All the good aliens have left the planet. And now this news. Fair winds and clear skies, Dolly.
I’ve got a brand-new MacBook Air on my desk after some delays in shipping from Vietnam, and overall I’m very happy with it. I sprung for the larger 15″ model, and it’s taking some time to get used to the new form factor in relation to my old 13″ model (and even my work 14″ MacBook Pro). I used it to finish up and export a video this weekend and I was happy with the smoother previews and speed. It didn’t take long to set up and install my various accounts and software suites—I don’t migrate settings, but prefer to do clean installs—and with only a few short hiccups where I couldn’t immediately lay hands on a serial number, it only took a few hours. Then I carefully wiped the drive on my old machine and cleaned it carefully with cotton swabs before packaging it up for trade-in. I added both of these to the technology list along with the Chromebook.
Along with that, I dropped another, heavier package off at the post office: I was contacted on the Binder Planet about some of my spare soft top hardware, and made a deal to ship a bunch of duplicate steel to a nice guy in South Carolina so that he can make one good top out of a bunch of parts. With that, I’m headed to Nats with $600 in my pocket for any shiny parts I might need.
I heard Regret by New Order at the pharmacy earlier this week and haven’t been able to shake it. Back in the day I had no idea this was the same band that released Blue Monday or had any connection to Joy Division; they were completely off my radar until I was in college. (Remember, I was raised in the State of Classic Rock, in the county of Hair Metal). This song features Peter Hook’s bass melody prominently, which is As Things Should Be, but another great song off this album is World (Price of Love), where he’s conspicuously absent.
Related: one of the books on my library list is Shadowplayers: the Rise and Fall of Factory Records, which chronicles the birth and death of their music label—and the Manchester club they essentially underwrote.
The number 21 is burned into my brain for some reason. I don’t understand why. For as long as I can remember, my neocortex has insisted that my wedding anniversary is on May 21, NOT May 22, the correct date. Thus, I went out last night to find proper flowers for my bride, and after some dead ends I found tulips in a lovely shade of coral and surrounded them with alstroemeria. I had to do this on the bench in the basement quietly so as not to alert Jen; I still have a long way to go in my career as a flower arranger, but I think the overall effect comes across OK.
In any case, Happy Early Anniversary, blondie.
The temperature has been bouncing up and down for the last couple of months, but now that everything is green again we’re well into yard sale season. It’s been pretty slim pickings around here for the last five years or so. I think that a lot of the older families cleaned out and moved on when Finn was a toddler, which spoiled me for variety—walking through the sales with her in the backpack I was always able to drag home good toys, clothes, tools, and other excellent finds. I don’t recall being able to find much of anything last year, and the opening sales this year were just as meager: lots of glassware and kids’ clothes but not much else.
I wrote about my Boy Scouts finds a few weeks ago, and yesterday I hit a community yard sale a little north of here. Within a couple of minutes I scored a free(!) steel wheelbarrow from a couple who’d just sold their house and were looking to get rid of stuff. I’ve repaired our plastic wheelbarrow twice now and it’s on its last legs, so I can make one good solid unit out of two easily. Up the street I found a brand new portable Manfrotto tripod, which will replace my larger travel tripods, and a set of stainless steel restaurant steam pans. Those are great for car fluids of different kinds. As usual there were a lot of clothes and glassware, but I was happy with the stuff I found, and Hazel snoozed patiently in the passenger seat while I walked around.
* * *
My tomatoes are going nuts in the greenhouse, which is a pleasant surprise. All I did was mix some new soil in with the old stuff left over from a couple of years ago, add Tomato-Tone, and drop the plants in. Each one is growing fast, they’ve all started flowering, and three of the four have set fruit as a result of my hand-pollinating. It’s all I can do to keep myself from buying more plants to put out there, but after reading that tomato prices are supposed to spike upward, I’m second-guessing my hesitance.
Meanwhile, the peach tree I bought Jen last fall is covered in fruit, which is a great sign. We planted it on the top of the hill at the west side of the backyard and surrounded it in deer fence over the winter. It came back bigger and greener, and our nightly visitors haven’t been able to nibble on it, which means it’s going to grow big and strong, and my girl will have fresh peaches to make her happy.
* * *
Later in the day I dusted off my black suit and got myself churched up for a trip into DC with the family: my sister-in-law’s PhD hooding ceremony was scheduled for the same day as the Pimlico horse race and a Nationals/Orioles game along with about twenty other graduation events, so traffic was heavy. We got there just in time for the start of the event, and met up with the family at a Fogo de Chau to eat lots of delicious meat until we were all stuffed.
I realize I’ve been doing a poor job of updating this feed with EV swap updates, so here’s a whole pile of them to lower your productivity to a crawl on an overcast Thursday! The newest is at the bottom, which covers Brian and I modifying the battery tray and the spline collar to mount the EV powerpack to the transmission, then doing some welding to mount the three sections together.
I stopped in to Hopkins today for my 18-month checkup, which is the second-to-last one I need to do before they declare me completely clear. Everything is looking good so far; my overall numbers are down most likely because I gave blood about three weeks ago (I did the Power-Red donation, which is geared towards NICU and cancer patients) and that brought my numbers down. Jen was able to come with me this time, and we stopped at Trinacria for our traditional celebratory lunch.
Back in the day, Dad was given a red nylon windbreaker from Ciba-Geigy in his early sales career. It was a very mid- 60’s design: a square band collar work jacket with two pockets. It had design elements that I came to love when I found it in the closet behind his other stuff: a black and white vertical racing stripe on the right breast with a Ciba-Geigy patch on the left. I think that early nylon must have shrunk over time, because it was marked as a medium but was definitely a small, and it fit me perfectly. When I found it, there was no way it would ever have fit on Dad, so I asked him for it. I had it for several years after college and took very good care of it. One night I wore it to a party, and it got pinched when I wasn’t looking. Heartbroken, I’ve looked for a replacement ever since.
Facebook is definitely reading my mind, because this amazing vintage Gulf jacket showed up in my feed yesterday for the eye-watering price of $175, size small. If I was stupidly rich, I’d have already bought it, but I’m not that much of a slave to fashion. I’m sorely tempted, though.
Reading multiple stories about how AI demand has made hard drive, GPU and RAM prices all skyrocket, I decided to pull the trigger and upgrade my laptop to something that will handle video editing better than the one I’ve currently got. This is an M2 Macbook Air that I bought three years ago, and I made the mistake of only speccing 8GB of RAM. It’s been a solid machine, but it has a few quirks I dislike (mainly software-related) and it just chugs when I’m working with heavy video files. I specced out a new M5 Air with 16GB of RAM last week, and with a trade in on my current machine I should save about 1/3 of the total cost. However, the order is currently stuck in processing—what was supposed to be in stock locally is now estimated to be here between May 15-19.
* * *
Interestingly, when I look at the stats for IK here, my daily numbers have jumped up to about four times where they used to be a year ago, and when I compare that with the Scout journal, those numbers have dropped. My guess (and I need to do a lot more digging in my server logs) is that I’m getting hit by the AI bots, who are scraping the site for content. I would have expected that the Scout journal would be hit just as much, but apparently not.
I’ve had the drumbeat and bassline of Angel by Massive Attack stuck in my head for the last three days. I was fortunate enough to see them live in 2019 during the Mezzanine 30th Anniversary tour, and this was more powerful in person than the recorded version, if that’s possible. Being able to see Horace Andy and Liz Fraser sing their tracks live was incredible.
Here’s the first release from Inferno, the upcoming BoC album. On first listen, I really like it. The beat is a lot more central to this track than any previous work they’ve done; I was always a huge fan of the Big Beat electronica genre, and I would love to see them lead the charge into a new era of solid groove. I tried to preorder the album last week but it timed out on me, so I’ll try again today.
This beautiful fellow is a Piliated Woodpecker, which is apparently rare compared to the other types in this area. He sat at the base of what used to be our cherry tree and cleaned it out on Saturday morning, giving me enough time to put the long lens on and snap a couple of pictures when he looked up. He’s bigger than he looks—I’d say about the size of a crow.
* * *
The tomatoes in the greenhouse are going gangbusters. I’d say they’ve grown about 5 times their size since I bought them, and they’re all putting out flowers, which I’ve been dutifully trying to fertilize every day. I sure do hope we get some good fruit on each one. I have to repair a bunch of holes in the plastic this coming weekend, because the replacement cover I bought seven years ago did not last as long as the stuff I installed in 2005.