Let Me Just Write a Long Post Real Quick

Ladies and gentlemen, I drank myself sick on cold brew iced coffee, and I feel gross. Absolutely awful. I’m cutting way back on the caffeine as of about an hour ago. At least until tomorrow.

I haven’t posted in a bit. What happened there was that I forgot to save my last entry properly, and it would have been erased forever the next time I published an update, but I had AI fix it for me this evening (I’ll explain that in this footnote¹), so let’s get caught up real quick.

I’m officially not only moved in, but settled in as well. I live here now. There’s still cleaning and organizing to do, but I’m at the stage where that never really ends. It’s all part of the routine chores now. And I’m finally done spending money like a madman. I received my last few Amazon packages today, and promptly canceled my Prime account for what I hope will be the final time.

The basement is all set up as a combination laundromat and art studio. I installed more lighting, some new shelves, and even broke down and bought a better easel. (They don’t make easels like they used to!²) I’ve decided fluid paints are superior to tube paints—unless you’re dragging them around outside to paint en plein air—but they certainly cost a whole lot more.³ Along with attempting to paint, I’m having another go at learning to make gelli plate prints. I won’t have anything to share for a while.

I haven’t been getting out on photowalks or bicycle rides much. It’s been very hot, humid, and rainy. That doesn’t seem likely to change any time real soon, so I’m psyching myself up to the idea of getting out for a daily ride early in the mornings. There’s no other way. It’s that or I won’t step foot out of the house until sweater season arrives.

I now own two bird feeders and a birdbath. How suburban is that? A gang of house sparrows found my feeders. They’re annoying. They’ll grab a perch and eat for hours and hours until everything is gone. They’ve been cleaning me out for days. Very greedy. Today, I switched from a quality mix to straight safflower seeds still in the shell. So far, the sparrows aren’t interested in that at all, but none of the other birds seem thrilled by it either. We’ll see how things play out over the next week or two.

Other than that, not much is going on, (and that wasn’t much either). No gnus is good gnus. I’m reasonably healthy. Work is busy, but it’s fine. I’m liking the quiet Collingswood suburbs far more than the noise and grit of the city, although it’s definitely not as lively or (something like) exciting here. I keep meaning to have people over, but then I’m tired or busy on the weekends. Maybe I’ll throw a pot party this weekend, by which I mean having people over to help me repot Agnes, the six-foot-tall monstera, into a larger pot!⁴

Footnotes

1. This blog is built in Astro, and I haven’t set up a proper deployment pipeline yet. I manually push the entire build directory up to public_html on every update. This is usually fine, but I neglected to commit my last post into git, and later, while noodling around on something else that went sideways, I ran git reset @ --hard without thinking. I recovered my changes by having Windsurf reverse engineer the HTML on the server back into MDX using Claude Sonnet. (At this writing, Windsurf is worlds beyond GitHub Copilot.) Sure, I could have gone into the git plumbing and fixed it myself, but that would’ve been a major hassle. ↩

2. They really don’t. My new easel is a Best brand and made of solid oak, but hardly comparable in materials or craftsmanship to the Best brand easels we were selling at PEARL when I worked there in the ’90s. ↩

3. Everything is more expensive now. My grocery bill made me downright angry this weekend. ↩

4. I believe marijuana is legal in NJ, so I guess you could do that too, if it’s your thing. Not in the house. It stinks. ↩