Good morning, good morning friends. Hello. Hi. How are you? Good weekend? Mine was excellent, thanks.

Had a dream last night about Annie, it was super sad. Took place in Lower Allston, “back in the day,” but she was already sick. My usual “lots of roomates living in a rundown Allston college apartment” trope of dreams. Annie lived with Ivelise and Ana Crowley and Jack and Emilie and they kept trying to get me to go to a party but Annie was already sick and sad and man what a depressing-ass dream I miss her a lot.

Good to see Ana Crowley, though.

BUT:

Check this shit out:

But even crazier, check this out:

I can now tell you the answer to the eternal question: “Can you merge two watermelon? If so, what happens?”

Are you sure you want to know? Are you sure?

Buttondown doesn’t have a spoiler tag, alas. But, then, how would you do that in an email newsletter anyway.

Eh, better hold off.

Look! Morning geese on the turtle pond!

Just back from the grocery store. They were playing Howard Jones. I resisted telling the nice old man working there just how many hits Howard Jones had — he has so many more hits than you remember. So many hits.

I bought olive oil. My Brand. I now have 10 bottles. But what can I say? It was on sale. This is how you get rich: buy lots of Olive Oil. Write that down.

I am obviously still scarred from the pandemic. That shit was so hard to find during the pandemic. Organic. Single location. Green bottle. Extra virgin. Doesn’t taste like ass. Don’t get me wrong I love my hipster olive oils from Robin or Eurof, but… I’m not gonna cook lunch with that gold.

Oh my god I have so much to tell you today I am bursting with news. It is too much. Too much.

We are going through a Band-Aid stickiness dry spell. Is this possible? It must be possible. None of my Band-Aids are sticking right this week. I am using a Band-Aid from the same pack as I used when I stuck one on my heel and it staid for, like, three weeks, and I can’t even get this one to stay for a day. Same with my finger wounds (so many finger wounds). Why won’t my Band-Aids stick right? Maybe it is something in my skin. Maybe it’s a chemical leaching out of me, from the Wegovy or Fish Oil or some shit. Except I was taking that shit before. WHY.

Speaking of Wegovy I am now on this new “XL” (thanks for that super self-image-reinforcing branding name there, Novo Norodisk), and it is working again like the old days. Just started yesterday but my god, I don’t want to eat a thing.

Which will be fun because my blood pressure is through the roof and I am fairly sure it will stay through the roof even as I eat literally no food.

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!

I am listening this morning to the new Chris Brokaw / Tanya Donelly record, which is some sort of gothic chant sort of thing, maybe Eastern European. Them the shrink wrap sticker says “Medieval.” It’s in Latin. It is rad. They should make one of these every year for the rest of their lives, just bang it out on a weekend or something. Love it so much.

“Tanya Donelly” is a very hard name to spell. Could be “Tonya.” Could be “Donnelly” or “Donnely.” I can never remember. It’s been what? 40 years? OK 36.

My computer desktop, which shuffles between 1,000 photos or so from my life, is showing a photo of me and my old friend Vivikeh, a Swedish exchange student, from 1993. I miss Vivikeh. I tried Googling her a few years ago she is either an academic or a doctor. Hard to tell. Vivikeh seems to be a pretty common Swedish name also I might not be spelling it right but that is the spelling from my memory.

Oh shit nostalgia K Hole stop stop stop we have so much to do today and so much to write about.

God look how hairy my legs were I miss that hair why are my legs so hair free now wtf.

All right let’s talk about CHORES SHIT YEAH CHORES WOOOO.

Wait no I gotta talk about the Museum of Life and Science field trip oh my god it was so fun that place rules. It is a museum of science, like any museum of science, except it has this giant outdoor portion with giant life-size dinosaurs and huge tree houses and a train running around and a nearly mile long SCIENCE TRAIL and a giant butterfly emporium like in that 90’s movie Angels and Insects that definitely needs a 4k re-release I’ve seen your wrists, Mathilda. Turns out it is very hard to take a photo of a butterfly those things do NOT stand still.

Emma was a registered Chaperone for this field trip but I was not but I snuck in as one and no one cared. We were in a little mini group with Jane and two of her friends and… You know, field trips to science-y places are not like when I was a kid. When I was a kid you had to stand there and listen to someone speak science at you. But now they just let you run around like a lunatic and do whatever you want. I suppose the logic — pretty sound, when you think about it — is they can do the science speaking at school. And last semester they did a whole unit on fossils and sure enough, all the kids wanted to look at the fossils area, so maybe they are on to something with these newfangled teaching methods.

I was exhausted, as I mentioned Friday morning, from my manic insomnia, but it didn’t really matter. It was a lovely day, super fun to hang out with the kids, have absolutely no agenda for your day. A+ would do it again and I want to go back to that place I didn’t even get to the ELEPHANTS area.

After the official field trip ended, we signed Jane out of school and went back into the museum with a few more of her friends. I sat in an Adirondack chair by the giant tree house, reading about the VA supreme court’s abomination of a ruling, spiraling a bit, struggling to find some hope, struggling to reconcile this amazing, beautiful day, these beautiful kids, all the joy and happiness around me with the Internet and Media Trolls who never spend any time with their kids or go to playgrounds who are hellbent on driving this world to Fascism. I wondered if any of the other parents here thought about it. I wondered if any of the other parents were even worried about their world falling apart.

I thought about a part in Molly’s book where the Warsaw Ghetto is organizing against occupation and how even in this time of death and misery there were tea halls and playgrounds. I thought it was super weird when reading about that the other day: how do you have a tea hall under Nazi occupation, but here I was at a playground under Fascism, or getting near enough, and, well. Yeah.

I understand how the Nazis got away with it. Most Germans just wanted to go on with their lives, ignore the unpleasant choads who took over their country because it didn’t effect them.

Yet.

I have known this before. This is a common feeling these days.

Anyway.

On the plus side: long, excellent talk with a fellow parent about water, water management, water purification, the assorted water districts around here and the assorted treatment plants. Solid nerding out. He was super quiet all day, but get that guy to talk about water and away we go. I loved it.

Saturday I began the chores, and it pretty quickly became clear that I was not going to get to work on the Studio because there was too much to do with gardening and clean-up and whatnot.

So much gardening: I (re-planted) my indeterminate tomatoes because I had tried to use seeds that were now eight years old. And upon replanting I noticed that, you know what? A couple of those eight year-old seeds actually sprouted, pretty impressive. I got the helical pile giant landscape screw thingies into the ground, the ones that will hold up a 4×4 without using concrete, so I can make the tomato trellis soon. I’ve got time. They are still small. I pulled out the winter garlic (kinda a wash, I planted too late, didn’t vernalize, used old garlic), and refreshed the beds and planted chives, peppers and basil in each bed, in order to see which bed is good for what — lotta shade variety in those beds. Pruned my pear tree. Straightened an apple sapling. Pruned the grapes. Really need to watch a video on grape vine management.

I built a new Birdies Bed, prepped it, filled it with dirt, and planted watermelons in it. I mused to myself that perhaps my brand loyalty to Birdies is misplaced: they ship those things over here from Australia, and that Vego influencer marketing is working. Probably better to support an American company, even if we don’t know how to pronounce it (hot topic, the Vego pronunciation GMHHAY passage. Lotta opinions in the Slack on that one).

I did a lot of weeding, tried to use my propane landscape torch on weeds in the driveway, but had the wrong size nozzle on my propane tank. Pyromanical urges thwarted. next week.

There’s a bed in the greenhouse that isn’t getting watered enough by the drip and I can not figure it out and it is driving me insane.

The light bulbs in a crawl space are all burned out. All five. All at once. All brand new, well, maybe a year, high-brightness GE LED bulbs. Breaker is not tripped. I am very confused and concerned.

I also cleaned the workshop in the garage: oh my god the joy of a clean workshop. Shredded a ton of cardboard. Put everything away.

I unpacked my new, BIGGER Brother P-touch label printer. This one is capable of printing labels up to 24mm in height, which is great for those big black-and-yellow bins I use outside. I worry about the stickiness and their all-weatherness. I Googled whether they had HEAVY DUTY label-maker tape and they do oh my god, so exciting. Ordered a roll. Gonna do a weathering test comparing the two I am so excited.

Now I want to know if they have TACTICAL label-maker tape because everyone knows the word TACTICAL is what you add to search queries if you want the toughest, most many version of anything.

Sunday I finally got to work in the attic and it ruled. Got ten piece of OSB down. Listened to a lot of great music. I got the last layer of the floor done under the HVAC unit, which means this, oh, six-month long journey to completely replace the floor under a giant HVAC unit without moving it is almost done. I just need to get the drip pan back in, which will hopefully happen next weekend? Hopefully?

Gas people tore up some of my flooring as they try and unravel the mysteries of the gas line placement in this house. They are coming back today. I need to talk to them. I cannot fathom what all these lines are for. I will have to rebuild that floor once they’re done. Maybe I can put some sort of armored sleeve over the gas line, it is ridiculous how thin these TUBES OF LETHAL GAS are and how easy it is to nick them. We are a weird-ass species.

I was pretty tired Sunday, even though I slept nine hours, but I just worked slow and steady, didnt stress about how much I got done. Out of breath too much, kept taking little breaks. Man what is up with my health I am an active person who eats well and does not drink too much this is all such bullshit. I need to live to actually use this studio.

Jane was amazing all weekend, what a great kid. Excellent playground time on Sunday morning, caught up with some neighbors. Excellent Bojangles time on Saturday morning, she had a play date on Saturday afternoon. Man that girl knows how to get the most out of a weekend. We both had some Monday blues in the car this morning. Makes me a little sad: she loves school but I can see Monday blues becoming a thing in her life because the weekends are so awesome.

We had a great talk driving to Bojangles about Iran and Trump and gas prices and how they often blame the president for high gas prices but this time it is definitely, completely him. It is hard to explain Trump to a kid: there is no good reason for why the guy is just so stupid. I am trying to balance being honest without completely eradicating her faith in humanity. It is… well. You know.

A balancing act, to say the least.

Shoegaze playlist for you today. Lotta new stuff, couple older hits, well, actually, I guess just one, Mistle Thrush, since I have been listening to them a good bit again lately. Always very exciting back in the day when they played “Shine Away” at the end of their set. You know, I’ve only seen three of these acts live. I need to see more modern, new shoegaze bands.

I have so much more to tell you but I suppose I do not need to blow my roll (money metaphor not ejaculate get your head out of the gutter) on Monday. I can save some for later in the week. What a day what a day my cup runneth over.