Good Morning. Hello. How are you? #1619
Weekend chores outdoor edition, the new Emmanuelle box set
Good morning good morning. Hello. Hi. How is your Monday? Okay so far? Ready to face the capitalistic, exploitive work week? Let’s do it let’s freakin do it.
Big revelation in the school drop-off line. The reason that Escalade/Navigator or whatever sits there every morning outside of the drop-off line but not parked is because they are doing a kid trade. Someone is giving the Escalade/Navigator their teenager in exchange for the Escalade/Navigator giving the other car their elementary school kid. That car then goes and gets in line. I am glad I sorted this out after a year.
KID TRADE.
If you are a Plex friend of mine you will he happy to see I added the 4k restorations of Emmanuelle, Emmanuelle 2, Emmanuelle 3 and a proto-Emmanuelle movie, 1969’s Io, Emmanuelle. Bought the new Severin Films Emmanuelle box set because how could I not. Emmanuelle was a huge part of my childhood oh my god there are so many Emmanuelle knock-off films and I swear to god every one of them was on Cinemax. More than a hundred. I am partial, being a sci-fi guy, to Emmanuelle in Space. Black Emmanuelle, as it turns out, is semi-official, as the actress who plays Black Emmanuelle is in Emmanuelle 2. I am just learning now that the eighth remake of Emmanuelle (just a remake of the first film, not including all the spin-offs) came out in 2024 and Naomi Watts is in it. Might have to check that one out.
The original Emmanuelle did around $40 million in worldwide box office as best I can tell, which would work out to $260 million in today’s dollars, which if it came out in 2024 would have placed it as the 25th top grossing film of the year, just after A Quiet Place: Day One. Not too shabby for an X-Rated film.
There is a 100-ish page booklet with the box and it cleared a lot of things up for me. The original author of the bestselling book was two people — a French diplomat and his Thai wife, who were, by all accounts, remarkable people. I hope they made bank off of their worldwide phenomenon.
I’ve had the first Emmanuelle in 1080p for a while, and the first half is a very good film. It sorta goes downhill in the second half, when doe-eyed Sylvia Kristel gets wrapped up with some dumb-ass old dude who spouts off erotic nonsense like he is the idiot nephew of Marquis de Sade or something. The accompanying book told me the second one is much better, and it is! It has a decent story! It is very feminist, Emmanuelle is in control of all of her decisions and her husband is a true partner in her free love hoo ha. I am excited to get to Emmanuelle 3 because apparently their free love perfect marriage unravels, as they so often do, because one of them wants some stability. This is, remarkably, foreshadowed in Emmanuelle 2.
So much moral sophistication (and incredible cinematography) in 70’s softcore erotica. Shame no one makes anything like that anymore. Euphoria, I guess, except that is dumb.
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We are listening to Bar Italia this morning. Sorry. bar italia, no caps, they are such rebels. I listen to every album by this band and I don’t usually love the, but a) there’s always a good song or two and b) it makes me feel young again and I imagine myself dancing at The Pill to it feeling all sexy and young and awesome and man those were good days. I am sad I missed that last pill reunion. I wish I coulda gone to it with my 40 extra pounds and my bald spot.
Album is called Some Like it Hot, and this track “Cowbella,” is pretty good. I bet it’s super fun to be in this band I bet they get to go to a lot of good parties and sleep past 7 AM most days.
ANYWAY.
Excellent weekend of chores. Here’s the thing about chores, about projects. You gotta balance the maintenance of pre-existing projects against getting new stuff done. And I made the difficult but correct decision this weekend to focus on a bunch of outdoor landscaping chores rather than work on the studio build, because I have been neglecting them for far too long.
Plus the weather was really nice. OMG so nice.
Also I got to work two days outside with my wife and it is so much more fun to do chores with other people. I keep gently asking Emma to come help me in the studio but she is not interested. But we spent two days doing mulch and landscape work together and it was just great. I shoveled, mmm, gonna say 180 wheelbarrows of mulch, 13 pitchfork scoops of mulch per wheelbarrow, placed them all around both houses. Emma did the spreading at the main house, I did the spreading at Chore House. Made a whole new, better, area for my Birdie’s Beds. Laid down a lot of landscape fabric first, so that the weeds wouldn’t get in.
Added this new long low bed which is where I’m gonna grow my indeterminate tomatoes next year because a) I have had zero luck growing them in the greenhouse in summer and b) this spot has good sunlight (lotta trees at chore house). I’m also trying to make the woody area between my garden and the entrance to the neurodivergent-affirming pediatric speech therapists’ office (you can see the walkway in the background) more cleaned up. It is looking pretty nice!
I also started the miserable task of cleaning up the eastern side of Chore House, outdoors. It is not really visible from the front door, greenhouse, driveway or tenant’s entrance, so it has become this catch-all mess of pallets and buckets and weeds and old wood and trash cans and all sorts of junk. And the weeds have been taking over. It was bad. I did not finish the whole area, but I got a lot of it done. I cleaned out the drainage creek and got rid of all the rotting wood and laid landscape fabric and mulch and got rid of a giant amount of leaves and cut back the tree and weeded a ton. Here I have a before-and-after thing for you:
It was so much work! And as if that wasn’t enough I ordered 5 yards of gravel and started fixing and extending the landscape behind the back of the greenhouse. When we built it, we had to make a level platform with an excavator and then we laid down gravel to make a pad for the pavers. But it was built on a hill, and we did not make the hill super smooth behind the greenhouse. We left a couple feet for me to walk behind it, but it’s been pretty treacherous becuase the slope was so steep. So I moved wheelbarrow load after wheelbarrow load of gravel back there on Saturday, widening the walkway and making the slope less steep.
Oh my god gravel is so heavy. Oh my god oh my god I was so sore.
But it is much better now:
I still have, mm, gonna say two, two-and-a-half yards of gravel sitting in the driveway, gonna have to figure out what to do with that. Might add a bit more to this back of the greenhouse. Might make a couple paths into gravel. Not sure. If nothing else, I can use it on the trail between the two houses, but that entails bringing wheelbarrow loads of gravel down a very steep hill and I do not relish the idea of doing that. So I am looking for other projects.
So, anyway, yeah, that was three full days of manual labor, three days of doing like 400, 500% of my “exercise” and “movement” rings on my watch. Which kept running out of battery, actually. I think the shoveling motion triggers the “raise to wake” functionality so the watch was just constantly turning on its display over and over again all day. Very weird.
Other than that, went to a playground Saturday, went to a playground Sunday. Took Jane to Waffle House. Saw a really sweet pimped out Imapala I think might have been being driven by a granny? I wish I got a picture.
Went to Lowe’s twice, oh right I bought a post topper I gotta paint and replace on the walkway to the Neurodivergent-affirming pediatric speech therapist office. Meant to do that this weekend crap. There are so many other outdoor chores. Gotta compost all the frozen plants from last week’s frost. Gotta finish the cleanup of the east side. But I also gotta get back to the studio build, maaaan.
Man I wish I could just spend my life doing chores and projects. Shoulda never given up on my Youtube channel maybe by now I coulda been a Youtube influencer and live off of my projects. THE DREAM.
Jane got her toothbrushing streak reward and she was very happy. She is going for another streak this week but we can already feel the magic of the streak wearing off, she has complained about it a couple times. But so far? Nine days and counting of teeth brushing both in the morning and at night. Amazing.
Justa mix for you today. All new stuff except an old mix of “Sit Down” by James that has recently been released to streaming (thank you Conrad for alerting me) and a Sebadoh track that came into my head this weekend that I hadn’t listened to in ages and, brought me to tears like it should. Bar Italia as per today’s edition and Husker Du as per an edition last week oh I guess that is technically old but it is a new release. This new Twilight Sad is very promising Annie loved them I shoulda put them on last week’s mix and she would have been excited about this new song. The new Mountain Goats is so weird but I do like myself a concept album. My god they are prolific. Oh right I also wrote about this new The The last week so here it is for your listening pleasure.
Have a lovely week go out there and show capitalism who’s boss.
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Thanks for reading.
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Good Morning, Hello, How Are You vol 1.