Weekend!
From start to finish, the last two weeks have had a *HUGELY* dumb set of bad things happen.
I broke a tooth which required a crown.
My computer finally gave up the ghost.
Maribou’s laptop finally gave up the ghost.
I took the car into the dealership for an oil change and they explained to me that my alignment was off which was causing premature wear on my tires to the point where they were not going to rotate them ever again so I needed to buy new tires.
We had to euthanize our beloved little cat.
And then, on Saturday night as we were smack dab in the middle of laundry, the dryer gave up the ghost and we had to switch to drying racks and shower curtains and hanging stuff over doors.
I’m sure I’m forgetting something or other but that something or other happened too.
And then, to top everything off, a conversation with an acquaintance about everything that happened resulted in them telling us “well, you know, Mercury just came out of retrograde.”
Any one of these things would have made for a crappy day (and a couple of them would have made for crappy weeks in and of themselves).
And the Mercury thing was probably the dumbest frame that could have possibly been placed around the dumbest couple of weeks ever. Ugh. Good riddance.
So this weekend we say “Goodbye to all that!” And never, ever, spend money ever again.
So… what on your docket?
Sorry to hear about your cat.
I think I’ve been waylaid into helping the lady friend by The Cure concert tickets for later this summer.
On the plus side I’ll be eating Masitas de Puerco Fritas and washing it down with a mojito or two. Maybe even get some Tres Leches for dessert.
Then, perhaps, I can spend a day to myself grilling kebobs and playing Doom after I get that cute girl in class into “Giant Killer Triangle”. 🙂Report
While I join the chorus commiserating @jaybird and @maribou for the loss of their feline companion first among a list of stressors, it sounds like you’ve got a pretty decent weekend lined up, @damon !
I’m pretty well booked up too:
Drinks and dinner with another couple tonight at Ye Local Steakhaus Friday. It’s close enough that we can walk there and stumble home afterwards.
Brew day and tri-tip barbecue tomorrow. I’ll have three brewer’s assistants to help, and then feed, so it’ll be a big day.
Hiking Vasquez Canyon on Sunday. You all know Vasquez Canyon: it’s where Kirk fought the Gorn. About half an hour’s drive from my house.
Monday we’re planning an expedition into the city to find and sample craft brew. Fellow L.A. area folks interested in joining up to bend elbows, let me know.Report
Warning! Warning!
I read the thing about helping procure tickets and immediately klaxons went off. You’re, like, going *WITH* her, right?Report
Yes, going with. Not paying. But I do have to go to the concert. Now, the Cure, I’m game to see, I’m just not big on concerts. I prefer smaller venues. I saw Steel Pulse in college at some bar venue and was 20 feet from the band and the noise level wasn’t super loud. That was nice. Sitting on the grass with bass driving through my soft tissues isn’t .
At least the venue isn’t hours away.Report
Bummer about having to go to a big venue but at least it’s a decent live band.Report
Dude, that’s an impressively bad string of luck.
I am very sorry to hear about your cat. I know that’s hard.Report
For the most part, I’ve regained my ironic distance and I have intellectualized the whole thing again.
There’s seriously an essay about tailored euthanasia that needs to be written.
Thank you.Report
I would love to read it.
I was just ruminating yesterday on my tendency to intellectualize emotions, and therefore at times fail to fully understand what they are (or to even recognize them at all).. Most of the time, this is counterproductive, but with grief, I think it may be the only viable coping mechanism, a sort of dam that will keep grief at a bearable flow, rather than a paralyzing flood.Report
My friend’s acute liver failure is over — we think. He’s coming down off the overdose of steroids now…Report
Best of luck to everybody.Report
As a graduation present to my sister-in-law, who just finished her master’s degree, we agreed to take our three nephews for the weekend so her and my brother could take a quick trip to Nashville for some R&R. So we will have three little monkeys, ages 7, 6 and 4 to contend with until Sunday afternoon. The older two are easy. If you need a break you can plop them in front of the Xbox and they will happily entertain themselves. For the 4 year-old, the advice we were given by my brother was, “If he is out of sight for more than five minutes, assume he is getting to mischief.” So that will be fun.
Hoping the rest of the weekend is blissfully quiet and peaceful. Maybe going to try to catch the new Xmen movie on Monday.Report
How far are you from Kentucky Kingdom?Report
15 minutes by car. We haven’t been there in years though.Report
Congrats to our sister-in-law! And good on you guys for being temporary parental units for the holiday weekend. Three kids that age can be tough. (Or at least I assume it can? Knittingniki and I never made the decision to switch from man-to-man to zone)Report
With two daughters, I of course always wondered about having a son. These days I am thrilled to be an uncle (we have 5 nephews total) and happy to send them home right before I admit defeat. The last time we did this I discovered the natural competitiveness of boys could work in our favor. It’s amazing how tidy they will be at dinner if you tell them the cleanest spot will get extra dessert or how fast they will clean up their mess if the winner gets more video game time.Report
Heh.
With our boys, we discovered that those kinds of strategies worked, but had a short shelf-life. The day came for each boy where you could see the wheels turning, and them figuring out that not going to go clean up a mess was better than extra desert. At the end of the day, all of our parenting strategies were eventually reduced to “because I said so.”
But if you’ve only got them for the weekend, it sounds like a perfect strategy. You guys should have a blast.Report
Four-year-olds are awesome. And while they are natural mischief makers, 99% of their mischief is harmless, totally fun, and the sort you often have to hide a chuckle while offering redirection. But the cool thing is you can still totally play with them. Like, really actually play. As they get older, they’re less interested you in that role. And I don’t mean “play” like “play videogames” or “play Monopoly” or “play baseball”. I mean, those are all examples of time well spent. But it can be SOOOO much fun to sit there while a four-year-old makes and serves you play dough food… especially if you challenge the limits of their cooking skills (and various cognitive processes) by requesting broccoli milkshakes and blueberry pizza and the like. It’s a hoot!
And if you want an easy home made play dough recipe that will keep him engaged to both make alongside with you and then play with for hours, holler.Report
My son purchased a very Lego-like set of bendy straws last week at Oregon Museum of Science and Industry. In the not too distant past, I’ve eaten my share of broccoli milkshakes, both play dough and all too real, and so I recommend the straws. Way less clean up and the invention probably won’t work well enough that you’ll be forced to drink much of the “mystery juice”.Report
Half the windows in my house are being replaced tomorrow. The current ones are what is known in the industry as “contractor grade,” which is a delicate way of saying “cheap crap.” I have been wanting to replace them with good ones for years, but this is a startlingly expensive proposition. So I am doing the front, south-facing side with this year’s tax refund, and will do the back next year.Report
Just randomly, what’s that running you a window? Because I’ve got at least 6 windows pushing 30 years and leaky that need to be replaced with storm windows….Report
I don’t have the numbers in front of me, but going from memory it comes out to around $500 each, including installation. These aren’t top-of-the-line windows (it’s not a top-of-the-line house) but one tier below that: double paned sealed, with argon in between, and made so you can tilt them out in the unlikely event that you feel inspired to clean them. I went through Home Depot. I assume they subcontract the actual work, but they have reputation to consider, so I am more confident than with calling up Joe’s Windows (even if Joe ends up being the subcontractor). Renewal by Anderson has a sterling reputation, but you pay quite a lot for it. Or you can ask around the neighborhood. Somebody will have done this, and have an opinion on the quality of the work.Report
We’ve replaced all our original windows now. The originals were wood-framed but slid open and closed horizontally (“sliders” locally). Looked good but didn’t seal worth a damn. The replacement casements were painfully expensive, given the very large glass area. Killed the drafts and made temperatures around the house much more consistent.
Other than the usual things, had our ductwork sealed. The initial flow test showed total leakage equivalent to an opening 12×12″. After sealing, that was down to about 4×3″. Made a noticeable different in how much air got delivered out at the end of the long duct runs.Report
30 years ain’t bad. You ever get a blower door test done?
If your house is that old, you might want to check the insulation…
Windows,as always, are the LAST thing to fix.Report
I’ve already handled the attic insulation and replaced the ductwork. I can literally feel a breeze from the old windows (several were replaced with Gulf storm windows about 15 years ago. They’re fine) — windows which are probably closer to 50 than 40 years old, single-pane too.
Doors are being re-sealed this summer (new gaskets and paint job, that’s it).Report
Did you airseal the attic?Report
The first major renovation I made was to replace the sketchy aluminum wiring and the electrical box. The house was built in the 1970s, when they thought aluminum wiring was a good idea, and the box was just old. The windows are in part an esthetic issue. They just bug me. Looking at the insulation would be a good project, but I suspect that having a furnace guy come in and spend some contemplative time in my basement will come before that.Report
Aluminum wiring? God, I’ve seen that shit blow up. Set the whole wall on fire sort of thing.
We were lucky on that sort of thing (1930’s house, paranoid builders) — still needed to ground the 2nd story outlets, but we could just wire the ground to the outside of the wire.
As long as you aren’t expecting to get back in “resale value” what you pay for… eh, have fun with windows!
We paid a ton to get our ducting reworked, and had to do half the math ourselves, anyway (with the quite competent contractor swearing we wouldn’t get enough airflow) — you really shouldn’t expect contractors to do fluid dynamics…Report
We’re packing up, getting ready for our move to downtown LA. We’re doing the reverse Ricky/ Lucy move, from the suburbs to the urban core.
I have the Jefferson’s theme as an earworm.Report
Moving sucks. I’ve told Maribou that, next time we have to move, we’re just setting fire to the house and we can start over in the new city from scratch.Report
That thought definitely crossed my mind last time I moved. I’d rather just buy all new stuff than have to deal with moving it all.
Perpetually on my todo list is getting rid of almost all of the stuff I still have in boxes.Report
They say that if you move twice without opening the box, just throw the box away unopened.
You’ll be happier.Report
ooh that’s interesting. Where to and why? Where are you moving from?Report
I work in downtown, and we live in Orange County, so currently I commute by train.
Which is better than car, but now that we are empty nesters (her daughter moved away to college) we decided that having a 15 minute walk to work is a vast improvement.
Being born and raised in suburban So Cal makes urban living a very strange and wonderful thing.
Like a lot of people in my position, everything I know about urban living comes out of movies and books set in New York- for better or worse!
Next to our apartment is a fire escape- I half expect the Sweathogs to drop in while the Mrs. cooks dinner, or to see a naked ugly guy across the street like in Friends, or some night, if Trump is elected, for everyone to throw open their windows and scream “I’m Mad As Hell!” like in Network.Report
Chip, even though I give ya a lot of hell, I hope this move is a easy one and the new place serves you well.Report
When you’re all settled in, I’m interested in Angel City Brewery. You up for it, @chip-daniels ?Report
Absolutely- that is one of the places I have always wanted to visit!Report
Regards on the tough times Jay.
My 10% pay cut went into affect this week, the entire staff was hit with it. Furloughs are supposedly next. The last three jobs, I volunteered several weeks, and they are always like, “furlough you, hell no get back to work”. Maybe I will actually have some time off soon.(how ya hangin’ in there Saul?)
The back, shoulders and legs are finally working the fatigue out from pulling the well pump a couple weeks ago. The defect was pin holes rusted through the motor housing. The new pump is in place and hummin’ pretty well.
Mom passed a little over a month ago. It’s been a slow process on the weekend, sorting stuff into donations, junk and those few bits of sentimental treasure. I guess I would distantly relate to what Oscar has mentioned and posted about, and hope he is doing well.
Volunteered my surveying skills to a friend to align a stretch of fence tomorrow. Maybe catch up on a missed episode or two of The Americans. Thanks again to whoever mentioned that it was a good series.
Tomato plants are a foot high, okra about 6″. The lone survivor orange tree has a couple green oranges growing. Amy has been requesting squash even though the season is late to plant. May prep a few square feet and plant it. It’s been an unusual season anyhow, worth the gamble.Report
My condolences for your loss. And I’m sorry to hear about the pay cut.
It’s been a weird season here too – we had the whole garden in and most of it sprouting weeks before the traditional (pre-climate change) wisdom on when you’re past the risk of frost. With the pelting rain we got last week, I’ll probably have to replant half the greens, as a lot of the sprouts got flattened. Tomatoes are certainly not a foot high around here, and okra is a pleasant fantasy.Report
@dragonfrog,Where do you live? I live just north of Baton Rouge and we got a very weird winter/spring deal. Basically we had absolutely no winter and a much cooler than normal spring that hung on for weeks past the usual date when the temp and humidity reminds me of a lousy sauna.
We have been getting bell peppers and some cucumbers already. The tomato plants are almost five feet tall and about to start turning red so hurray for weeks on end of home grown maters. Laziness struck and the only other things I planted this year are Japanese egg plants, cantaloupes and watermelons all of which are doing great.Report
Yeah, this is the first year in YEARS where we haven’t put the AC up by now. More than that, we haven’t had the couple of weeks where just opening the window is a good option. It’s just been too danged chilly.
Last night, for example, it was in the 40’s! I had to bust out one of my hoodies again to fully enjoy the basement.
This is some weird stuff.Report
@jaybird, We turned our AC on for the first time two days ago. It has been strange. There was even a itty-bitty hurricane in January which is very, very rare.
But things are returning to normal. I am looking out my window and watching a gecko run across the back porch. The temp and humidity are high enough that my belt, besides holding up my pants, has double duty and turned into a salt water dam. I am also thinking about getting out the chain saw so I can cut a path to the river and swim.Report
Opened up the whole-house fan a couple of weeks ago (yay, living in a high semi-arid climate!). The World’s Most Sophisticated Whole-House Fan Controllerâ„¢ will let us keep things between about 66 and 76 all summer. There are occasional years when the AC doesn’t run. I’ve been thinking that I need to build a new version of the controller. Use a Raspberry Pi for the controller. No screen on the wall this time, just a temperature sensor and a panic-mode stop button. Run it from a browser.Report
Edmonton, Alberta. We got not much in the way of cold, and very little in the way of snow, this past winter. In spring, at times when there’s usually still snow on the ground, melt water running down the roads in the afternoons turning to new and surprising ice in the early mornings, and the ground wet with melt water, it was already dry enough you had to water anything you want growing.Report
@dragonfrog, That explains the one foot maters. I have heard that the artic is really getting hit hard by climate change with temps running about five degrees above normal.
It has been eons since I was last there but I always liked being in Edmonton when I was on my way back to Alaska. It meant I was close to the Alcan and plus I was out of the plains and back in the trees. I love trees much more than grassland.Report
Oh they’re nothing like a foot – maybe six inches. Only thing over a foot is the garlic.Report
Thanks df, and sorry to hear about the greens. I remember years ago in Oklahoma, we had these storms that produced down drafts. A type of wind that came straight down from above, hit the ground and flowed sideways. It would flatten an entire garden or up to 40 acres of farm crops. They happened more often than hail, tornadoes, wild fires or the occasional cloud of locust.Report
What does aligning a fence entail?
That sucks about Mom. It’s good that you’re keeping busy. Or it’s not bad that you’re keeping busy. It’s good that you can.Report
Thanks Jay, mom lived a pretty interesting and active life, and most people who knew her, smile at the mention of her. She went relatively quick which was a small blessing. About the saddest part is grandmother at 97 has outlived her youngest daughter.
Normally alignment involves running the bottom wire of the fence and stretching it tight, the tension of the wire creates a straight line to build the fence but that’s only for fences that are a few hundred yards in length.
My friend has a strange piece of property where one side ended up being the longest edge of a triangle, so we’re looking at about a half mile stretch. There is a instrument called a level that can be used, but at those distances small errors in angles become feet.
So we are going with a local surveyors GPS rover running off of a system that uses Real Time Kinematics. There are several ‘base station’ units in the area to work with. I tested the system with TxDOT and several surveyors benchmarks and we’re all hitting within an inch or less of each other. The work will involve locating on the ground, three locations that he can set post to stretch the wire.
That’s kinda the easy description. Getting sub inch locations with a GPS rover requires a lot of statistics, plus knowing the parameters of the satellites overhead, and the state of the ionosphere(Dilution of precision). It is a little more difficult because the particular rover we have doesn’t have static data recording. Ha, that’s for sissies!Report
Sorry to hear about your mom. Dealing with all of the estate stuff is the worst. I let my mom’s estate sit in limbo for half a year just because I couldn’t deal with it.Report
Sorry to hear it was a difficult time for you, but I am glad you took the time you needed.
It completely crushed my first wife when her father passed. I tried like hell to help her through but there was some core faith she had in God that was shattered, it got bad, and I had to remove myself from the path of destruction that followed. I recommend anyone having trouble with it to reach out, if they can.
One thing that helped me through was to scan the collection of moms pictures into digital format, and send them to family members. She was truly a pioneer of her era. Salt of the earth and free in ways few people would understand.Report
that’s a hell of a run of suck, jaybird. bleh.Report
I am sorry about you guy’s cat @jaybird
We took tiny cat (Zwak, 15yo and 4lbs) into the vet a couple weeks ago, and while blood cell count was really high, so antibiotics! Went back, and WBC count was higher, so possibly cancer. She doens’t seem to be in pain, so just keeping things chill for her right now. It sucks, she has been with me longer than my wife.
On a plus note, AAA baseball tomorrow. Always fun!Report
Go to the hippie pet store and buy the hippie roast duck marinated in quail egg gravy (or whatever goofy stuff they happen to have). A packet of that from time to time gives a lovely moment of respite for the humans and the cat really seems to enjoy it too.Report
Sorry to heat about your cat too, @aaron-david . Sending many wishes and crossed fingers.
The baseball sounds great, though. I have discovered that the older I get, the more I enjoy going to an AAA baseball game over aMLB one.Report
Thanks @tod-kelly and @jaybird she’s hanging in there, but we went through this last year with our dog, and boy was that suck.
Yes, AAA is the most fun outside of a good college football game (though there is a park around the corner from me that has little league, and that aint to bad to sit and watch, better when its not your kid!)Report
@jaybird and Maribou, I am so, so sorry to hear about the passing of one of your beloved family. I wish I could say I’ve never had to do that depressing and ugly task with a kitty or puppy of my own, but… oy.
I’m sorry as well to hear that Everything Falls Apart, and kind of all at once in the same money flow cycle. I also wish I could say I’ve never lived through that. But I’ve definitely had times where it’s just one thing after another. I’d have just figured out how I was going to jury rig the budget so we could, ya know, eat, and then Niki would come in and say, “I’ve got more bad news. The dishwasher is overflowing” (or something), and man, I swear I would just want to cry. Hope you guys are doing ok with the stress levels. (And very selfishly, hoping that the plane tickets to PDX have already been paid for, so that I get see you soon.)Report
I just checked with Maribou and we bought our PDX tickets and hotel rooms *MONTHS* ago.
So that, at least, will be an oasis that I am very much looking forward to visiting.Report
@tod-kelly Oh yeah, we bought that trip weeks ago. And my trip to Vegas for a memorial in August. We did not yet buy the Jaybird-his-Mom-and-Maribou-go-to-visit-the-aging-Canadian-relatives tickets, but they aren’t … negotiable, so we’ll probably still do that too.
Torn between ” AUGH IF I KNEW ALL THIS WAS HAPPENING I WOULDN’T HAVE BOUGHT SUCH AND SUCH” (trips, etc.) and “THANK GOODNESS I DIDN”T KNOW ALL THIS WAS HAPPENING OR I WOULDN’T HAVE BOUGHT SUCH AND SUCH”.
One of the few times in my life that I’ve been deeply grateful for the credit economy. In the moment if not necessarily philosophically. (No politics!)Report
In that case, I will publicly put on my empathetic-looking face and nod slowly with a knowing frown, while inside I will smile and dance myself a selfish little jig.Report
I have a pretty damn busy weekend, and sadly most of it is work stuff. I’ve been asked to produce a regular live show for a theatre/microbrewery here in town. It’s something I have never, ever done before, and I’m quickly learning that a lot of ducks need to be put in a row in order to make such a thing happen and not suck.
I’d been hoping to take the weekend off and relax, but we just got an offer from iHeartRadio to be a sponsor and do free promos for the show on its stations. They want to start in a couple of weeks, but say they can’t start till we have our entire media, social media and marketing apparatus put together, which until now we weren’t planning on having ready until July. So that means a lot of stuff has to come together in a really short period of time. And that means I’m going to have the opposite kind of weekend then I had been hoping for.
I do have one dinner party I am going to. The Evite told me the dinner will be “cat themed.” I have no idea what to make of this.Report
Dude, from your first appearance in the group chat, we all knew you needed to be on the radio. That is awesome.
As for “cat themed”, if my experience is any indication, it involves sitting quietly with some herbs and just hanging out but getting really pissed off if someone comes within your personal bubble. Sounds heavenly!Report
Knowing the hosts, I am pretty sure that will not be the vibe of the evening.Report
Maybe it means immediately stealing someone’s seat when they get up and then looking at them as if you’ve not only been sitting there the whole time, but that you built that very chair and invented the idea of sitting and the fact that you have to take the effort to make a pained face to communicate such is only adding to the irritation. Then falling asleep. Then biting someone near you and acting like you didn’t do it AND they were inviting it by whatever they happened to be doing at the time.
Also, assume this position at the least appropriate time possible…Report
Thats actually much better than the plan I came up with myself, which was to simply mark everything in their home that I thought ought to belong to me.Report
That’s pretty good too – bring post-it notes maybe?Report
Wait, @tod-kelly , who is the “we” you refer to in the second paragraph? The microbrewery? Regardless, badass!
And, yes, @jaybird is absolutely right: Tod has a voice for radio. A face, too. :-pReport
@kazzy The “we” is myself and the paltry* team I have put together.
The “micro” in the micro-brewery is a little misleading, because now they own a big chunk of Portland’s main non-stadium venues and scores of locations in Oregon. They are going to be doing their own PR and promo stuff for the show, but the putting together of the actual on-stage show, the behind the scenes machinery, and the brand is all on the Seven Deadly Sins. (Seven Deadly Sins being the name of the show.)
Actually, this is a good place to give a shout out to OT commenter alum “Johanna,” delightful and talented better half to OT alum James Hanely, who created 7DS’s fantastic logo. If anyone here is looking to hire a graphic artist for a project, I cannot recommend her enough.
*Paltry in number only! They are super talented.Report
@tod-kelly if it is cat themed, perhaps you need one of these: A cat tongue brush, so you can lick your cat!Report
Nothing formal on the docket. The boys are with Zazzy and I’m looking to co-opt my sister’s apartment in the Meatpacking District while she is in Iceland (“Kicking off summer in a place with ‘ice’ in the name?” I said. “22 hours of sunlight,” she responded. That’s a lot of day drinking!). I may invite a special friend to accompany me for some of that. The city tends to empty out on big weekends like this so it can feel like your own private playground. Add in a friend across the river in JC with a rooftop pool that opens and I’m aiming to be sitting pretty for most of the weekend.Report
Man, you are having the weekend I want to be having.Report
Well, I finally started playing XCOM 2 and the addiction is already in full swing (I was up playing it ’til two in the morning last night), so I suspect most of today and tomorrow evening will be spent continuing that. Sunday I’ll be hanging out with a buddy of mine drinking beers, puffin’ joints and watching whatever sports are on, followed by Game of Thrones.Report
Right now I’m in the MD Listening Lounge watching Kurt Elling and his trio at Newport. He was at the height of his artistry, before the long slide into ballady dullness.
No great plans this weekend. Some golf, a BBQ on Sunday, and practicing on the bass for a show my band is doing at a local watering hole in 4 weeks. EEK!
Really getting the itch for Leaguefest.Report
Does having two jobs, being a permanent single parent, and a regular volunteer mean nothing?! I have a three day weekend with NOTHING to do. What… who… where??? I don’t know what’s happening!!!
After I feed the turtle and fold the laundry in the morning, I guess I’ll have a sandwich.Report
We got a letter from Queenland University (my wife’s employer) today, saying that they have been informed that she has missed five consecutive days of work and these forms need to be filled out to prevent it from being considered unauthorized absence and before she can return to work.
Very astute of them… except she hasn’t been to work in two months. And filed for medical leave at that time. And now, the day before she is supposed to return to work, they give her some stuff she is going to need to fly around the tri-state area to get every doctor she’s seen to sign off on it.
Filed under: Things they could have presented to us a month ago.Report