mostly, I think, all fixed now. We are getting some good turtle imagery. It is all very exciting.
Did some gardening: in that phase where the cucumbers are over-delivering and I have to pick, like, ten a weekend to keep them from flowering and stopping producing. Feeling good about getting the plants through the summer. I need to harvest the potatoes. The sunflowers have given up the ghost. The tomatoes are jacked and starting to turn red. The pumpkin and watermelon vines are flowering and crawling. Grapes are doing okay but one more year about griping about their transplant, I think. Transplanting grapes does not seem to be a thing, huh? The beets and carrots are coming along nicely. Thai basil is volunteering everywhere in the ground and I love it. My pepper plant is ready to pop. All good things. Great progress since I got the outdoor irrigation fixed, double water in this summer heat, the plants seem happy.
Emma did some landscaping around the entrance to chore house, which is nice since, you know, parental clients of the neurodivergent-affirming pediatric speech therapists drive in there. It looks very nice. Hats off to Emma. I helped very slightly by lifting a few rocks so she could get some landscaping fabric underneath them. Big strong Ricky.
One thing that was very nice this weekend is Emma did chores over at Chore House with me. We are maybe perhaps letting some flood victims use the house for a few months. I am torn about this but it is obviously the right thing to do. So Emma came by and spruced the place up a bit: cleaned the toilets, which I am very bad about, repaired the toilets, did some other chores, made craft slime with Jane. It was nice to have the whole family choring together because, you know, the family that chores together stays together.
Beyond that, well. Emma made a nice dinner one night, one morning she got up and went to breakfast with Jane and I, second weekend in a row. I made two hardware store runs, one with the entire family, all very exciting. We attempted playground times but it was already 90°F at 9:30 AM so none of Jane’s friends’ parents would meet us there so we gave up. I read a lot of my books — a rare time where I am reading two different books at once, not a thing I enjoy normally.
Oh and Jane made that awesome card you see above for Emma. Really amazing. I love that one.
It was the 40th anniversary of Live Aid yesterday, and I celebrating by watching about three hours of the footage. It is all up on Youtube now, the official LiveAid account added it all and released it yesterday. All proceeds go to their charities, to which they are still donating more than £3 million a year. It is crazy.
I remember LiveAid and I remember watching it live, a lot of it anyway. I do not remember much more than that. I know I watched it on MTV. I was 13 so just old enough to care but not old enough to know most of the bands. Was most excited about Duran Duran and Phil Collins. It’s crazy reading the comments on the ten hours of youtube videos: people remember that shit. But I guess I was a smidge too young to really grasp the enormity of it all.
Made up for it last night. I watched (some of) The Status Quo, Boomtown Rats, Style Council, Howard Jones, Duran Duran, Joan Baez, Black Sabbath, The Beach Boys, Sting and Phil Collins, Elton John, Adam Ant (so good), Ultravox, Elvis Costello (one track, Beatles cover), Nik Kershaw, Run DMC (awesome), REO Speedwagon, The Power Station, Phil Collins (again), Hall & Oates, Bob Dylan, and USA for Africa. Much more to watch. Might do more tonight. It was really fun.
But the absolute best was Sade. I mean, maybe this is where I’m at in life or something but damn. She stole the show. An institution Sade. Apparently she married an English soldier, bought a fixer-upper cottage on the seashore and rarely gives interviews. Absolute legend.
Until tomorrow.
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Good Morning, Hello, How Are You vol 1.