Does anyone else just … not wanna? Like, today has been a weird day, and I am not in the mood for a single damn thing, up to and including getting ready for school tomorrow (remember Wednesday is a day with no synchronous teaching for me right now, meaning that I literally had all day to get a lesson pulled together and I haven’t) or getting ready for any of these parent phone calls I’m scheduled to make from 6:00 to 7:00 this evening.
Technically parent/teacher conferences are tomorrow night, but I’m scheduling phone calls in 10 minute increments, and my two and a half hours filled up almost immediately, so I opened up another dozen or so slots today. I talked to four parents between 3:30 and 4:30 and was generally a gibbering, incoherent mess for most of it; I have lost my ability to talk on the phone, apparently, and on top of that I kept going glassy-eyed and not here right now in between calls and kept being a minute or two late.
I slept well last night, too. I’m just a damn mess today.
I’ve posted a couple of times recently about how we are embarking on a new round of home improvement around here; the new roof is more or less set in stone and is happening in a couple of weeks, the new bathroom is almost certainly happening (more on that in a bit) but doesn’t have a timeline yet, and today we had someone out to talk to us about a new water softener.
Technically this would be a replacement water softener, but the one it would be replacing has never been used once in the entire time we’ve lived in the house and may actually be as old as the house itself. I’m not going to go looking for posts right now, but I know I’ve talked about this house and its plumbing issues before: the original builder was a contractor, and there are clearly things about this house that were done by someone who knew what they were doing and was concerned about doing a good job, and … and then there’s the plumbing, which … was not. We have had people out before to look at the plumbing and they have declined the job, and when the water softener guy went into our basement to look at the existing “system” and the various pipes involved in bringing water into our house and moving it around, it literally rendered him speechless. He was so shocked and horrified that he couldn’t get through a sentence for a good twenty minutes. This is not an exaggeration.
We are being charged for installation. He was very apologetic for this, saying that installation was usually included in the cost of the unit, but there is so much repiping required and so much work necessary to figure out just what the fuck all these pipes are for that he felt he had no choice. We asked how often they felt like they needed to charge, and the answer was that in seventeen years of water softening he never had.
My wife and I spent most of the consult laughing our asses off at how clearly flummoxed this poor guy was. He’s bringing three other guys out with him when they come out for the install. It was hilarious.
I asked him whether he thought it would be okay if I documented their attempts to fix our system for the Internet, and he got a little twinkle in his eye and suggested we video the whole thing. I think I like this dude.
(Re: the bank; further cementing my wife’s theory that banking is bullshit, I had a car drive very slowly past our house today, pausing for about a minute at the foot of our driveway. The car had a magnetic sign on the door, but as I was in my office looking out the window at the time (and teaching a class, for that matter) I was unable to read it. If I find out that that was the appraiser, who did nothing more than basically ascertain that a house did in fact exist at the address we provided, I’m going to laugh my ass off. Then I’m going to hire a couple of black actors to go into that bank with exactly the same information we had and ask for a loan and see if they’re handed thirty grand as easily as we were.)
If one were to look through the “Spider-Man” tag on this site, one would see that I posted several times about the original PS4 Spider-Man game, over a period of several months. Typically my game playing is serial; I pick up a game, finish it, then move on to another one, which might be a new one or might be a playthrough of something I’ve already beaten. But I’m usually just playing one game at a time, and if I abandon something before beating it it’s very unlikely that I’m going to go back to it.
I am genuinely fascinated that my move on both of Insomiac’s Spider-Man games was to play it for a while, set it aside for months while I did something else, then come back to it and finish it. I pulled this several times on the first game and only one on Miles Morales, but Miles is a considerably shorter game. The talk is that originally it was supposed to be an expansion as opposed to a new game in its own right; I feel like I got my money’s worth out of it regardless and am not concerned with what they choose to call it.
When I wrote about the game previously I said that it was, in many ways, the exact same game as PS4 Spider-Man, with some gameplay changes to account for Miles’ bioelectric abilities, and that remains true. This is a hellaciously fun game to play, if perhaps a tiny bit too unconcerned with the rule both Spider-Men have against killing people. While there isn’t actually an achievement for it in this game, you’re gonna toss people off buildings or redirect rockets into their faces a whole lot in this game, and if that’s going to break immersion for you you’re gonna have a hard time. Boss encounters are, I think, largely better done than the original game, although there’s not nearly as many of them, since Miles doesn’t really have much of his own rogues’ gallery yet. And the game is still a tiny bit too much into beating people up and hunting down collectibles than I’d like it to be. They even hold back an entire thingy-hunting mission to the epilogue, even if they end up making it make great story sense anyway.
But yeah. That story?
Goddamn.
Can we get these people writing comic books, please? Because both of these games had me teary at the end, and this one compounds things by a surprise dedication to Chadwick Boseman that messed me up, as well as a kind of randomly-placed statue of Stan Lee that I came across by accident at about the 2/3 mark of the game. These games get Miles and Peter better than any other incarnation of the characters I’ve ever seen other than Into the Spider-Verse, and I am including several iterations of the comic books in that as well.
I played it on the PS5, obviously, and it’s gorgeous as hell; I could stare at the textures in Miles’ various costumes all day long, and there’s even a Spider-Verse costume that lets you reset the frame rate so that the game looks more like a movie. You can’t throw bagels at people, unfortunately, but it’s still neat to play with for a little while. The music is better than the original game, and Miles’ love of hiphop plays an actual role in several different places in the game. And we finally get Ganke in a Miles-centric non-comic thing, which made me very very happy, as I love the character, even if they dial his computer nerd stuff up to about 15 to give him something to do.
So yeah, this is a great game. It’s not a reason to buy a PS5 on its own, I don’t think, but it’s available on the PS4 as well, so if you have either system and you don’t have it yet, definitely pick it up. I absolutely can’t wait for the third game, and I’ll try not to take four months to finish it when it comes out.
I beat Spider-Man: Miles Morales this evening, finally, and I think I’m going to count that as everything I needed to achieve today, because I am done, otherwise.
Well, we talked to the bank today, and we talked to the contractors on Thursday, and it looks like in addition to the new roof that is Definitely Happening in less than a month we’re finally fixing our master bathroom up this year, and at a cost that has us looking around and thinking about ways to make it more expensive than what our estimate was. I have discovered that I have strong opinions about our standalone shower. I want some shit in there, y’all. I want body jets and lighting and shit, and if we can figure out a way to hide some speakers in the walls that would be awesome too. But yeah, apparently at … how old am I? 44? I’m not 45 yet, right? Right, at 44 I want to be able tot take a shower in the dark with LED lights color-shifting in the water and high-pressure body jets massaging my various nooks and crannies.
Oh, and throw a bench in there, too.
The actual visit to the bank was at once both deeply annoying and aggravating and super easy. First of all, the lady who was taking care of our application not only wasn’t wearing a mask but had a Goddamn two-foot-wide sheet of plexiglass taking up maybe a third of her desk, but since there were two of us on the other side of her desk only one of us could partake of its utter lack of actual tangible usefulness. Then she very much did the “talk to the man” thing throughout the process, including at one point actually asking my wife, who makes a lot more than I do, if she had a job. Not what her job was. Did she have one.
And then we hit this weird point in the interview process where she had to ask us if we were male and female? And she apologized in advance for “all the questions” she was going to have to ask us and then that was it, and she was so apologetic for it that it managed to come off as transphobic? By this point in the conversation I was thoroughly ready for the whole thing to be over and so I didn’t ask a whole lot of questions, but if you need to get verbal confirmation of whatever, just ask and let’s all move on with our lives. But why would it just be gender? What the hell does that have to do with anything?
(ETA: My wife reminds me of something I’d forgotten, which was that she also asked about our race, which means that this was very likely the bank tracking who they’re giving their loans to, and not actually part of the application process per se. It was still very, very weird.)
Oh, and never once were we asked for ID, which strikes me as … odd. Like, my credit got a hard pull today, and while there’s supposedly going to be an appraisal of the value for our house that we more or less made up on the spot and gave her, it might be a drive by? As in the appraiser might never enter the house, and might just be making sure it exists? And, boom, $30,000. And no ID. I verbally gave her a Social Security number, and so did my wife, but never once did any paperwork more complicated than a pay stub come into the picture.
Kinda wondering right now, honestly, what sort of experience a black couple or a gay couple might have had in the same situation.
I don’t usually do disclaimers, but let’s put this front and center: This isn’t any kind of sponsorship/influencer thing. They aren’t paying me, and I bought my clothes like everybody else.
A couple of weeks ago I became aware of The Winston Box. You’ve probably heard of similar services; this is one of those subscription box thingies where every so often at an interval of your choosing they send you what is effectively a blind box with some clothes that they picked out for you. You specify a few options regarding color and style choices and then you’re basically rolling dice. The hook with these guys is that they specialize in big and tall sizes. As someone who has sized himself out of entire stores– more of them than I care to admit, frankly– this was attractive. There’s a Fat Man Store out by the mall where I buy clothes from periodically, and they’ve got nice stuff but they’re expensive as hell— think $25 for a plain T-shirt, $75 for a sweater level– and the idea of a $75 box that would include two or three items that were likely to fit me seemed like it might be worth a shot.
Plus, and I cannot emphasize this enough, coronavirus. I’m pretty sure I just got involved in this because of my seething need for novelty and entertainment. So, fuck it, here’s $75; send me some shit.
This is why I was so mad at FedEx yesterday, by the way.
So that’s my box. It looked a little on the small side at first, until I thought about just how little space clothing takes up when it’s vacuum-packed. As it turned out, there was plenty in there. But hell, let’s open this thing!
Okay, I admit it: a lavender winter hat as the first item out of the box did not excite me, both because we had damn well better be well out of winter hat weather until next November and … yeah, lavender hats aren’t really my thing? But this was my first box, and they let me know there would be some extra stuff in the first box. So okay, Becky can wear the branded winter hat. I mean, it felt soft and warm, and all that. I’m sure it’s a fine hat.
I figured out pretty quickly that taking pictures of stuff in the bags wasn’t very interesting, so everything else is unpacked, in the order it was in the box:
ITEM THE FIRST! This t-shirt, featuring a vaguely phallic, vaguely Mesoamerican dude. I mean, I wear t-shirts. Like, all the time. I’m not over the moon about this one but I’ll wear it.
Now, this item, on the other hand:
homer drool dot gif, y’all. I will wear this. I will wear this a lot. It fits great and it’s super comfortable and it’s absolutely something I would have picked out for myself. I’m actually kind of mad that we’re moving out of hoodie weather for the year right now, but I expect to live in this thing for the rest of the weekend. Thumbs up A+ will wear. Honestly, this all by itself convinced me to stick around for the next box, because this would have been $100 at the fat man store, easy.
And then there’s Item Four:
Hmm.
At first glance, this was a huge no. One, I don’t wear sweatpants. I have one pair of what I think of as Comfy Pants(*) that I sleep in when it’s really cold, but I don’t even wear sweats around the house. Two, and it took my wife pointing this out for me to realize it, but I have very different rules for colors in shirts than I do for pants. I have at least two shirts very similar to this color, and I wear them as often as anything else I own. All of my pants? Jeans, except for the shorts I wear to bed, which are black.
These are sweatpants and they are baby blue. They are never going to get worn outside the house under any circumstances and I’m really not the laze around in sweatpants guy. Even when I’m lazing about the house, I do it in jeans.
Then I touched them, and … yeah, okay, I’ll sleep in these tonight and see how I feel. I’m a little concerned about the size, since I feel like my waist and inseam measurements for jeans are going to be massively oversized for something with an elastic waistband, but I’ll find out tonight, I suppose. Also, they had a $75 price tag on them, which, again, was the cost of the entire box.
So, one thing I’ll wear constantly and already love, one thing I’ll wear but am kind of meh about stylistically, one thing I immediately gave to my wife, and To Be Determined. Fuck it, bring on Box #2 in a couple of months.
(*) What makes them Comfy Pants and not Sweat Pants? No cuffs at the ankles. I dunno why that makes a difference to me but it does.
Okay, damn it, I get it, logistics decisions that make sense on a nationwide level often don’t make sense on a specific, individual package level, and these large shipping companies have to make decisions that make sense on a nationwide level.
But I cannot help but notice that this package, which sat in a warehouse in California for five days after being received, was originally supposed to be here yesterday, then was rescheduled to today, and now has been rescheduled to tomorrow, appears to have been routed completely around where I live.
I assume that you will not look askance upon me if I reveal that I find this fact moderately frustrating. There is nothing especially important in the package; it’s not, like, insulin or something, and I’m not being harmed by having to wait an extra day or two for it. But if it’s in Chicago the day before it’s supposed to be in South Bend and you know that for some reason it has to go to Indianapolis and then to Detroit before coming to South Bend, which is in between Chicago and Detroit, maybe you update your scheduled arrival then? And then maybe don’t keep insisting it’ll arrive by 2:45 on that day right until the moment where that is temporally impossible?
In other Stupid But Annoying news, the last time I bought a new watch band for my Apple Watch at the beginning of the school year it got stuck while I was installing it, and I’ve never been able to remove it. The band is starting to look more than a little raggedy but I still can’t get the sumbitch off, and I am going through this spectacularly stupid mental calculus where I’m starting to seriously consider buying a new watch rather than continue to deal with this nonsense. I’ve had the old watch for over four years and I feel like I’ve gotten my money’s worth out of it, but that sort of means that I’m buying a new, $500-800 watch depending on the options I choose because a thirty dollar band is stuck, and that also is on my last damn nerve.
(Why the hyperexpensive option? Because the stainless steel case and the sapphire glass screen are what are on this watch, and four years after buying the damn thing and wearing it 20 hours a day there is not a single mark anywhere on it. No scratches, no paint chips, no dents, no nothing. The stainless steel case with the sapphire glass screen are indestructible, and I don’t know how close the cheaper model comes to that ideal. I don’t like scratches on my watch.)
So, yeah. I’m having a Day. How are you?
(EDITED TO ADD: I just received a helpful text message from FedEx informing me– no, two helpful text messages from FedEx!– informing me that my package has been rescheduled to Thursday, 03/11. Which is … today.)
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