I can put off deciding what to have for dinner for as long as I want, but it’s just going to be dinner time again tomorrow and I’ll have to do it again.
Tag: adulting
Adulting!
Took the old garage lights to the dump— did I mention we installed new garage lights?– got our taxes done, and knocked a couple of test holes in a wall today for a “weekend project” we have in mind that no doubt will take six months to finish. I feel like that’s a Saturday, right?
I have four letters of recommendation to write tomorrow, all for the same scholarship, and the building can only nominate one of the kids who apply to the next round. I am supposed to send the letters directly to the school counselor and I am genuinely tempted to write a real letter for the clear best choice and have the rest of the letters say “I choose that other kid.” I’m not going to do that, of course; I’ll make the best case I can for each of the kids, but I think the choice is pretty clear at least among these four. I think the world will forgive me if I use a common framework for the four letters, though. Hopefully. After that I have a week of lesson plans to write– for some reason I really want this week settled before I get to school Monday morning– and after that a combination of threats and prayers toward nature, because apparently despite it being nearly 70 degrees earlier this week we have a winter storm headed our way again? And, no. There are not going to be any more winter storms. Indiana had tornadoes yesterday, and it is an ironclad rule of the universe that tornadoes and snow cannot coexist in the same week. Just … no. I threatened to kill God on Bluesky the other day and it received a startlingly positive response; nobody wants to make me follow through here, right?
Today is the 61st anniversary of Malcolm X’s assassination, and while I freely admit that I did think when I purchased the above book about Malcolm X that I would read it during Black History Month, specifically starting it today was a happy accident. I could tell you without looking it up that Malcolm was killed in late February of 1965, so I knew it was soon if we hadn’t just missed it, but if I’d gotten the 21st right it would have been a lucky guess. I’m startled at how fast February has flown by; I have about 30 books I need to read in the next seven days, and my wife and I ought to figure out what we’re doing for our eighteenth anniversary at the end of the week.
Yeah. Eighteen years. I am so old that I have been married for eighteen years. Madness.
It’s a video game night
I actually got a fair amount of adulting done today, getting my car scheduled for some long-overdue recall repairs and putting 150 pounds of salt into the water softener, thus allowing it to, y’know, keep working. Read three books. That’s not quite the achievement it might sound like, since two of them were novellas, but still. And now I’m going to try and get Clair Obscur to click. It’s close, but I’m still bouncing off it a bit. Hopefully tonight’s the night.
Oops
I damn near forgot to post today, what with doing all sorts of accident-related adulting early in the day, my son having a friend over for the whole afternoon, and then a Trunk & Treat at Hogwarts filling up my evening. I also managed to squeeze in some reading, my Arabic, and finally putting Black Myth: Wukong to bed, although I think I’m going to play for a bit longer to get the platinum on it. I’ll probably do a full review, but the short version is “It’s pretty fucking awesome and you should play it.” That said, the reports of insane difficulty on the final boss and the final optional boss are a little overstated. Erlang took maybe half an hour and The Great Sage’s Broken Shell maybe an hour, neither of which qualifies as enormous difficulty in my book, especially since the strategies needed became clear pretty quickly and it was just a matter of putting everything together.
Just, y’know, forgot the website until 9:00. Sorry!
In which the day got away from me
Let’s see: I spent a couple of hours hunting down bosses in Black Myth Wukong’s final level, which inexplicably transitions into an open world map but doesn’t actually provide you with a map, meaning such concerns as “north” and “south” become way more complicated than they ought to be. We went out to dinner at a local Italian place, the one with the really good bread, although I’m starting to suspect that they’re using genuinely stellar bread to cover up for mediocre entrees. We finally took down the utterly terrible curtains that have been hanging in our dining room since we bought the house and replaced them, and the hardware, with something not filthy and disgusting, and we went and bought paint for the entryway to the house, a decision that I think we’re going to live to regret, but my wife thinks otherwise, and she’s usually right about these things.
I don’t feel like that gets me to 9:00 PM, and I’m not sure where the several other hours of the day have gone, and I’m rather disturbed by my inability to account for, like, half the day. The boy is at a lock-in at school right now (I have done one of these during my career, and I will never do another) and you would think having the house to ourselves would lead to something exciting, but instead we’re going to watch one (1) episode of Great British Baking Show and then go to bed.
Adulthood’s exciting, innit?
In which I can change lightbulbs
It’s always fun to discover that something you thought might have been complicated was, in fact, an easy job. Last week a man pulled up alongside me at a light, tapped his horn, and waved for me to roll my window down. I took a moment to think about whether I had any bumper stickers or other adornments on my car (I don’t) and went ahead and rolled the window down. He let me know that I had a brake light out, a fact I was completely unaware of, and then wished me a merry Christmas and sent me on my way.
Have you ever replaced a bad bulb in a taillight? I never have, nor to my recollection have I ever actually had the plastic outer casing on one break in a way that would require it to her replaced. I think maybe the Escape had a crack in one of the taillights but that was one of that car’s most minor issues and I never bothered to fix it. I wasn’t even sure who to go to about that; I know the oil change places will check your lights for you, which implies that they’d swap the lights out if needed, but I’d never had to have it done.
Turns out it’s super easy. On my car, there are four bolts holding the taillight cover in place, and once you remove those (just a screwdriver, nothing complicated) you can easily pull the cover off; it’s being held in place by three plastic tabs in addition to those bolts and takes a touch of wiggling until you know exactly where they are, and after that it’s just a matter of removing the bulb (twist a plastic thingie to pull the bulb out of its housing, then remove the bulb via a very similar motion,) testing it, and putting everything back together. I had a little bit of trouble getting the new bulb to seat properly but I was able to replace both brake lights in maybe 20 minutes even with that slowing me down. The second one didn’t need replacing but the new LED lights came in a four-pack and since I was replacing incandescents I figured I might as well swap them both out so that they matched and to keep myself from having to do it again in the near future.
In short, if your brake lights go bad, at least look into replacing them yourself; having done this once I’m never going to even consider paying someone to do it in the future. I can easily imagine cars that are a bit more complicated, but I suspect on most passenger vehicles it’s genuinely something you can do with no particular mechanical skill.
So yeah. I changed two lightbulbs today. Yay me!
I had five little bits of adulting I wanted to do around the house today; this was one of them, and as of 6:44 PM I’ve completed two others. We’ll see if I get to the last two jobs or if my PS5 and the book I’m reading eat up the rest of my night. My wife reminded me this morning that I have most of two weeks left to Accomplish Shit so I don’t need to get too far ahead of myself just yet.
In which I’ve accomplished something
Okay, on some sort of Absolute Scale of Adulthood, successfully installing a ceiling fan at my dad’s house is probably not at or near the top of the scale. But as far as I know the damn thing is solidly installed, working properly, and isn’t going to come flying off of the walls or collapse or anything like that, and now there is both light and moving air in Dad’s kitchen again (we’re not going to talk about how long it took for this to get done, especially since it diminishes the actual achievement itself) and as far as I know the only thing that really still needs to be done is painting that patch of naked drywall up there that was underneath the original fan.
I mean, y’all, this involved wiring and everything. Wiring is scary! And I only had to go back to Lowe’s once, because I forgot to bring a wire stripper from my house and Dad didn’t have one, and Lowe’s was closer than going back to my house for mine. I thought for a few minutes that I was going to have to install a junction box but it turns out I didn’t have to, so all good there.
And then I got home and found out another former student had died, or at least that’s the rumor; the kid moved to Pennsylvania a few years ago so right now it’s all rumor mill shit and no one who I still talk to has any idea what happened. If I remember right this kid was a year ahead of Makyi’s class, and if I’m being honest I don’t remember him all that well, so it’s not hitting me nearly as hard, but … Christ, between this and everything going on in America this week the emotional whiplash has been a motherfucker and I would really like the world to calm the fuck down for a couple of weeks. It’s enough.
On being a grown-up
One of my students asked me today how much I hated paying taxes, and I think I slightly blew the kid’s mind when I told him that I don’t mind paying taxes at all, because I enjoy living in a society and paying taxes helps ensure that. He didn’t press for additional details, but had he done so I’d have pointed out that there were probably examples of specific taxes that I wouldn’t be especially fond of, or taxing systems that I had preferences on, but the concept of paying taxes itself? No, I’m fine with that, and there are any number of reasons why I might, in theory, advocate increasing my tax burden with no argument. In fact, having voted for a tax referendum for our local public school system in the last couple of years, I have already done that.
Anyway. This is leading toward a humblebrag, so brace yourself as necessary. My tire pressure sensors have been acting concerning lately, and I have three road trips planned in the next three days, so rather than adding air to my tires for the second time in eight days and crossing my fingers I decided to swing by the local tire shack and have someone take a closer look at them.
And that ended up costing me $650 for four new tires. And that’s after a visit to the comic shop, and buying myself dinner, and a visit to CVS for certain supplies that cost me $60, meaning that I left work and looked at my bank account and thought damn, I did pretty well keeping my spending down this week, and then dropped eight hundred dollars in a little over an hour and a half.
This is where the humblebrag comes in: for the first time in my life, I don’t mind the tires at all— to be honest, I wasn’t surprised when the diagnosis was “Well, you’ve got this giant screw in your tire here, so that’s the specific problem, but you’ve had this car since 2017. Have you ever put new tires on it?” I wasn’t certain that was what was going to happen, and I probably could have waited a few months if necessary, but I was able to look at a fairly substantial unplanned-for car expense and just shrug and pay for it because the money wasn’t going to kill me. Now, don’t get me wrong (he said, fending off the forces of karma), I don’t want any more unexpected $650 expenses anytime soon, but being able to just pay for that shit was nice.
The next couple of days are going to be busy– my wife’s aunt passed away and her funeral is in Michigan tomorrow, and then my nephew’s birthday party is in Chicago on Saturday, and we’re staying overnight for that so there’s a (shit!) hotel bill to pay for, but my classroom was a hundred and thirty degrees today so I’m happy to not be there for a couple of days. Hopefully Sunday will be relaxing enough by itself to get me through next week.