Good morning good morning greetings from the Chatham County McDonald’s on 15-501. I am all set up here with my laptop on their blessedly-restored free wi-fi (it was out all last week) in some indeterminate queue to buy an iPhone Duo. Just a (very pretty) blue holding page. No queue info. Doesn’t say whether refreshing helps or not. very different from the ticketmaster experience, which sucks, of course, but at least they tell you a few things. Even if it’s all bots. It’s probably all bots right now waiting in line for this phone, isn’t it? You guys see all those memes of, like, 100,000 people trying to buy Fontaines DC tickets for a mid-size venue in Boston? Madness. Bots love Fontaines DC.

Man I expected more from Apple than waiting in this queue for five minutes. It is not clear to me why on earth I expected more. I do kind of think this phone might be an unexpected hit, though. I hate Apple and am excited to use an iPhone again. The world is full of contradictions.

Why am I at a McDonald’s you ask? Well, aside from the fact that coming to the Chatham McDonald’s at 8 AM is a very popular thing for old dudes to do, it is also THE BIGINNING OF CHORE WEEK. I have today off from work. I have the next ten days off from work. To do chores. It’s going to be amazing. Right after I successfully (hopefully) buy this phone, I gotta hit up the dry cleaner, the hardware store, get my car washed, all in this little strip mall complex. Then I go home and write these words (wait what?), do my quick morning computer chores. Try to get all that done by 10:30 ish, Emma gets up, we gather up…

Well look at that. They let me in and ordered. Done. SIX TO SEVEN WEEKS for delivery, jesus. They said the 23rd, shipping starts, and I was there right at 8, so… yeah. Suspect demand was pretty good. Maybe it’s because I got the 512 instead of 256.

Oh well. I will try and forget about it for another two months.

Anyway, that is done, it’s after 8, my Sausage McMuffin with Egg has been consumed, and as much as I love all these other old guys with phones, laptops and paperbacks, I am off. Talk more later.

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!

We’re listening to a new song by… Bloc Party and The Other Two, aka Gillian and Stephen from New Order? Seems to be some remix. It’s on the “new” page of Apple Music today, which has taken off fucking new albums from the page. Jesus man. Make yourself less useless by the day. This is annoying.

Anyway, back from my errand chores and let me tell you, man. Chore Week already rules, and it’s not even 9AM on the first day. Bought a new phone. Got the car washed. Picked up the dry cleaning, went to the hardware store. Have little piles of supplies on my counter for each impending project. Just the best. So happy. Chores chores chores.

I feel slightly bad that I went to the disco-light car wash without Jane, because she loves it, but I am compensating by setting up a complicated magic trick I plan on performing for her next time we’re at McDonald’s. It’s gonna be great.

Where did I leave off? Right. So after this computer shit, Emma and I will do the recycling and go to Walmart. Then I’ll swing by Chore House and pick up the supplies I need for today’s chores, which are predominantly at our actual home. Lotta of the chores are gonna be over here this week: Emma has (politely, sporadically) grumbled that I do too much home improvement at Chore House compared to our actual home. Which is, of course, valid, but the whole point was that I learn how to do things over there and make sure I don’t mess them up at home, and then apply those learnings to our actual home. But, then, it’s been like three years of constant home improvement over there and I have learned a thing or two, so time to apply some of that to our house.

Today I am fixing my toilet pedal, for the third time. Kind of ridiculous. It’s hard and fiddly getting the thing to work properly with these hollow toilet seats that we have right now for kids. Of course I don’t think Jane even uses the flip-down “kid” portion of the seat anymore, so we will probably switch back to normal seats before too — man this is so interesting isn’t it?

(the toilet pedal is a whole past-GoMoHHAY saga that if you missed, well, let me just tell you: every house should have a pedal to lift up the toilet seat. Especially when the man of the house gets headaches bending over because of a rare disease. And yes, I know some men just sit for their number ones, but I… I dunno man I guess I’m still too Alaskan for that.)

But mainly I am working on getting the network from the basement utility room up the attic. The builders of this house wisely put a cable conduit run in, pull string and everything. So I just need to run the fiber up there, install the switch, get all the wires mounted to the wall, then drill a hole in the ceiling and install the living room AP into the ceiling. It’s been sitting on a shelf for, like, a year or two and it does not provide as much signal in that manner. Plus once this chore is done, I can slowly expand the network shit from the new switch. I aspire to get an AP outside on the east side of our house so the garage has better coverage. That is not part of today’s chore. But planning it is. I have only been to our attic like four times ever, so I need to really suss out what’s going on.

Emma is gonna help guide the fiber and new pull tape up the conduit from the basement while I pull from the attic. FUN TIMES.

So yesterday we went to Jane’s FUN RUN, which was a lovely time. Some teenagers hype up the crowds and kids run themselves exhausted in circles as the grand finale to a week-long fundraising event. They successfully raised their $41k, which they are apparently going to spend on a 3D printer lab which seems awesome. Maybe one of them can render my rack-mount solution for a four-wide installation of Unifi PoE Audio Ports with small Fosi amps on top of them. I really need to learn 3D rendering or find some quick way for these things to get done. Emma is good but I can’t be foisting all my 3D rendering projects off on my wife. Can I?

Anyway, super cute, took lots of pictures, would love to show them to you but there are too many faces of other people’s kids.

Talked to my favorite dad dude and he is hilarious. He’s a civil rights attorney, working on assorted ICE and voting rights cases, so naturally he’s overworked AF. Got to stop wearing a suit and work from home when Covid hit and they, like my company, are one of the rare cool ones that didn’t make everyone come back in to the office post-covid. I mean, they better be, they are a civil rights legal non-profit. Anyway nowadays he just wears a Dickies jumpsuit all day every day and it is fucking hilarious. I love it. Looks like a mechanic while he fights ICE. The best.

We had a nice long talk about privileged upbringings and how much better off our kids have than we did and how this worries us but also we’re not gonna artificially make our kids lives less healthy. This is a very tough thing, and I think about it constantly and don’t think I’ve ever had a great talk with another dad about it. So that was nice. Sadly he is not going to the show tonight that Jane is going to with his daughter, because they are one of those lunatic families that decided to ruin their life with a second kid.

Had a long talk about this recently on one of my slack groups. Really is a huge gulf between parents of one kid, and parents of two kids. Someone said that parents of one kid are closer to childless adults than parents of two. I don’t know if I would go that far, but there is definitely some truth to it. Someone else posted an article that said when you’re a parent of one kid, you can still visit your old life, convince yourself you haven’t abandoned it. You can take a few days off, still go to shows, bars, see friends, etc. And that is definitely true. It is very clear I couldn’t pull this off with a second kid. Once you’ve had two, your old life disappears completely. There is, of course, good and bad in this. But… yeah. It’s a lot more… final of a rupture.

Then Jane went back to school for a few hours then I picked her up and we went to do ROOT CANAL PART ONE. As we left the school, I saw another parent friend, still there three hours later, doing the fun run all over again, with her second kid. So, yeah. Two kids. Respect.

Root canal part one went well. Girl does not take to Nitrous near as readily as her daddy, but the pain killers work at least. She was great. Sat still for nearly two hours while they disinfected everything and killed a few abscesses (will never remember how to spell that word) in her mouth in prep for the actual root canal, now scheduled for the 19th of next month. They put the whole thing on a big TV monitor so I can watch him poke around in my daughter’s mouth. Fun times. She was a real champ.

The whole nitrous thing got me thinking about the time when I was a teenager I got caught trying to buy nitrous cartridges from the cooking store in Fairbanks, and the proprietor knew my mom and told her. And it was a whole thing.

And now you can just fucking buy the things on Amazon in bulk.

Glad I don’t do shit like that anymore. Jesus.

Jane got to pick dinner so we went to Taco Bell, natch. My god that girl loves Taco Bell. They have the Olivia cups, but not her pink Baja Blast, which is a real shame. OH. Speaking of which, KFC is leaving Pepsi for Coke. Which I don’t care about a tall, except we have a combination KFC/Taco Bell down here. Not our main one, but our secondary one. My god I am so unhealthy I have a secondary Taco Bell. But anyway, Taco Bell is explicitly staying with Pepsi, and they have deep partnership with Mt Dew, developed Baja Blast together. So, what the hell is the combination KFC/Taco Bell going to sell?

This stresses me out far more than it should. Which is ridiculous. But hey man, this is the shit men gotta focus on, apparently, if they don’t want to turn into choads or fascists.

BYE.

Ooo we finally have enough for a new covers playlist! Very exciting! It’s been ages. What fun. Love a good covers playlist. Just finished this one out with the very moving cover of the Ted Lasso theme by Brandi Carlisle. Thank you to Liz and Gatti for telling me about Gaytheist, they are a good time. Still kinda wish Underworld played Doot Doot on this tour that woulda been hilarious and wonderful. Yeah this playlist is all over the map, but it’s got a lotta good shit. COVERS.

OKAY. Well I am off to CHORE WEEK. Well that’s a lie, first I need to check revenue at day job, bank balances at both jobs, go through all my tabs, reconcile my credit card transactions and write 750 more words to myself, but I can get all that done in 30 or so. AND THEN CHORES WOOOOOOOOOOO.

I will have so many good chore stories for you next week. XOXO gossip girl.