Good morning hello hi. Tuesday after a holiday. Always rough. I love not being at a job, and also I miss all my level-setting Monday one-on-ones at my job, so I feel like I don’t even know what’s going on.

Nice to have the first dinner of the week be taco tuesday, though.

Dropped Jane off at school, got stuck behind the accursed Honda Fit again this morning, so slow. So slow. Jane drew and ant (we have been watching educational videos about ants, they are crazy) on the drawing app. I let her bring a plushie My Melody to school I’ll probably get guff for it.

Went to the grocery store and braved all the double-parked nurses getting their Starbucks. So many double-parking nurses. What is that about? I mean, most people going to work at that hour around here are nurses, I suppose. Maybe they’re used to not being questioned and being in a hurry. I don’t know. I do know that I am not in any way a parking scofflaw. I never double-park, I never use a loading zone to get my takeout. I park. Like an adult. Emma and I sat in the window of Med Deli Sunday night, looking out onto Franklin Street. So many people park illegally and don’t just get takeout, eat their whole meal at a table while double-parked. Society, man. It’a crumbling.

After the grocery store I had to go to the UNC Eye Ear and Throat Clinic and department of Otolaryngology or however you spell it and whatever that is, to pick up my allergy drops. Allergy drops are amazing. Allergy drops are a sign that we are still progressing as a society. Man I do not even think about my allergies anymore, and they plagued me for 40 years of my life. Poof. Just gone. Magical drops under your tongue. That’s IT. No surgery, nothing. MAGICAL DROPS. Society, man. It is thriving.

Traffic sucked, though. Not, like, anyone being an asshole. Just too many people. The Maps Gods sent me a rural route — by the Boat and RV storage facility, actually. It was looking good. I like our cheesy billboards. I need to get a photo of those. It is weird driving on a beautiful rural country road and seeing like 1,000 cars. Unsettling.

I passed another gas-guzzling Honda Fit and its license plate said #1 MAMA and reader, I got way too upset about that than I care to admit.

#1 MAMA. My god.

Had some good music, though. Maybe I’ll make you a mix tape of it.

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Listening to the Butthole Surfers this morning. In a move that is somewhat surprising, to me at least, Capital Records has reissued the two major-label Butthole Surfers records, Independent Worm Saloon and Electric Larryland. They did this last year but I just got around to buying them. I had hoped that with these reissues, the astronomical prices for OG pressings would go down, but no luck. So I have settled for the very nice sounding reissues. Thus completes my Butthole Surfers vinyl album collection, thirty years in the making. Except for Double Live, which I owned on CD when it came out, and have since sold. This was a mistake. The cheapest copy for sale in America is $180. Alas.

Chores chores chores what a great weekend of chores. It should have been a four day weekend for me, since we had Friday off at work. But I spent Friday lazily and very slowly returning to North Carolina from New York City after seeing that amazing Underworld show. I bought a shirt at the show that has poofy paint on it and I love it and I spent a good amount of time with my wife debating the paints laundry hardiness. I am scared for my new Underworld Poofy Paint shirt.

I really got started on the chores Saturday, so I had three days. Did some gardening Saturday, harvested like 20 or so tomatoes, not bad considering the ongoing deer infestation I have because it takes forever to repair a gate after some mother of a neurodivergent kid ran into it like two months ago. I got like 100 thai peppers, 30 shishito, 30 or so banana peppers, couple jalepenos. I have so much basil I don’t know what to do. Three giant bushes, actually four. Genovese, Thai, and two Siam Queen bushes. Just monstrous. I have four sad chive plants all being overtaken by giant basils. I have a couple sad baby watermelons I took too long to harvest because I got confused and didn’t realize that I had planted baby watermelons and I was waiting for them to get bigger, whoops. My lemon, lime, banana, apple, pear and orange trees haven’t given me shit this year, which was expected, one more year, but disappointing nonetheless. I have way too many roses and zinnias and weeds. I need to get on mulching now that the temperature is finally going down.

Mostly I worked up in the Chore House attic, working on my recording studio. I did a lot of video-making for the structural engineers, starting the next great battle with them: Where Do I Put This Pole. I wired up another garage speaker and the garage Wifi AP. AND I started running a bunch of the low voltage wiring — speakers and Ethernet — along the side of the house to get over to the server room. This is very exciting because I finally got to try out my brilliant idea of using slap bracelets as wiring harnesses. And reader, it is working pretty well!

If I had my druthers, I’d have the slap bracelets be… mmm… gonna say 10% more claspy. The wires can droop a little bit in certain situations. And there is a whole art to be learned on where on the bracelet to staple it to the joist, which end of the bracelet do you wrap first, etc. I suspect I am now the world’s foremost expert on using slap bracelets as wiring harnesses and I am very excited about this.

When cutting the hole in the garage ceiling for the speaker, I lazily did it from the top, not from the garage, so the sheetrock ripped and took a bunch of the paint with it. So Jane and I went to the paint store and I had to buy a gallon minimum of paint so I could have new garage ceiling paint, which seems to be the only place in the whole house that uses that color. Alas. But I do love going to the paint store and I love how they save all your custom colors and you get to name them in their system it is very fun. And Jane got to collect paint chips just like Bluey in Bingo in the majestic Hammerbarn episode. IYKYK.

Also I connected up some old ethernet wiring that was already in the house to the new network, so I could use an already-installed security camera again in my new system. This was a bit of a pain because I rolled the dice and went with the T568B wiring protocol to wire up the one end of the pre-existing wire I could access. Turned out the old wiring was wired in the T568A protocol, oops. Also I just learned that I have forever been putting my RJ45 connectors onto my Cat-6 cable upside down, so all of the previous Ethernet wires I have personally made are wired in what I guess we would call “Inverted T568B.” Whoops. How embarrassing. I thought B was more popular than A but my house seems to be wired in A. Mysterious.

Needed some 1½“ #4 screws — impossible to find, went with #6 and shoved em in — so I went to the hardware store. Ran into my partner Rocky and we sat there having a macho dude contractor dude conversation in the hardware store and I felt like I was secretly actually a contractor and not a sensitive boy goth artist and it was just great. I am very happy when I’m living my weekend contractor life. It is… it is close to the ground. It’s eyes right in front of you. It’s Yoda telling you to keep your mind on what’s happening right here. It feels good. My world is smaller and controllable and I can fix things and build things and there’s a tool for everything. I can see how people get real into that and how it infects their politics. And some of that is Democrat and some is Republican. Mostly contractors like YIMBY building shit and like immigrant labor and have a bunch of Mexican and Peruvian friends. But they don’t like environmental regulation much, and they don’t love taxes.

But really it’s all an illusion and we’re all just meatbags hurtling through space on a fucking supersonic flying rock and at any moment another giant asteroid could wipe us all out. Of the Deccan Traps could go off again. I learned about the Deccan Traps this weekend from a Jane video. Indian volcanic field that may have helped kill the dinosaurs. Or Yosemite could blow. And bandits are robbing you blind because you want to be able to build another storage facility and they’ll clear the red tape for you if you just let them invade another country or something.

I guess what I’m saying is it feels very very healthy and happy to not think about any of that even while it feels very very ethically wrong.

And I think a lot of people have a lot of trouble with that.

Jane’s been great the last few days but Saturday Morning she lost it on me again and it was rough. She never loses it on a weekend morning. Had to go to breakfast without her. I sat forlornly alone at McDonald’s reading articles about Pathological Demand Avoidance and thinking okay yeah, this is her, let’s get her a therapist, blah blah. And we added a timer to her Switch (we’ve already taken away the iPad indefinitely).

Then the next morning she played her switch till the timer went off, and rather than coming and waking me up, she just crafted and read. I came upstairs to find her reading a book about anger management and then telling me very politely she was sorry about yesterday and won’t do it again.

And has been pretty much an angel since.

So, I DON’T KNOW MAN.

Just wonderful drive time music this morning. A lot of unknowns, total surprises, songs I barely remembered or thought about in ages, and a Coldplay song. Started off with a Tricky song that quotes Public Enemy and I told Jane the story about how some kid wrote those lyrics in their notebook and some teacher or something read the lyrics and the kid got in trouble and no one understood they were just Public Enemy lyrics that album sold like a million copies but none of these adults knew any better and the moral of the story was adults are dumb and don’t let them read your notebooks and I am not entirely sure how telling her this story is going to benefit me, but it is the truth.

Except I am just now remembering that this in fact was from Ted Lasso. WHOOPS.

Anyway, this mix rules. It’s so good. You should listen to the whole thing. It is a testament to how freakin good my shuffle mix is. Only song I skipped was “Hung Up” by Madonna but that’s cuz I heard it just last week. Otherwise, this is straight how it came out. That Supercar to Daisy Chainsaw run? SO ROCKING. That Yves Harvis to Makaya McCraven run? So experimental.

Okay I have stalled too long I have to go face work reality now. Miss you.