Good morning good morning greetings from Chore House and CHORE WEEK. Man I might be taking this chore thing a little too far. My daughter certainly thinks so. She just imagines Chore Week to be a constant stream of unpleasant tasks like teeth brushing. She is so, so wrong.

Not to say there haven’t been setbacks in days 1-3 of our ten-day Chore Week. Oh lordy. There have been so many setbacks. But thats the thing about when you’re doing something you love: setbacks are just part of the process, dare I say, part of the fun. Maybe, maybe not.

Went to the Circle K this morning in the hopes of finding an alternative to McDonald’s for a local Old Man Morning Loitering Spot. Sadly, they do not have booths in there. I thought Circle K had booths. I guess that’s just Refuel. Sad. Also there was definitely sugar in their bacon egg and cheese wtf. Alas.

A thing I am wrestling with here in Chore Week is that I have a bajillion things on my list of things I want to get done. I have so many things, it behooved me to map them all out on my calendar to make sure I allotted enough time for all of them. But like all good plans, that plan was shot to hell in the first few minutes.

Chore one was to get fiber to the attic at home. There was a big orange wire conduit with pull tape in the IT closet and it, I THOUGHT, went right to the attic. I had even gone up there and checked. Shoulda been easy as pie. I tied the fiber and a new pull cord to the old one, had Emma in the IT closet ready to feed the cables through the conduit, and I went up to the attic to where the conduit ended.

And I tugged on the conduit and… it was just a one-foot long segment of unused conduit. I had, apparently, previously seen this and assumed it was the end of the conduit in the IT closet. But NOPE. Nothing.

And for an hour Emma and I both searched and searched, but there was no conduit.

Where does that conduit in the IT room go, I wonder?

No idea.

I have now concocted a cockamamie plan to run the fiber on the outside of the house, necessitating the purchase of new and different supplies at the hardware store. Oh my god I have already been to the hardware store so many times. It is ridiculous.

But I do not know what day I will manage to enact this alternate plan.

Setback one.

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We were listening to Angel Olsen, but I had to turn it off because the Lowe’s delivery driver called. Which was setback two. This material was supposed to come Saturday between 11:30 and 4, and me and the fam were at breakfast at 10 AM when the woman called from the gate telling me she was here. I was not. So she is coming again today. In about ten minutes. At least it’s the woman who doesn’t mind putting the OSB in the garage. Some of them won’t do that for you.

We’ve had some small victories, though. I thought I needed to replace a doorknob, but it was just a loose set screw and I repaired it. Took ten minutes instead of the 90 I had allotted. Of course I learned this after I bought a replacement doorknob, so I had to go return that to the hardware store. But still. That was nice.

I’ve also been finding that a lot of chores get halfway done and then I need a supply or something and I have to put it on pause. So I am halfway done with the chore of cleaning and re-wiring the truck. I used Goof Off to get rid of all the tape sticky stains from my previous half-assed wire runs, but Amazon has twice now failed to send me a specific USB cable I cannot get locally. So I can’t finish that chore. Today I am going on attempt two to fix the drip irrigation in the greenhouse, which involves repairing a hose and my god it is so hard to repair a hose. I keep buying the wrong part, or the clamp doesn’t clamp, or… something. I may well spend three hours on that today, that’s just the first stop in the drip chain. If I get the drip fixed today and nothing else, I should be happy. But of course I have allocated six more things I’d like to do today: clean the greenhouse gutters, blow out the debris, plant lettuce in there, move the fruit trees in there, get the heaters set up for winter, plant snow peas and garlic in the outdoor raised beds. My god if I get all that done it will be amazing.

Yesterday I spent the day working at home, on the outside, re-doing the conduit and all the ethernet and fiber cables that leave the house. I had half-assed it when I first installed it (of course, when will I learn this lesson), and I needed to fix it all before I could get the turtle dock camera repaired (which, I admit, I also half-assed the first time). But it all went great! Yesterday went great! A perfect day of chores, getting exactly what you hope to get done, done.

I would like at least one more of those in Chore Week that would be so amazing.

The thing about half-assing things the first time, though, is sometimes it works! You don’t want to over-engineer! Take the dock cam (distinct from the turtle cam). I also half-assed that thing and it is still working like a champ, no problems. Any additional effort working on it any further would have been wasted.

Like Kenny Rodgers said, you gotta know when to half-ass em, and know when to do em right.

Lowe’s driver is here brb.

SUCCESS. That woman’s awesome. Really is the best forklift driver. She will put your stuff in the garage. She gets tips. Other drivers are just… not helpful.

The other annoying thing that happened this weekend is that my Lightning died when we were, like, 20 minutes from home at our beloved BBQ joint The Pig. And let me tell you, when a Ford F-150 Lightning’s 12-volt battery dies, it is disturbing. First you get every single error the vehicle has to offer, so you’re told the brakes are shot and the driver’s seat won’t move anymore and there’s been an electrical overload and the emergency break is broken and the frunk is broken and and and. Then all that stops and the thing completely dies. AND THEN it starts doing this really loud THUMP THUMP THUMP through the speakers at about the rate of a heart beat, except it is wildly erratic. It does this for, like, five minutes, which utterly terrified my daughter. Then it slowly dies. Like the heartbeat just slows down to… nothingness. Then 60 seconds go by and… one last thump. SO CREEPY.

We had to get an uber home. That was fun. Real nice Lexus, all of us crammed in the back.

Got home, Emma did bedtime while I watched a ton of Youtube videos and we became increasingly sure that what happened was simply that the battery died, like in any other car. And that a jump would fix it. Not a jump from another vehicle, mind you. Can’t do that. But you can use a jump battery pack.

So we put Jane to bed, grammed Emma’s jump battery pack, and drove back to the pig and jumped it.

Oh also for some reason you don’t put the connectors on the actual battery. There’s this pointless, complicated thing where they make you jump it from some special leads built into the frame of the car? Maybe it’s a convenience thing because the car is so big regular jumper cables wouldn’t reach the battery from another car? Except you’re not supposed to jump it from another car! No idea.

Now. You may be asking yourself why an electric vehicle has a small, normal-car-sized battery at all. And why, when it dies, you can’t just use that giant big honking battery on the car, which at the time had 60% charge. NO IDEA. The Lightning is not a ground-up EV, obviously, Ford rapidly made it from the normal F-150. But later, we researched this and it’s all the same thing going on on Grammy’s Mach-E, which is much more of a ground-up vehicle. I mean, I guess I get it: OPM parts manufacturers make the parts they have, and Ford’s not gonna commission a million new, custom parts for a low-volume vehicle. But it is kind of insane.

Also, makes me wonder: Do Model 3s have a car battery as well? Is this universal? Reddit tells me yes, but that was 5 years ago and they are always iterating those things. Seems dumb. We should not do this!

What’s weird is since that jump, the Lightning has not had a single problem. Been three days now. I purchased a bettery jump kit (the one Project Farm recommended, of course), and keep it charged and in the truck at all time, just in case, but so far so good. WHY? What discharged the battery to begin with?

I have been beset with a million financial emergencies lately: root canals and dented garage doors and Ford jacking me six thousand dollars on a recall repair and a new washing machine and and and… look I am not a poor man but it’s been like $30k of unexpected expenses this summer and fall and I am exhausted and do not want to spend more money on my truck right now.

But I am kind of wigged out it happened at all.

A mystery.

Jane’s been mostly good. Not as angelic as last week, definitely some stubbornness and return to aggro. It’s been a shame.

OH but we did two fun things this weekend:

1) Her girl scout troop raised a ton of money and supplies for the local animal rescue clinic and we brought it all to the clinic and they gave us all a tour and oh my god I want to adopt so many cute kittens it is out of fucking control. SO MANY CUTE KITTENS. SO MANY CUTE LITTLE GIRLS. Just a cute overload. Ridiculous. I have this adorable picture of the whole troop sitting in the back of the Lightning posing with all of the supplies and it is so dang cute. But I do not put photos of other people’s kids on the internet, so you’re just going to have to trust me.

2) We took Jane to her first club concert, the Linda Linda’s, at one of my favorite venues, Haw River Ballroom. Conveniently and coincidentally, one of her best friends was going as well. And then we ran into another friend with his daughter, and he was with a friend who had a daughter, and then we made friends with a woman and her sister and her daughter, and we carved out a little place at the front of the balcony for them all and oh my god it was just the cutest.

The Linda Lindas new album is getting very proto-metal and Jane was dancing around like a lunatic to it and I very annoyingly said that she was one day going to like Daddy Music.

Her and her friend had the best time, but it started late and we all left early seriously the place was like half full by the end of the main set. Jane doesn’t know about encores yet, lol. So we just got out. And she was so tired on the way home just adorable.

We got home, I picked her up, carried her to bed and she passed out before my eyes.

PARENTING FUCK YEAH.

Ummm… The share button is gone from Apple Music? I can’t share a playlist? This is so weird. Is it just because I’m on my laptop here at Chore House? Or is something more fundamentally wrong? Well that sucks. Here’s an awesome shoegaze playlist you can’t actually listen to. No idea. I will try again tomorrow. Eek. Might have to switch back to Spotify sooner than anticipated here.

Until tomorrow, friends. Peace, love, and CHORES.