Good Morning. Hello. How are you? #1549
A weekend of chores, so many chores.
Good morning good morning good morning. Monday. So exciting. Last day of summer before Jane goes back to school tomorrow. The good news: I woke up at my school time, 6:40, no problem this morning. The bad news: I went back to sleep till 8, and now I am exhausted and over-slept and probably won’t be able to go to sleep on time tonight. Lovely.
Excellent weekend, though. SO MANY CHORES. Just the best. Two solid days of chores. I chored so hard. Last night we watched the new Marc Maron special, Panicked, which was very funny, though that dude needs to learn to hold his head up straight. Freaks me out. But there was a part where he said that he could only find any sort of peace in this fascist hell world while doing errands. Boy, I related to that. Errands and chores, errands and chores. The best that life brings us.
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 some punk witchy band call the New Eves right now, two songs in on their album The New Eve is rising, and it is pretty great. Little bit confused by the plural band name — New Eves — and singular album name — a single New Eve.
Also I used em-dashes up there but they look a bit narrow and it just occurred to me we could make an old curmudgeon font for people like me who use em-dashes habitually but, unlike me, are concerned about appearing to be AI-written, and we could just have fonts out there that artificially narrow the em-dashes so they only look like, gasp, en-dashes.
En-dashes really getting lost in the AI discourse but that is probably fine.
Let’s just go nuclear on this chore thing shall we? Been a while. Let’s do a deep dive into all the chores. List every one of them:
Went to Lowes and bought ten bags of soil, a bag of gravel, some cucumber seeds and a giant pot. Like just gargantuan. Well, not like those roman tree pots, but, like, 20"x20”.
Went to the grocery store
Saturday was outdoors and garden day at chore house. Transition from summer to fall. To whit:
Trimmed back a giant hedge bush blocking a walkway
Trimmed the pollinator garden also blocking the walkway
Pulled the old cucumbers out of the bed and on the trellis, refilled the soil in the bed, planted new cucumbers
Went and tamed every determinate tomato plant, which are still producing absolutely insane numbers of roma, san marzano and cherry tomatoes. I do not use tomato cages, because I am a lunatic, so they all have a zillion poles holding up their branches. They look insane.
Picked all the thai red peppers off of the thai red pepper plant.
Planted a new red bell pepper plant for Fall
Planted four new bush beans for fall. No. Six.
Tamed the watermelon vine
Tamed the sage and rosemary bushes which have grown absolutely out of control
Put three bags of dirt into the new pot and then transplanted my dwarf cavendish banana into the pot because it was rootbound in its old pot and did not grow to a fruiting size. Hopefully that is fixed now. Proceeded to sing “Are we gonna kick it, kick it root bound,” to the tune of the Beastie Boys for the rest of the day
Pulled and mulched the dead sunflowers
Cleaned out the entire greenhouse, hosed down the floor, scrubbed it, vacuumed it with the wet/dry vac.
Figured out why the thermostat for the greenhouse fan wasn’t working. Because i had tripped the breaker because the plug end of an extension cord was completely submerged in water whoops.
Planted lettuce, spinach and bok choy in the beds I had prepared in the greenhouse before I left
Trimmed back the absolutely beastie cinnamon and globe basil plants in the greenhouse
Reorganized my seed cases and re-filed all the seeds from summer and pulled the rest of the seeds I need to plant this fall: mainly shallots, chives, broccoli.
Weeded the entire front “yard” are of chore house.
Started to clean up the area behind the greenhouse, which has overgrown with brush since we build the thing. This needs a lot more work.
Chopped up a tree — well, a crepe myrtle — that had fallen over in a recent storm.
Took that bag of gravel and laid it in a wet spot at the edge of one of the raised beds in an experiment to see if I need to buy a lot of gravel to deal with some drainage issues. I do. I am not excited about this. Considering hiring an actual landscaping company. But they cost so much money. But my back.
Moved 250 lbs of sand that had been sitting in bags unceremoniously dumped next to one of my grape trellis poles about six months ago
Trellissed up all the summer grape vine growth
Composted everything. So much new greens for the compost bin.
Exhausting day. Thank god it wasn’t too hot out. Even so, I had to drink like three Gatorade Zeros to keep hydrated. Almost fainted a couple times (another similarity to Marc Maron’s special where he almost fainted after a hike in the heat). Had to take little three minute breaks. Moving 250 pounds of sand, especially, was quite unpleasant.
I had hoped I could do one day of all Chore House chores and then get to work on the studio the second day of the weekend, but no such luck. We needed another day. If Saturday was the yard, Sunday was the garage workshop. Though, by circumstance, part of cleaning up the garage did incrementally move the studio project forward a smidge. The day included:
Getting all of the spider webs out of the garage, I hadn’t been in there in weeks and it was out of control. I need to buy some spider traps. This was a two-stage process, I used the compressor air gun to blow all the spider webs off of everything, then at the end of the day I blew everything out of the garage
Repairing an old family painting of Denali that I inherited from my parents and was falling out of its frame. It is now hanging in my office in Chore House.
Repairing an old Japanese statue that I inherited from my paternal grandmother, whom I really never knew, she died when I was a baby. But she has loomed large in my life and I have loved her by extension. It was missing some chunks of ceramic, but you get the gist. It is now sitting on a shelf in Chore House.
Moving a spare giant 36” blueprint printer the contracting company got from one of our subs. I have one already. I guess I will just have one in each house since you never know when you will need a blueprint made.
Getting all the outdoor power equipment back onto the wall
Getting all the wood laying around back onto the wall or its plywood storage spot or moving the pieces up to the attic
Moving a giant four-foot tall stack of 4’x8’ rigid foam sheets up to the attic for floating floor work
Hanging up a ton of spare work clothes that are all covered in caulk. I pulled them all from my closet at home and moved them to Chore House in a vain attempt to not ruin anymore expensive Truework shirts with caulk
Setting up a spare old HomePod Mini in the master bath of Chore House and getting it mounted and placed in an attractive manner
Moving a bunch of boxes to the studio storage area in the master closet while the Studio gets built
Assembling a new router table I got that is built into a Milwaukee Packout lid and it is a great invention but unfortunately it did not come with instructions and I think the router disk is mis-sized for the hole, so I gotta email Stack Smarter about that today.
Shredding all the cardboard for mulch because I used up all the shred I had the day before on the new beds
Loading up my truck with trash and things that need to go to the free swap tent. I need to do that today hopefully. Truck is packed.
Replacing the hose that burst on the east side of the house with this hardcore heavy duty one recommended to me about three months ago on the GMHHAY Slack. Belated thank-you to Mike and Ian for their recommendations. Fingers crossed. But that hose is a beast.
Organized the giant mess that was my disc sandpaper
Checked to make sure I got the gas turned on in the house again after the gas leak I caused. I knew I got it repaired but I couldn’t remember if I ever did the final thing and call the gas company to come and turn it back on. I did. I also put a gas shut-off wrench next to the main gas line valve so I can turn it off quickly in the future.
Cleaned up the garage mac and got everything re-logged in so I could order shit and watch tutorial videos again
Mounted eight magnetic tool strips along the miter saw station so I could get my ungainly drawer of drill and driver bits organized
Used my beloved shelf-and-table hooks to run the extension cable from the planer to the grinder along the table edge so I could get my raise-and-lower table underneath the workbench
Put paint hardener into two five-year-old cans of paint I found in the attic that had separated into oil and sludge, and spent like 20 minutes on each of them with a paint stirring attachment on my driver getting the hardener fully mixed in, so they can harden, so I can throw them away without waiting for a special paint disposal day.
Took out the trash
Swept and blew the floor to get the whole place cleaned out.
Writing it all down doesn’t seem like six hours of work. Hrm. I guess it was only like five and a half. I did breakfast with Jane and then we went to the playground before I got to it on Sunday.
Still. I am happy with the results and I got a lot of dumb chores done that had been piling up for months.
I should have taken a photo of the Denali painting and Japanese grandma statue. I’ll get those for you this week. But here is a photo of the newly-cleaned garage.
Now that we are safely past it, I would like to give myself a pat on the back for not commenting in any way, shape, or form about that whole Coldplay Boston caught-having-an-affair thing. You don’t have to comment on everything to be on the internet. You get to choose!
All of these chores is not to say I didn’t spend any time with Jane, we had a lovely weekend. Breakfasts and hardware store outings and playgrounds and dinners and Real Civil Engineer. But mostly she and Emma spent the weekend at our neighbor’s pool, last pool weekend of the summer. Jane is excited for school. I think I am ready. I remember hating getting up so early, and I will probably hate it soon enough, but there are enough positives that hopefully they’ll carry me through, oh, I don’t khow, a quarter or so before I start to get existentially depressed about waking up that early again. And truth be told, I can’t say I ever found my groove this summer with a wake-up time or sleeping in. Maybe my body is changing. Maybe I’ll like it this time.
Right?
Got a moody and quiet playlist for you today. Almost all new stuff, except for the first track, which is from one of my favorite albums of all time, Bark Psychosis’ Independency, which is newly-ish on Spotify. I used to listen to this album constantly. Epecially the fist three tracks. “I Know” was a staple mix-tape opener for like 4 years of my life in the 90’s. But I hadn’t listened to the whole album in years. Still so good. And we are still working through the Springsteen Tracks II set. Love the new Claire Rousay don’t kow More Eaze, though. Love this new Advance Base track, also don’t know his collaborator, Walker Rider. Will check them out.
Okay well let’s go have a week.
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Thanks for reading.
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Good Morning, Hello, How Are You vol 1.