So I got some stuff done this weekend. The weather has been brutally cold so I’m not that interested in spending time outside, but I did venture out there for some tasks. In rough order:
- Went out for brunch at a place we’ve never been to: Kimchi fries and bulgogi on my huevos rancheros. I don’t think any of us ate again until dinner.
- Reorganized the basement shelving (consolidated old brewing equipment, moved similar items together, swept under old shelves, generally straightened up). It’s amazing how soothing I found this.
- Punted on dinner and ordered Indian food from down the street. This restaurant is on its 17th grand re-opening, so the food was OK—but definitely better than trying to cook something ourselves.
- Enjoyed both Saturday playoff games, which were entertaining. The girls actually sat on the couch with me for most of Packers/49ers, which was fun!
- Installed a replacement steam radiator valve, replacing the replacement which did not work for shit (it basically let the radiator get as hot as possible, which made the bedroom uninhabitable). Verdict: the new one is working extremely well. I will have to buy six more of these.
- Bundled up the dog and myself for a coffee walk Sunday morning. She looks dapper in her Christmas sweater! we did a short walk because I put on one layer too many and was overheating quickly. (Jen got me a proper set of thermal leggings for Christmas, and with those, smartwool socks, and an UnderArmour ColdGear shirt, I was sweating).
- Bundled up and headed out to the garage to finish welding in a third patch on the spare fender and ground it down to (mostly) smooth metal. It’s going to take some filler to clean up. I bought a surplus flight suit from eBay a while back which is doing an excellent job of keeping warmth in and hot metal shavings out.
- Learned that spark plug holes in cast iron US engine blocks designed in the 1960’s are tapped metric. I would have bet my house this was not the case.
- Dug out the garage doors and ran up the Scout. She was happy.
- Scraped and shoveled the front walk again for the elementary kids tomorrow morning.
- Posted a new set of designs to Threadless, made some money!
- Realized I’d never moved any of my font collection over to the new laptop(!?); rectified that situation quickly.
I hit a deer on November 21 and filed a claim with USAA that evening. It’s now December 22 and I still don’t have a payment for the car in hand. There was one lost week when the salvage yard was waiting on the lien release document I misplaced, where I had to chase down the issue myself after nobody contacted me. On the day the claim was resolved, December 15, they cut me a check instead of following my instructions and electronically transferring the funds to my bank account. The representative I spoke to this morning said it would take 5-7 business days to get that check, which means it will probably show up the day after Christmas.
I would have a hard time recommending USAA to anyone after this laborious process; the fact that I have done more work to resolve my claim than my fucking claims adjuster irritates me.
Steve Albini has an outsized voice in the music industry of my generation; he engineered some of the seminal albums of the 80’s and 90’s. He was/is also a notorious curmudgeon, with an almost pathological need to offend and anger anyone and everyone. He’s slowly changed a lot of his attitudes about music, people, and his place in the discourse, and most importantly, has owned up to his responsibility in all of it.
As the years wore on, his perspective started to shift. “I can’t defend any of it,” he told me. “It was all coming from a privileged position of someone who would never have to suffer any of the hatred that’s embodied in any of that language.”
It’s fascinating to read about someone who unabashedly, unashamedly owns up to his faults without the aid (or hindrance) of an army of PR flacks and crisis managers.
We have a Brother all-in-one printer that was highly touted to be the “best printer for Macs” when I bought it several years ago. This is how I feel about it. It’s one more “cannot connect to printer” message away from its day in the field with a baseball bat.
Finn and I got our COVID booster yesterday, and I woke up this morning feeling as sore as I did on Day 8 of the welding project. I thought I’d be OK to get some stuff done around here but I also feel like my feet are about an inch off the ground, so it’s probably best not to be driving or operating heavy machinery. I took a nap at noon with the dog and I’ve been playing Starfield since 3, but part of me is itching to get up and get something done.
From the Guardian: 15 Ways to Get Back to Sleep. I’ve been waking up randomly at 3AM with various anxieties floating around my head for the last six months or so, and I think I need to internalize some of this advice.
After about 45 weeks of almost flawless fitment, my Invisalign trays started to get out of whack at the end of last month, specifically the top sets. Usually they go in with a nice satisfying click as they fit around the little nubs glued to your teeth (the trays need something to grab onto), but mine weren’t clicking. The tray was hanging down more and more to the point where I couldn’t wear them during the day because they gave me a horrible slobbering lisp. I checked in with the orthodontist, they rescanned my upper and lower palate, and I picked up two new boxes of trays the other day. When I put the top set in I got the click and they fit perfectly. I put the newest set in Tuesday night and I can tell they’re now working on moving my premolars outward to continue making room for the front teeth—which are almost straight—because the premolars are sore as shit. I’ve got about 30 weeks left in the series, which will put me somewhere around the end of the year for a straighter smile.
Back in the late 1990’s, when the web was alive and open and could be anything you wanted it to be, there were a handful of writers who started keeping journals online, and small communities formed around them, and their numbers grew. The best of these became daily stops during my morning coffee, and I found enough inspiration in their ability to code their own sites and write so well that I started this site—halfassed, really, hiding out as a secondary link on my primary site for a year until I got enough nerve to buy a boutique domain. Some of these folks hung it all out there, writing about every feeling and experience they had, and they gathered audiences around them to share their experiences. They also attracted haters who threw bricks and perfected the art of shitposting. Most of those pioneers are gone now, their domains shuttered, but a few old-school bloggers are still out there.
One of the originals, Dooce, died by her own hand yesterday after a long struggle with depression. She was a singular voice, who wrote with cutting humor and heartfelt tenderness about her kids, her dog, her husband, and life. In the early days I remember her comments section as a supportive place where friendships were made and she often responded to her readers. But she also took a lot of shit for her site. Whole websites were created just to attack every post. Her site had fallen off my regular reading list a decade ago or so when her site became mostly about sponsored content; the ad landscape was changing and she had a family to feed. She was still posting occasionally, and apparently her viewpoint over the last couple of years was transphobic and ugly, which was a shock to learn about.
Whatever the case, I consider her one of the primary influences for starting this site and my striving to be a better writer. I’m terribly sad for her and her family.
My brother in law and I drove down to Bob’s house on Sunday to install a new bathroom vanity, and I was glad for his help. It’s not heavy but it’s bulky, and having two people to get it up the stairs, into the bathroom and over the toilet to fit in the corner was super helpful. 1970’s bathrooms were made for hobbits, I think. We had to return the original sink that had been delivered with a giant chunk broken off the backsplash, and were able to exchange it with another off the shelf. Then we spent most of the rest of the day chasing plumbing fittings down. His house seems to be nonstandard in all the most annoying ways; by the time I had the sizing sorted out it was 5PM and the standard-sized reducer we found to go on the paint waste pipe didn’t fit the P-drain kit we’d bought—which claimed it would fit anything. Good times. So we contented ourselves to cut and fit some kickplate, swapped out the original plug with a GFCI unit, and measured for a new medicine cabinet.
Renie, you will be glad to know I’ve figured out the notification preferences out for my AirTags. There’s a handy little setting to specify not to be notified at certain locations—so I’ve got notifications off for when I leave the AirTags and all my other location-aware devices at home, for example. Down at Bob’s on Sunday, the tag I put in my messenger bag worked exactly as advertised when I left to go to the store. So I’ve got three of them activated and serving different purposes, and I have an idea for the fourth.
For the last three weeks I’ve been battling a weird form of insomnia. For my whole life I’ve been able to go to sleep almost anywhere, and make it the whole night through, even when I’d have to get up to go to the bathroom. But lately I’m waking up at 3, sometimes 4AM and I’m unable to get back to sleep. My mind is off and running, and I’m working through problems and issues from the day and I can’t calm it down to return to sleep. I might doze off and on until Finn’s alarm goes off—this morning I had a pleasant dream where Emma Watson delivered a pizza to our house, and I sat down with her and had a wonderful conversation about shooting the Harry Potter series with her even though I’d never been there or knew her—but more often than not I’m just awake. I don’t drink caffeine after 11AM anymore. I’d spent a good part of the day running up and down Bob’s stairs. The previous day I was on my feet for 14 hours straight. Something is clearly going on with my brain or my metabolism; I just haven’t figured out what.
In this article, Stephan Ango writes about the strategy of hybridizing vs. specializing: focus on being a generalist and bringing multiple pursuits together to find unexpected connections vs. focusing completely on one career path.
Having a wide base of skills with one or two specialties gives you more tools in your toolbox — more ways to solve problems.
As an unintentional hybridist (illustrator, designer, game designer, coder, front end developer, videographer, photographer, carpenter, teacher and contractor) I can now maybe claim I had this brilliant strategy mapped out for my whole life, or I can admit that I have the attention span of a moth. Whatever the case, I do see how this mixture of pursuits has helped me think beyond just that of an illustrator (which is what it says on my diploma).