Good morning good morning. Hope you had a lovely holiday weekend. MLK was a real one, man. I keep meaning to re-read Letter from a Birmingham Jail, which I’ve not read in, oh, 30+ years. I suspect it hits different these days in myriad ways.

Happy belated birthday to Craig and Keith, readers of GMHHAY, twins, former employees of the esteemed and legendary Merriweather Post Pavillion. It was great to see you both this Christmas. GMHHAY as a rule does not do birthday wishes, so, you know they are legit.

GIRL SCOUT COOKIES. Cookie season is upon us. If you would like to buy cookies from Jane, scan this QR code or click it. Fresh Girl Scout cookies will arrive at your door. Probably by courier, unless you live in the Triangle, in which case a very cute Girl Scout will arrive at your door for what they call in the biz “Girl Delivery.”

Gotta say, the Girl Scout cookie-selling app, the adorably named “Digital Cookie” is a lot better this year. It even takes Venmo. Now if it would just stop logging me out every 12 hours. I mean, cmon man.

We sold cookies on Saturday at a cookie stand. First day you could buy cookies. At a comic shop. I lied it was not a Magic the Gathering tournament it was a signing by the esteemed comic book artist Mitch Gerads. The line went right by the cookie booth. Captive audience. We sold more than a hundred boxes of cookies. Hell yeah.

My god I love selling cookies so much.

We got a new shipment of hardcover copies of The Economics of Star Trek: The Proto-Post Scarcity Economy, fifth anniversary edition over at the Rick Webb store. Did you know there is a Rick Webb store? Lol. No you did not. Because even though I write 2,000 words a day to you fine folk, I am absolutely terrible about self-promotion.

Also I really gotta finish that stupid vol 2 of GMHHAY. I mean it’s all done. I literally just have to order the print proofs. This has been the case for four months.

JESUS.

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!

Listening this morning to a 50th anniversary pressing of Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here that I bought at Walmart this weekend. Happy birthday, Wish You Were Here. You are a great album. You are not my favorite Pink Floyd era but I like you a lot because I like Pink Floyd a lot even the eras that are not my favorite.

God. Four day weekend. I did so much this weekend. I could write you an entire novella about it. I will try and keep it brief.

But I will not try and keep brief the part on Friday morning where, after my horrifying wave of nausea, I went to Jane’s school (in a mask, I am not a monster) to watch Jane and her class do a presentation on FOSSILS. Oh my god, it was so cute. There were fossil poems and songs and book readings and facts and trick questions on multiple-choice quizzes and the whole thing ruled. And Jane was so excited to have us both in her class room and we hugged a lot and I got to see some of her more notorious classmates and parents and secretly wonder about parents and their relationships and divorces and whatnot it was all very fun my god I love school presentations.

Also hit Walmart on Friday and since I had Friday off I could really take my time and savor the Walmart, been a while. No Walmart radio, was there during reduced stimulus hours. The Turkey Chomps and organic butter are back you can breathe easy. I needed two things I do not usually buy - lots of serving tongs and some sort of stiff brush to clean – like a nail brush or something. I tried to find them without my app, and I did, but the cleaning brush was $13 and the tongs were like $12 each and I was about to spend something like $70 on this shit and then I remembered my trusty app and searched for both and found tongs for $1.99 each in the manly grilling section, and a nail brush (as opposed to dish brush) for $2 and saved myself like $60 because of that app. I am very disappointed in Walmart for this pricing trickery. Also their broccoli was a little soft.

Then I went to the doctor because a) nausea spell you guys saw Friday morning and b) I could tell my two-month-old cough was turning into Broncitis. I am now on Zithromax, thank you very much. Day four. Feel maybe almost cured. Fingers crossed. Emma is not so lucky. Day six of her (stronger) antibiotic and she’s still not great.

Spent most of the rest of Friday doing Studio work. Got a little in every day this four-day weekend.

Did bedtime since Emma was still on her work rampage. We did a daddy-Jane dance party. It was a great bedtime until the end and she wouldn’t lay down. I was so bummed. We had a game planned where I would stay a minute longer every time she gave me a hug and we had been talking about it all week and she whiffed it and I was sad. Alas. Maybe next weekend.

Saturday we did the Cookie booth, which ruled. It was in Cary and our friends who live in Cary came by the booth and we all went to lunch afterwards and that was lovely. Then more studio work.

Sunday Jane and I went to McDonald’s. We have the best McDonald’s. It is clean, it never runs out of shit, it has the friendliest workers. We talked to a woman that works there a few months ago who also works at the Waffle House and she said the owner and manager are both super nice. I love our McDonald’s. I feel terrible saying this. But it’s true. Then back to Walmart to buy some specific shelf brackets they have to make a poor-man’s ladder cable run since it turns out those sexy ladder-like cable management trays you see in all the SF office buildings are like $90 a foot yeah, no, I will pass. This isn’t even gonna be in the main studio.

Then Jane did iPad at Chore House while I did studio work.

Monday Jane and I went to Breakaway Cafe for breakfast and we have been playing a game where we both don’t look at our phone and it is so hard and she always wins and my god, I have a problem. The potatoes were good, though. And the dad at the next table was explaining climate change to his pre-teen kids and was doing a very good job and he had a very solid progressive viewpoint and his kids were listening rapt and my god you could tell he was just loving it, mansplaining and all, but still. Nice job, dad. I am jealous, not gonna lie.

Studio work: I got the fiber run from the current internet room in the guest closet up to the attic. Built a Vevor IT rack with absolutely sociopathic assembly instructions. Grabbed an old, very old, Unifi switch and got it up and running in the studio so now we have network in the studio all very exciting. Installed the cable run, got the fiber in the cable run. Installed two speakers into the ceiling of the den so I could get the floor built above them. Cleaned out a ton of old insulation, vacuumed everything up, installed the Safe N Sound, and put down layer one of the new floor. Completely finished floor layer 1 — the hardest layer — in the west side of the house. Very excited about that. Now I need to do layers 2-6, which combined will go more quickly than layer one. EXCEPT I have to do a thing I have been dreading forever, which is lift up the HVAC unit onto some construction jacks, remove the cinder blocks and drain tray, lay down the new floor under it, and then replace the drain tray and new blocks that are commensurately shorter so that the HVAC unit rests at the same height as present, even with a floor 3 inches higher. I have been working on the mechanics of this in my head for months and I think I have a plan, but still. I am dreading it.

There is another Rick Webb out there, actually he’s not even one of the 50 or so Rick Webbs, he’s a Philip Richard Webb, but he has been using my email for everything this weekend, like a hundred things. I do not like it. He signed me up for TRUMP TEAM three times, which of course has no opt-out or unsubscribe because everything Trump does is illegal.

But then! Then he signed up for some Arizona-area drag performers asking for drag queens at a party. So I emailed them and told them a) this was not his correct address, and b) he had just signed up for TRUMP TEAM so he might be trouble and to be careful.

Lotta shady shit going on in the world these days, lemme tell you.

But maybe we can postpone one more day thinking about it.

Not to say I don’t have meltdowns about the political situation in this country several times a day, of course.

But maybe we can postpone one more day thinking about it.

He says, again.

Jane had a playdate over yesterday and everything went well till the end. The friend was using some toy mic/amp setup Jane has and she was being way too loud with it. Jane told her to stop, the girl said Jane was being bossy, and they melted down. Friend got it together when Emma came in and said she was leaving soon and they needed to clean up. But Jane did not, went to her room, threw a giant fit. And, yeah. I mean, Jane was… right? But handled it terribly. And it’s all so much nuance, you know? A poorly behaving guest is a tricky thing for even an adult to handle correctly and politely.

In her giant fit she threw every stuffy in her room on the floor. And after the requisite 40 minutes or so, she and I made a plan to clean them up. Jane will never back down in a situation like this without getting something in return (my god she’s gonna be a holy terror in business if capitalism still exists in 20 years). So we made a deal where I would hand her each stuffy and she would snuggle with it a bit before she put it away.

And so we did. She snuggled with, like, 50 stuffies.

Great way to spend a day if you ask me.

Got a drone playlist for you today. I wish Apple made interesting covers for the playlists instead of these dumb color fields. Alas. Anyway all new hot fresh drone, except for the last track, which is from one of my old favorites. Music is awesome, so much good music. Jo Montgomerie is from this label I just discovered, via Bill, because they are putting out one of two new Cindytalk records. I had never heard of this label, the Helen Scarsdale Agency, or any of the innumerable bands on their Bandcamp page. But of course any label putting out a Cindytalk record in 2026 is of interest to me, so I have been investigating. I am three artists deep now, and they have all been awesome.

OK talk tomorrow where I will probably doom post about Greenland and Minnesota and Iran and whatnot because really. There is a world out there beyond my noble pedestrian domesticity. Imagine if Stephen Miller had an attic and the skills to finish it.