I was catching up on house finances yesterday afternoon and realized we hadn’t been billed for our water in over 90 days, so I went to the Baltimore City Water site to check up on it, and this is what I found: 
We live in Baltimore County, but for some strange reason our water is provided by Baltimore City. Om May 7, the city’s computer systems were attacked by hackers demanding $100,000 in bitcoin as ransom. The acting mayor at that time refused to pay, and so the systems have been slowly returning to operational since then. Make sure you choose strong passwords, friends.
A post on Metafilter the other day took me by surprise. July 3 marked 20 years since Mark Sandman of Morphine died onstage in Italy. The post was valuable because it linked to some documentaries I wasn’t aware of: one about Sandman and one about the band. I need to figure out where I can see the latter because it’s not online anywhere. Stop and listen:
We’re getting our money out of the pool membership so far this summer. We brought Christi and Glenn and the kids on Friday and had a hard time getting them out of the water. Finn went off and swam with her friends while Bear floated around the pool on a trio of noodles, and Ruby splashed in the baby pool for most of the morning.
In the late evening the skies finally darkened and we were chased out of the water by some thunder, but we hung around and got another 20 minutes in with the lights on until they started closing down. We were the last families out the door and had two very tired, very upset kids to say goodbye to in the parking lot.
Saturday morning my neighbor stopped over and we spent three hours sweating in the new bathroom; he got the rest of the electrical work completed and I hung the new closet door. At this point it’s roughed into place—I still need to drive the nails in all the way—but I need some more shims to make sure I’m not bending the casing halfway up the sides. I also got the floor heat computer initialized and programed for basic morning heat, and then copied that to the rest of the week. I can’t tell you what a big achievement that feels like; the door looks good in place (and when I get the casing installed it will look even better) and it’s lovely to have a working light in the shower.
After that was done we headed back to the pool and met up with a number of friends from the neighborhood. It was the perfect way to spend a brutally hot afternoon: floating in the deep end with a bunch of adults, listening to the kids splash around on their own, sipping on an illicit beer.
Jen and I binge-watched the first four episodes of Stranger Things last night until 1:30AM (!!!) and we are enjoying the new season immensely. The writers acknowledge that their characters are getting older and are using the idea that some aren’t growing up as fast as their friends in the storyline as well as some unusual character pairings to shake things up. And the 80’s fashion callbacks and music cues are spot-on. I think we would have stayed up later to watch more but wisely went to bed much later than either of us is used to.
With the introduction of a pool membership, the 5th of July got a lot cooler this year. We woke late, scratched some food together, and broke down the remainder of the parade gear outside. The prehung closet door for the bathroom arrived at about 10:30 and I had them lean it up against the front porch until Glen and Christi stopped over, and then he and I horsed it up the stairs and into the bathroom with only a few dings in the wall.
After some pizza we mobilized to the pool through some spitty rainshowers, and apart from some dark clouds here and there it didn’t rain in earnest until 8PM or so. The impending threat of rain and the holiday weekend made for a smaller crowd. We all stayed in the pool as long as possible, and the water was warm and refreshing. Our neighbors had a bunch of leftover food and invited us to help them eat it, which was lovely, and we were the last folks out the door at 9PM.
Scouting Bear
State Fare, the new-ish restaurant downtown that has swallowed most of Main Street, released a themed beer with Jailbreak Brewing Company called Game of Chairs. This is in honor of the 4th of July parade and Catonsville’s tradition of setting out lawn furniture along the parade route in June. The restaurant sucks but Jailbreak makes good beer. They sold out of all of their sixpacks the day it was released, but I might wander down and see if they’ve got any keg beer left they’ll sell in growlers.
I recently re-enabled Jetpack, WordPress’ do-it-all plugin for their publishing platform, here on idiotking, after a year or two without it. I had it working for a year or two and I liked the additional features it provided, but one day it brought my whole site down with no warning. Strangely, the Scout blog, which uses a forked version of the same homemade WordPress template, remained operational. I didn’t feel like chasing the problem down until recently, when I got a notice that the hosting provider for idiotking wanted me to update the version of PHP it was running. I did that without much fuss, and then let it sit for a while. Today in a meeting I downloaded the plugin and re-activated it, and it seems to be working smoothly. I’m going to fool around with some of the new features they’ve added, and hope it doesn’t break the whole thing again.
I love the groove of this song.