Good Morning. Hello. How are you? #1563
Studio work, a bright young Walmart employee, ApplePay going rogue, Big Thief, Playground law, a stupid Blue Alert from two states away
Good morning, friend. Hi. Hello. How are you? All well? Nice weekend? I hope you had a nice weekend. Is your ApplePay suddenly triggering constantly on your iPhone? Mine is triggering dozens of times a day for no discernible reason. Just me? Really? Weird. Maybe Apple is telling me, specifically me, that I gotta update my OS to this stupid-ass new liquid glass nonsense. Because one thing I love is getting a fast new processor and then blowing all of its performance gains on pointlessly intensive UI elements. Love that particular treadmill.
Had a pretty good weekend. Got a decent amount done on the studio. Could have been more, would have liked it to be a bit more. Was definitely moving slow on Sunday. I powered through, but there were a lot of long pauses where I just stared at things trying to decide what to do next. And even more long pauses that were more fundamentally existential in nature where I knew what the correct, right, craftsman-like thing to do was, but I really wanted to half-ass it, but I knew that half-assing it was wrong, so I just sort of sat there on the floor, waging psychic warfare against myself, until my better demons won out and I did the task at hand in the correct, non half-assed way. And reader, I am pleased to report that my better angels won each and every one of those psychic battles.
Eventually. Slowly.
Also I would like to give myself a shout-out for remembering to put on my “caulking clothes” before I did floor caulking. I usually convince myself that “I’ll just be careful” and avoid the myriad caulk lines on the floor while I roam all over the floor caulking more potentially-staining caulk lines on the floor. But no no no, not this time. Since our last battle with getting caulk on our clothes, we have prepared. We took every piece of work clothing that we had that had caulk on it and we moved them all over to Chore House and put them in the master closet. Now, when it is time to do a caulking job in the attic, I go downstairs and change clothes. And then, when I am done, I put those clothes in the laundry at Chore House and put my regular work clothes back on. This is the key: never the two sets of clothes shall meet.
It took months to get my brain and hands to set this system up, but it has been set up and it is glorious.
In terms of actual work, well. Lotta going back-and-forth between assorted tasks because I had to wait for shit to dry. I picked up from last week where I had been waiting for the Lexel to dry on the tube now going into the attic from the exterior. So this week first thing I did was add the spray foam insulation to that wall where the penetration is. Then I had to wait 24 hours for that to dry. Then I re-added the Safe’n’Sound, cut an OSB floorboard to shape to close up the subfloor, added a bunch of bracing to give the new subfloor patch something to adhere to, screwed the floor down. Then more spray foam on the gaps on that panel, which I now have to wait to dry. So, next weekend we can turn to the rigid foam layer of the subfloor there and the sheetrock and we’ll be back to where we were when I decided to suck it up and rip all that up to put the fiber ingress in the right place. “Progress.”
In a different area, I finished the foam subfloor layer, and added sheetrock layer number one, carrying each 4×4 piece of sheetrock up the stairs as I laid it. Set up a real nice sheetrock cutting station on top of 4 bats of Safe’N’Sound it is real sweet. Got the floor down and then had to caulk the joints before I could add the second layer of sheetrock — the number one secret of soundproofing a room is… well, mass. Hence sheetrock. But the number two secret: no gaps!
So now that caulk has to try, so I moved back over to the southeast corner of the attic, the last part where there is any original subfloor left, under a nest of ductwork that I have raised from the floor, and I continued my journey of pulling up the subfloor, pulling out the old insulation, adding the Safe’N’Sound, shaping a new subfloor panel, test fitting it, adding the Avantech floor joist sealant, placing the panel for the last time in its proper place, and screwing it down. I got five panels done. I had postponed this part of the project in order to get the fully assembled subfloor done in the vocal booth/storage section, so I can make time to get the HVAC contractors in for duct re-routing without slowing down the project. It’s been a while. I was dreading to return to it. But you know what? I find it kind of soothing.
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We are listening to the new Big Thief today, Double Infinity. I saw a review saying that it was “mediocre” and they were “phoning it in,” but I disagree strongly. It is a smidge stylistically different than their old stuff, a bit happier a bit more jammy, two things that you wouldn’t think I would enjoy, being a moody fart, but I find myself liking this version of Big Thief more. I like this album.
We got a “Blue alert” this weekend: a Blue Alert is a bullshit “emergency alert” on your phone, controlled by the police departments of America where they bug a bunch of people because someone pissed off the cops. On your Apple device, if you go to Settings —> Notifications, you will find them euphemistically under “Public Safety” alerts. You can go ahead and turn them off, they suck. Of course, I had them turned off, but this one was mis-categorized and they abused the system. Apparently they do this all the time in Texas and it has caused millions of people to turn their emergency alerts off completely and apparently was a big problem when it was time to actually use the emergency alert system as intended and notify people in low-lying areas of rapidly surging flood waters.
In our case, it was an alert for someone who had committed “aggrivated assault” (sic) two states away and the suspect was on foot. I’m sure he was gonna run all the way from Georgia through South Carolina to North Carolina, super helpful. Also, note this dude was not wanted for attempted murder or murder or anything, no, just “aggrivated assault.” Definitely a thing to big millions of people two states away about.
Gonna go ahead and assume it was a mistake. Because I still have a misbegotten shred of respect for government agencies and workers.
Went to Walmart this weekend on Friday and did my normal-ass Walmart thing, Walmart Radio was playing some bangers. It was great. Except when I was checking out, the stupid new Walmart payment OS and it’s dumb-ass anti-theft AI decided I was stealing something because I scanned one copy twice then threw the second one straight into the cart. The whole thing shut down and called for an attendant.
The attendant comes over and I say to him: “it thinks I’m stealing because I scanned two of the same item” in a slightly peevish voice.
The guy, whom I have never seen before working there, said “it doesn’t think anything. You’re giving it too much credit.”
I am somewhat flabbergasted at this manifestly true and insightful comment coming at me from the Walmart line and I turn off my peevishness and say “you know, that is a really good point.”
(Real secret weapon, magically turning off your peevishness and giving a stranger a compliment. In today’s world, most strangers are shocked to receive any sort of compliment. Except creepy compliments to hot women. Don’t do those.)
And the dude seems sort of nonplussed, taken aback that I am so kind and chatty now.
Were I richer man I would have offered this bright young man a job on the spot, and he coulda had his own little Horatio Alger journey into the thrilling world of AdTech and/or Boat and RV Storage.
Alas.
Jane’s been pretty good this weekend. Some peevishness and one fit at the playground. Some girl was borrowing a few of Jane’s sand toys, and that same girl had three sand buckets, so Jane borrowed one of the sand buckets, and the girl was like “no you cannot borrow my bucket” and Jane was like “oh I am borrowing this bucket you have two other buckets and you’re borrowing my sand toys.”
But the girl was not having it so she went and got her daddy and Jane still refused to give the bucket back and ran off with it so I had to intervene and she got real mad at me and thought about punching me or grabbing my face like she does when she has a flash of anger, but she resisted both, got control of herself, which, serious props.
Also, man, that was kind of a BS lesson I had to teach there. Yeah, you gotta give the bucket back, it’s the right thing to do, because it belongs to that girl, but also, yeah, that girl does not need three buckets and she is also using some of your sand toys and that girl is a hypocrite man. But we’re gonna just let it go, because we are good people.
She did not like that one bit and I do not especially blame her. Seems like a pointless lesson in this day and age, but I am still committed. My daughter will belong to a secret cult when she’s older, like the Christians in Rome with their little fish-arc drawing code thingy. She’ll be secretly kind in a world of Chads and Trolls. Some day she may have to appear in court to answer for the charge of “illegal kindness.”
Maybe we shoulda gone and kicked that girl’s ass. Jane coulda taken her.
Don’t have a playlist for you today, so here is a live Suede video it is rad:
Have a good Monday. Let’s see if we can avoid existential crises this week and just, you know, have a work week like a normal person. TBD.
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Thanks for reading.
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Good Morning, Hello, How Are You vol 1.