Good morning good morning. Hello. Hi. How was your weekend? Have a good time? Get a lot of chores done? Did you assist your kid in messing up a jump trick and cause your kid to chip their two front teeth and very badly rotate another one? Did you spend Friday evening in a dark pediatric dentistry practice two towns over, riddled with guilt while your kid spent 40 minutes under nitrous that did nothing, enduring a splint and a large amount of UV-cured resin? No? I am glad for you. It is no fun thing to go through.

It was stupid, it was embarrassing. Why did it not click for me that we should maybe not be doing dumb tricks on a concrete floor, instead of over the padded carpet of the basement where we usually do them? How did that pregnant woman who was standing in line behind us take it? Did she get a glimpse into her own future? Why the fuck was that dude in front of us in line at the Lowe’s hardware taking so f’n long checking out with his Craftsman weed whacker? Why did that dude buy an item from clear across the store, one item, then check out on the other side of the store, passing like six other registers, only to then dispute the price, make us take more than ten minutes in line, and cause my daughter to get antsy and impatient. Why the heck didn’t I listen to Emma when she said we should hoof it over to the other registers.

UGH.

So much blood.

Thing didn’t stop bleeding fully till morning.

Jane is fine, mostly. She handled it all pretty well. I mean, she has two chipped teeth and some temporary braces. I personally don’t think it looks terrible, and Jane doesn’t terribly mind, except she has a tendancy to bite her lower lip and now that is “pokey.” And she is super not into the idea of multiple dentist visits to get her teeth fixed. Not at all.

But hour to hour, minute to minute, it has not been a giant horrible thing for her. Mostly I was worried it was going to traumatize her from doing her climbing, taking risks. Make her a more fearful kid. But that has not happened at all. Took her to the playground during a brief respite from the rain on Sunday, and she climbed right up that tree. Good for her.

And, of course, I am riddled with guilt for assisting her in these dumb jump tricks. I was trying to keep her entertained while this dude disputed the price of his weed whacker! We do this trick all the time she’s never whiffed it.

UGH.

We went to urgent care first, luckily nearby. The dude asked whether he could use his stupid-ass AI notetaking app. Apparently had not hear about the Pope’s encyclical. I, being mortified and horrified by my role in the accident, did not feel it was my place to raise a ruckus right at that moment. So I deferred to Emma. Hopefully we made the guy uncomfortable enough that he knows in the future that asking can be contentions. Also zero discussion of where the data was going. Cool, cool.

He did, however, strongly imply that we should probably get the thing looked at as soon as possible and not wait till morning. So Emma called our dentist, who left an after-hours number to another clinic. Then Emma called that one. It left another number. She called that one. That one called right back, asked for details, which the Urgent Care physician had given us. She decided it was urgent enough to look at tonight. So we stopped at home on the way, got Brown Bear, some caffeine, peed, and headed up to Hillsboro Pediatric Dentistry.

Forty-five minutes of dental work. She was a pretty great dentist, though. Kept telling Jane “10 more minutes almost done” and Jane bought it each time. She had a giant stuffed toothbrush plushy that was very cute.

She was so tired by the end, she went to sleep right away.

Tomorrow morning we bring her into her normal dentist and begin the reconstruction journey. What fun.

Slight aside: Her normal dentist, Dr. Ricker, has the most charming, personal professional biography I have ever seen online.

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Listening to Neil Young’s Mirror Ball this morning. Apple Music told me it was new. It is from 1995. Pearl Jam were his backing band on it. I bet that was fun for them. I somehow missed this, his 21st album, but it makes sense, I am a half-hearted Neil Young fan at best, though I do feel like I’ve been making an effort to listen to each new album since… well I guess not back to 1995. I sorta ignored him in the 90s because the press kept saying he was in a feedback phase and I thought I was gonna get the Jesus and Mary Chain or something and, yeah, barely any feedback at all. I felt robbed.

But you know what? This album is okay.

Black Box Recorder played their first gigs in seventeen years last week. In England, of course. The setlists are almost perfect. Every song is fantastic. I personally would have liked to see “Weekend” and their perfect, anthemic “School of Rock” in the set, but come the heck on how awesome would it be to see Black Box Recorder live?

How did I not even know about this?

Other than grievously wounding my child, my weekend was lovely. SO MANY CHORES.

I installed an exhaust fan in what we call the “box room” in our house. The room where the HVAC unit is, where the 3D printer is, where Emma does her screen printing. Drilled a hole in the side of the house and bob’s your uncle. The secret to being afraid of drilling holes into the side of your house is just go ahead and drill a hole in the side of your house. Seal with Lexel on the outside, spray foam on the inside. Easy as pie. I hooked it up to a little rocker switch. It’s right by our electrical panels so if I were a more handy handyman I could even set it up with its own light switch but… there are limits to my knowledge and confidence. Electricity scares me.

But mostly I focused on the studio, three days of work in the studio. After a solid day of adding more subfloor, I finally got to the milestone I have been working toward for, oh, six months. The drip pan is now back under the HVAC unit, with me having raised the floor four inches underneath the HVAC unit, all while it never moving in height.

It is not perfect, but given the absurd solution I had to implement, it is pretty f’n good. Basically I thought about how exactly to accomplish this every night for months and it has all come to fruition. No unexpected problems presented themselves. It went precisely according to plan, which is… unprecedented.

I would feel very proud of myself if a) I had managed to clean up after myself afterwards, b) I had gotten the thing perfectly straight. It is laying crooked underneath the HVAC and although this is completely irrelevant to the drip pan’s efficacy, it is driving me crazy, kept me up all night. I have a plan to fix that but will involve using tin snips in very tight quarters and more of the liquid plastic I have been using, Flex Seal. And oh my god that stuff stinks so much. Which is why I did not clean up after myself. It stunk too much in the attic after sealing up the cut seams in the drip pan I had to make in order to get it into place.

Also, the stuff looks like spooge, which does not help matters.

I have important clarifying information and updates about the term “Chicken Walker” thanks to Sean T Drinkwater. The term originated long ago, in the OT era, behind the scenes. Phil Tippet at all, the model makers and SFX artists, called them Chicken Walkers. And I was incorrect it did not first appear in-universe in Clone Wars, but, rather, 2004’s Star Wars Battlefronts. How and where chickens exist in a galaxy far, far away remains an unknown mystery.

Oh also I promised you a photo of the tomato trellis. So I took one for you this weekend. I did not need to do much gardening this weekend, everything is in the beds. It rained the whole weekend anyway, so I wouldn’t have been able to get out there much. Boy the plants are happy about all that rain. The tomatoes are growing fast now.

This is where the Jane anecdote would go, though I suppose half of today’s edition was a Jane anecdote. Starting tomorrow, Jane and I will have a week alone together. She is excited for it, because Mommy and Daddy always talk about boring adult stuff when they’re together but when one of them is gone she gets all the other one’s attention. I asked her in the car this morning if she ever found any of the boring adult stuff interesting. She said “I always listen, and sometimes I find some of it interesting but I am not going to tell you what.” Such a secretive kid.

I approve. Don’t tell your parents anything.

Don’t have a playlist for you today, but Laurie Anderson stopped by the Tiny Desk, so that is a special treat. Ans she does Dirty Boulevard I mean come on. National treasure, Laurie Anderson. Love her recent opera about Amelia Earhart.

OK have a good Tuesday. Oh man it’s already Tuesday. Crazy. I was thinking it was Monday. Oh man four day week. Thank Blixa.