I should actually do this: I should go back through the literal decade of my life that this site encompasses and check the last week of August and the first week of September for every year to see how often I mention being sick. Because holy hell have I been sick for the last couple of days, and I’m still sick today, and I fully expect to be sick tomorrow, and I’m already thinking I’m probably taking Tuesday off so that I can get the shit done that I already know I won’t be doing tomorrow. I didn’t post yesterday because I was asleep. Basically for the whole damn day. Then when nighttime rolled around and I tried to go to sleep sleep, I had weird hallucinatory dreams all night, including one where I got Superman’s powers and immediately flew off to Burning Man so that I could find a certain billionaire asshole who was rumored to be there and drown him in the mud.
I feel like, while not entirely unreasonable, that’s probably not a mentally healthy thing to be dreaming about, right?
Anyway, I owe you a review of Cat Rambo’s Devil’s Gun, which
holy shit, there’s a hummingbird outside my window, just a minute
Damn! He got away before I could get a picture. My wife claims to see them fairly regularly around here, but me spotting them is a damned rare situation, especially on this side of the house. I suppose this big bush/tree thing outside my window does have some berries on it but I wouldn’t think of it as hummingbird fodder, generally. Maybe I should start watching more closely, or put a feeder out there.
Anyway, I got sent a free copy of Devil’s Gun, and so I feel like it deserves a review, and I’m not quite in the right headspace to write it right now, so … eagerly anticipate that, I guess. I’m currently reading T.J. Klune’s Wolfsong and it has already broken my heart six times so you have that to look forward to as well.
And now back to bed; I was breathing okay a couple of hours ago but I am very definitely not breathing okay right now, so being a bit more horizontal seems like a good thing.
I’m not Sundaying— I swear I’m really not– but man, I feel like I really let the day get away from me today. I was feeling great at about 12:30– I had about 75% of my grading done for the weekend, although no actual planning yet, and I felt like that left me in really good shape to get everything else I needed to do done. Then, somehow, lunch took two fucking hours, and while I’m intellectually certain I had to be doing other things than eating a couple of veggie burgers and some chips between 12:30 and 2:30 I will be damned if I can remember what any of those things might have been.
My son has a D&D group every Sunday from 4:00 to 6:00. As he is not the most social kid on the planet (he is great around people– better than he thinks he is, really– but in general would always prefer to be at home playing games, which I can hardly fault him for) I like to encourage anything that gets him out of the house and interacting with other human beings. That said, the absolutely lovely people who host this gaggle of sixth-graders several weekends a month live a million miles away, and it’s three hours out of every Sunday for my wife and I as well since returning home between dropping him off and picking him back up is stupid. Anyway, by the time I got out of the shower (that’s correct, I ate lunch before showering) it was time to go, and then I had to finish the grading and the planning, and oh right I owe the Internet a blog post, and now it’s 8:04 and I cannot shake the feeling that I’ve forgotten something important that I had planned to do today.
I mean, the lawn didn’t get mowed, but I didn’t want to mow the lawn, so whatever.
Oh, and I lost half an hour to trying to buy a Roblox gift card with the generic Visa gift card that he got for his birthday this weekend, and that type of fuckery generally makes me want to punch things.
The good news is that there’s no reason– he said— why this shouldn’t be a relatively easy week at work, and last week was dandy. The early in the year exhaustion ought to be starting to abate this week too. So for the most part, things are looking up, at least until I realize I forgot to pay the mortgage or whatever it was. Looking forward to that.
Is boredom a symptom of depression? I mean, it can be, right? I don’t think I’m clinically depressed because I’m too functional for too much of the time, but these brief twelve-hour funks where I don’t want to do anything could stop anytime and I’d be fine with it.
I had a really good day at work today– this is certainly my best start to the school year in, well, years, and to be completely honest I wouldn’t be able to tell you what specific years might have started off more strongly. That said, it’s going to be 100 degrees for the next two days, another one of my former students died recently and I just found out last night, and if I don’t get a decent night’s sleep tonight I’m going to end up driving off the side of the road on the way to my awesome job tomorrow. So we’re going to make this a little mini update and go read on the couch for a while.
Also, for those of you who were concerned, I’ve gotten some balls rolling regarding the kid from yesterday.
Spent the weekend in Michigan visiting my aunt and my cousin, and between the drive and being “on” for family and the first week of school I am officially pre-exhausted for this upcoming week. On the other hand, my cousin had the good sense to marry a Lebanese woman, and Jesus Christ do I love absolutely every single fucking aspect of Lebanese cuisine, so we ate really well yesterday and brought a ton of food home, all of which I will have eaten by tomorrow.
Oh, oh, and I got a flurry of emails over the weekend and I have two new students coming in tomorrow, neither of whom can speak English and one of whom has spina bifida in addition to not speaking English, so that’s gonna be fun. Will I figure it out? Yes. Will I remember to create a sub folder so that I can put the legally-required evacuation order for the the spina bifida kid in it? Uh. Probably. Sure. Let’s stay positive. I have Monday and Tuesday planned out right now; surely that’s enough, right? Wednesday through Friday will take care of themselves.
Oh! Also! It’s going to be in the nineties all week and the high Thursday is supposed to be a hundred and one (101) degrees, after a summer that barely touched the nineties at all. Did I predict this state of affairs? Yes the fuck I did.
At least Kissinger’s going to die and TFG’s going to go to jail to make up for the rest of it, right?
I am so tired that I may actually be dead, but the first day of school went really well.
After work tomorrow we are heading to Michigan to visit my cousins and my aunt for the weekend, so if you don’t hear from me for a couple of days, don’t panic.
The new bed is fully in place, and the new mattress is going to arrive tomorrow, so depending on how long it takes for it to decompress from the tiny box they’ve stuffed it into he ought to be sleeping back in here by mid-week next week at the latest. I have a couple of observations about putting this bed together, if you don’t mind indulging me:
First, the build quality of the bed itself is really impressive. The whole thing is steel and decent-quality particle board; there was a small dent in one of the pieces of wood because the box took a hit at some point during the delivery process, and we’re going to see if we can get them to send us a new one, but I was able to hide it and it’s not going to make any kind of difference structurally. Everything went together really easily, all the predrilled holes in the metal pieces were in the right places, the welded joints feel strong, and once I went through and tightened all the bolts (suggestion: install everything with your hands to finger-tight and then go back with a drill once you’re certain everything fits right) it just feels rock-solid. It’s not making any noises or squeaking or anything and it just feels like it should have cost more than the slightly-over-$300 we paid for it. There may have been a bag of screws missing from the hardware box– I say “may have been” because it’s entirely possible we lost it during the unpacking process, but I really don’t think that’s what happened, because I was being careful. At any rate, a trip to Lowe’s solved the problem for an extra $5 worth of screws. Whatever.(*)
Let’s talk about the instructions, though. And if you think I’m about to complain about something translated from Chinese, think again. There are almost no actual words in the instructions, I assume specifically because they wanted to avoid translation issues. That said? The instructions suck. They get piece numbers wrong a few times– one page had a couple of part numbers handwritten in it, and even then they were wrong– and there are a couple of deeper issues as well.
One, this bed is reversible, which one would think would be a selling point– by which I mean that the stairs can go either on the right or the left of the bed itself, and once you figure out what you’re looking at it’s easy to figure out that, okay, if this goes here instead of here, that’s why this seems to have extra holes in it. But the instructions never mention this! In fact, the diagrams show the stairs on both sides and in both orientations at various points with no indication that anything has changed, which as one could imagine, can lead to some confusion to those not paying careful attention. I am proud to say that I made only one build error– that bottom three-part rail on the right side was initially put in upside-down, which was not the instructions’ fault and was easily fixed. But I’m generally pretty good at this kind of thing. If you’re not used to it, the moving stairs are gonna be a problem.
And, well, there’s this, too. Take a second and look at this diagram carefully before you keep reading:
Look at the bottom part of the diagram. Am I going blind, or is there some sort of haywire M.C. Escher shit going on with the directionality of the bottom third of this diagram? Like, these lines don’t line up correctly, right? This is apparently looking up from underneath the stairs, and I can’t put my finger on what’s wrong but I also just can’t parse it.
The good news is that all you really need to be realizing from this diagram is 1) put feet in the feet-holes, 2) screw all of the pieces of wood onto the frame, and 3) put those little brackets on the side of the hangar cubby, which– right– I did screw two things up, because I used the wrong bolts there and, uh, had to have my wife get two more from Lowe’s. But this fucking diagram is terrifying if you’re already not confident about how to put this type of thing together, and I’m genuinely not convinced that the actual diagram itself matches physical reality properly.
One way or another, though, the boy has a new bed, and once the mattress goes in and I get his whiteboard put up on the side there and, Christ, some more lighting– note that I had to pull some of my spotlights from my year of teaching at home to help me out in the top picture– I think the room will be good until he decides the trees and Pokémon are too little-kiddy and we need to repaint again. One way or another, I hope he likes the loft, because it’s never leaving that room.
(*) My wife, who actually got the job of having to buy the right screws, might disagree with my “whatever” here, just for the record.
We have been on a hell of a tear around here lately; the boy’s new loft bed isn’t finished yet and the mattress won’t be here until Monday anyway, but we tore apart his old bed (storage, with a storage headboard as well, so it was quite a job) first and moved that into the garage. Today also involved reinstalling the trim I removed yesterday so that the new refrigerator could be moved in, then putting the door back, then hanging up some smoke detectors that have been in the Wrong Place for literal years, so we got all kinds of stuff done at the Siler homestead today. Tomorrow I’ll put the desk together and add the stairs on the side and then the bed will be done, and sometime in the next couple of days there’s going to be some painting in the living room. Also, now that I’m an electrician, there’s a really good chance that our front and back porch lights are not long for this world, because I’ve never liked them.
I know I promised a pillow review. Probably not tomorrow, since I’m sure I’ll be posting “after” pictures, so let’s say Monday. I promise soon, though.
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