In which open doors and windows season is upon us!

It’s Tuesday, which is my Sunday, so I’ve had some Grape Nuts and coffee and then watched an afternoon movie and made a crazy Bombay sandwich with hash browns in it and ate a cupcake.

The patio cat had five kittens on the 16th and 17th and they seem alive and well and they live in a box on the patio. I have homes for three already but that leaves two so let me know if you need a kitten.

I bought myself a lilac but I can’t decide where to put it. I’ve put in two tomatoes and some basil, and last year’s parsley is mysteriously still alive. I’m way behind on laundry and I’ve basically quit doing dishes. We did some weeding yesterday but the property still looks pretty crap. At least all three trees are leafing out!

I’m very much leaning toward An Afternoon Nap, if you must know.

Got my tax refunds, so that’s nice. Account balance looks a little less dismal than usual! I’m seriously considering a cleaning service to come get the floors and corners and fan blades and things clean. It sounds so bougie but obviously A) I care about it and B) ain’t gonna do it myself, so why not use the tax refund?

I’m in desperate need of a vacation. I’m bored of everything. Thank God it’s spring! The balmy air and flowers and leaves help a little, but mostly I think my brain could use some out-of-town time. Maybe we’ll have to take an overnight bag to Portland or something.

In which there’s nothing to be excited about, I just realized it’s been an entire quarter since I last posted.

Glad spring is here, though I’m already mildly stressed about the yard. There are a thousand weeds poking up through the gravel in the back, which I do not want to either pull by hand nor poison with herbicide. Owning land is probably more fun when you’re genuinely a garden sort of person.

Been collecting landscaping business cards for awhile; finally sat down and texted all of them today because the lawn’s at least 10″ tall and himself is making zero moves to mow it. One place responded and said they’d take a look in the morning and let me know what they’d charge. (Himself gets to pay for it, of course, and I might even take an admin fee for arranging it.) I ain’t livin’ in the ghetto-ass bad yard-lookin’ house, fuck that. If he ain’t gonna mow it, somebody who isn’t me is.

This administration is stressing me out. Looks like the economy very well might collapse? What the fuck. I mean, I already can’t afford to ever retire, but I am very accustomed to my global supply chain and don’t want to wake up one morning to find I’m too poor for exotic, expensive, rich-people things like coffee or, I don’t know, soy sauce. Or clothes. Or any of the other shit we do not make in this country and cannot make again within a reasonable amount of time because, as any moron knows, building these things from first principles is complex, expensive, and time consuming, and when you’re done you need an entire class of people who will agree, for whatever reason, to work in factories, and in this country that ain’t the white people.

It really is bizarre how deeply fucking racist much of America actually is, when you get down to it. They voted to burn the country to the ground not on policy (the “policy,” if it can even truly be called that, was released pre-election, and it laid out exactly what they’re doing now: disappearing citizens without due process, destroying the government, defunding the post office, social security, and medicare, and knocking science and medicine back a hundred years) but more because they wanted to be able say the n-word without normal people snubbing them for it. People voted for fucking fascism because they didn’t want anybody who isn’t white and straight to, what? Be treated as human beings?

They all say it was about economics, but nobody rational would vote to have their retirement fund in free fall. It’s not Christian and it’s not conservative, because for those you’d need love and intelligence: two qualities conspicuously absent from any of these people.

Anyway.

The patio cat I liked, the probably-mildly-brain-damaged-from-exposure-or-malnutrition cat, got chased away by another patio cat. This replacement patio cat was a large, mature, street-wise tuxedo cat, and he brought a tiny juvenile cat around. She turned out to be female, of course, and I knew I should trap her and get her fixed, but I didn’t, and now she’s visibly pregnant. Long story short, there are about to be patio kittens.

These I will, swear to dog, trap and get fixed. For fuck’s sake. Even if I have to pay for it myself.

The little hardwood sapling my aunt gave me survived the winter! It’s beginning to bud! I slow watered it this afternoon. I like to imagine it twenty years from now, shading the back yard and the roof. Can’t imagine being here myself to see that, but still. It’s a really nice thought.

I was offended to perceive I was coming down with something the week before last, because I’d had Covid only six months before, but come down with something I did. Missed three days of work, had to go to the walk-in clinic. Some kind of bonkers sinus infection, maybe, or a lung infection or something. They never really know, but I got the good cough syrup and a course of antibiotics. I asked the doc about prescribing them for something that probably isn’t bacterial and about placebo, but she told me that a greater percentage of people respond to antibiotics under these circumstances than you’d expect if the effect were only placebo! So, mystery bacteria! Or something. They don’t know.

I felt better after two doses of antibiotics. But no way to know if it was because of them or if it would have happened anyway!

Today I did dishes, make an extremely elaborate sandwich, did laundry, watered the hardwood tree, got groceries, paid bills, found someone to mow, and did full sadhana. Give me gold stars, please!

In which IT’S HERE!

Week before last I was surfing Amazon and the reviews for the modern typewriter are pretty terrible. They’re made of cheap parts because to make them of good stuff would make them cost far too much, and nearly every model has a review that says “This is cheap shit, I hate it, just buy a vintage one because they’re much higher quality.”

So I emailed my family to ask if anybody had an old typewriter lying around, and no one did (save an aunt who had an electric that smoked when she plugged it in), so I found one on eBay and I bid on it.

And won.

It seems that old typewriters go for $30 to $800 dollars, and there doesn’t appear to be any fucking rhyme or reason—some are as-is, some are fully checked over by pros and certified working, some are rare, some are common, but regardless of status, somebody online is gonna offer you something for $675 that goes for $55 elsewhere. I assume greed and stupidity, since that’s what drives eBay pricing in general, I think.

Anyway, this thing was listed by a Goodwill in California, and the photos were weird (as in not taken by a typewriter guy) and the description was non-existent. I got it for $40 including shipping, so even if it was a paperweight I could still get that back just by selling the keys and platen.

It arrived today and it’s heavy as hell; I routinely carry 20 pound wheels of cheese around, and this thing is much heavier than that, so maybe 30, 35 pounds? I can’t be bothered to go weigh it on the bathroom scale, but it’s a lot for something you put on your desk.

It’s quite dirty and dusty, is missing a 4 key, and needs some work, but I think I’ll be able to use it after some TLC. Main issue is that I’ve only briefly gotten the keys to hit the platen. There’s some margin setting or other I haven’t figured out yet that’s preventing it from actually typing except during that brief period before I kept fucking with more settings, and there’s also something messed up about the key arms for 8 and J, but I bet that can be fixed with some judicious needle nosed pliering.

Oh, and it’s short one proprietary ribbon spool. Replacements, according to what I’ve seen so far, run about $35 each. OF COURSE. (But once you have two proprietary spools you can wind on any old ribbon you want, forever.)

Anyway, here’s the manual:

So pretty soon I’ll have a working typewriter, for some reason I can’t defend. I mean, I don’t need a typewriter, because I have a computer and a printer, and I’ll probably only use the thing for the occasional envelope I can’t be bothered to slot into the printer or recipe card I don’t want to hand-write, and it’s big and weighs a ton and would be an absolute bitch to get rid of again. It’ll be fun to clean and tune and get working again, as a project, but I already have several hobbies I’m just not doing…

Anyway, I’m going to go brush and vacuum it out and get to cleaning it a little before I go back to bed.

In which nothing.

I keep forgetting to blog because it’s 2024 and people don’t read blogs anymore, which means there’s no engagement, which means that thing in your head that tells you to blog is now telling you to spend three solid hours scrolling Bluesky instead.

Anyway, it’s Monday, my day off, and I’ve gotten through 8 of the 15 items on my to-do list, two of which required me to actually work my actual job (I do the bi-monthly newsletter for the creamery, and also I have some thing tomorrow where somebody hired me to do a half hour presentation sans AV equipment on cheese and serve a cheese platter, and nobody can speak extemporaneously for thirty fucking minutes without a slide deck unless they’re defending their pHd or whatever so I had to cram a little).

I have all the doors and most of the windows wide open but it’s not exactly warm enough for that so I’m wearing socks and a wool sweater and will shortly be drinking hot tea.

I made soup for lunch and ate it with some homemade bread.

I’m re-reading old Jeeves on my Paperwhite.

We watched Fallout together last week and it was good.

I ordered a second watch with a date display, because I keep looking at my watch when I need to know what day it is, for some reason. I’ve been staunchly anti-watch for literal decades but now I’m a watch guy, I guess? Anyway it’s a Timex and it was something like 63% off and it shows the day name and number and it fits the silicone watch bands I already have so I’ll be able to wear it to work without damaging the leather band it comes with. I’m pretty excited about Wednesday, which is when it’s supposed to arrive.

Apropos of nothing, here’s a meal I made and ate two months ago:

It was delicious!