Hi, friends!
How is your weekend going? Fun stuff happening? I’m getting a manicure today and I’m super excited about it. I don’t get them often because gardening is rough on nails. Also I don’t like wearing gardening gloves so I make things worse for myself. But also, I don’t have anything else to plant soooo feels like a good time for a manicure since limited yard work for the next few weeks!
i have tomorow off 🙂
*dances*
may also have sun stroke tho….
goddamn i am toasty
Our kayak voyage went downhill quick today. Sky turned gray & winds made for crazy side waves. Good thing I was with my older daughter that has no fear & didn’t flip the kayak. We called it early & went to bybeer store/taproom for a beer. So cool to have her 21! Then went to Asian store & making Kim Chee pancakes, Szechuan tofu, & namul bean sprouts for dinner. Wife & younger daughter went to Les Mis play in Seattle so we have to have dinner ready when they get here or the beatings will continue!
Despite my many, many, many trips to the West Coast (California, from Orange County up to the Napa and Sonoma Wine Country) I’ve never understood that strange climate and the micro-climates that go along with it. You know, here on the East Coast, and I think it’s the Gulf Stream or something, we have months and seasons that you would expect. But in LA they have gray May and June gloom. Come Memorial Day I’m ready to take all my clothes off and run around in an inner tube but not in LA. And then in September and October it’s time to trot out the sweaters and go all “Love Story” and kick leaves at the dog, but in LA it can get to be 100 degrees and the fires can come racing over the mountains. Up in SF, you can wake up in the hotel district around Union Square, I don’t know if it still exists, I can’t believe tourism is exactly thriving, and it’ll be a chilly and foggy 50 degrees, let’s say. Then, you can take the BART over to the East Bay, and by early afternoon it can be over 100 degrees.
Despite its many problems, I still envy Californians. Unless you live in SF and a couple of other cities in the Bay Area it’s pretty easy to isolate yourself and avoid the chaos and the craziness. The taxes are horrendous and God knows what they’re supposed to be paying for. Certainly the schools are shit, just like in New York, but if you’re like my friends, you will enroll your children in tony private schools and through them meet all sorts of interesting parents. Not in the Bay Area, though. No one seems to be interesting anymore and all the people with all the money are ill-adapted incels incapable of reproducing. Which is probably for the best.
We call this month Juneuary, it can swing from low 50s to 80 in nothing flat. Winds usually pick up in the afternoon but last few days we have opposite. Climate change is fucking us hard but not nearly what rest of country is getting other than wildfires coming soon.
You live in Seattle, right, or near it? I read this very funny (but it wasn’t meant to be; it was straightforward) casual aside that when if you can see see Mt. Rainier you might not need rain gear for the day. But the article pointed out (I have no idea why I was reading this) that Seattle isn’t as rainy as advertised. It’s just that it happens more often in the form of mist or a light rain but the total annual rainfall amounts are less than some other cities.
I was just trying to remember how many days I have spent in England. It was the day I was flat on my back. Over the course of my life I estimate that I have spent at least nine months there. Remember, my university was in Germany, not Britain, so this was all recreational/mooching off English friends and their parents over the last 40 years, plus BH lived in London for a year. I don’t remember once ever being rained on.
Our rainfall is exaggerated but we do have lots of gray days or permadrizzle in the winter. Summers make up for it by being best in the country when we don’t have wildfires. Rarely gets over 90 & stays mid 70s most of time. I live in a convergence zone that gets the beat or worst weather during storms. Really fun but at least our weather reports usually acknowledge us.
California has tons of great public schools (just like NYC) but the problem for a lot of families is that the process for figuring it all out is a mess. Buying a home one block in the wrong direction can mean the difference between a great school and a bad one, or misreading some complex three part conditional statement on a website can mean missing an application deadline.
I think it’s one of the reasons why immigrant communities tend to grow while randomly mobile families struggle. When your cousin from overseas comes over, there’s an extended family network available that can explain all of the ins and outs before the first kid is even born. If you’re coming by yourself from Kansas, how are you supposed to figure it out?
You don’t, so you hire a coach to get your little four-year-old Precious in to the Montessori preschool, and then you’re off. In LA, this means driving up into the Hills, and in New York you either dispatch a nanny to take Precious or, if you’re like some of my friends and got your children into especially desirable schools, take them yourself, where you will hobnob with the great and the good who bother having children. I am childless and sworn to secrecy but the list of bold-faced names my friends have met and interacted with this way would fill a small phone book.
Right, it all works if you can hire the right consultant. But the Devil will take you and your kids if you hire the wrong one, like those Hollywoood types found out when they ended up getting arrested for hiring a sleaze.
I sympathize with people who just throw up their hands and go the private school route, even if I don’t think they’re really thinking things through all of the time. It really shouldn’t be so hard to find a decent public school.
Public schools, like the suburban ones I attended, used to teach to a certain standard. That’s the last thing Randi Weingarten is interested in now.
It’s not like the private schools are much better. A friend of mine once asked me to participate in this “bring a friend to school day.” I was very close to this family. The mother and I met in college so we have a long history and we serve as each other’s confessors, when necessary.
I showed up and we rotated through and it was fun, I saw all the cubbies and the crafts materials and there was a little musical, but then there was this very weird lecture about the evils of slavery. I looked around the classroom, which was 100% white and Asian, as you would expect, and so were the “friends for a day”, and I think the kids were maybe seven? It was incredible. Imagine being a recent immigrant from East or South Asia, you’re doing OK so you get your kids into this fancy-schmancy private school, only to have the (white) teacher start talking about the African Diaspora and collective guilt. I actually confronted the teacher after this. I said, “You’re a lunatic. Something like fifty thousand white New Yorkers died in the Civil War to end slavery.” And she said, “It was a power grab to maintain capitalist…” and other misunderstood Marxist nonsense.
Luckily, it was a private school, so she was summarily fired a couple of months later, for a different reason, but had she been part of the New York City Department of Education workforce, she’d still be drawing a paycheck 20+ years later, with union-supplied automatic raises and benefit increases built in, and she would spend her days in one of the rubber rooms.
Still not feeling 100% so the weekend wasn’t much fun. ☹️
Oh dear. We need you to feel better.
Thanks 🙂
I discovered robins are building a nest in a garden structure, so we’re going to need be careful about giving them privacy until the kids are grown.
Holy fuck these kids are going to need serious therapy for a very long time.
https://apple.news/A57ohPaZFRaCkYnZ5CHCFAg
On the bright side… at least Emol didn’t say he was going to make a man carrying drone capable of finding/lifting the kids out of the jungle using Chat GPT and while calling the rescuers pedos.
This is very late but I feel like I must get this off my chest. I’m trying to work, believe it or not, and a car just drove by with speakers blaring. That’s nothing new in this neighborhood, but it’s usually shitty…this time, it was this:
I think Stevie Nicks and Fleetwood Mac in general are like the whitest thing ever, back when the cool LA sound was lily white (imagine a Black Beach Boy or a Monkee) so what that car was doing here I don’t know. A decade ago I would have guessed buying drugs. One of the many drug-addled Kennedy spawn died of a heroin overdose not too far from my apartment in the 1970s, but since they all have so many the herd has to be culled somehow. But now drugs are openly sold and traded citywide, no one cares, so why they didn’t just go to…
Anyway, enjoy.
RFK kid? Something messed up his kids really badly when he was killed, except for maybe the oldest, Kathleen.
You’re thinking of (I really have hate-read way too much about the Kennedys) Kathleen. She was the widow of…let’s let wiki explain it:
If I were to give a woman marital advice, which I’m not often called upon to do, my First Commandment would be, “Is this person in any way related to a Hyannis Kennedy?” The women who marry into that family are driven insane, into alcoholism and drug addiction and suicide. When Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s, campaign gets off the ground, I wonder if anyone will get around to asking why his second wife hanged herself during their acrimonious divorce proceedings.
I am actually looking forward to his third wife, Cheryl Hines, going out on the campaign trail. The Kennedys are good Catholics, despite the many divorces and alcoholism and suspicious early deaths of concubines.
I can just imagine the unguarded but unpublishable interview with Cheryl Hines, after she’s had a couple.
“Look. On TV I’m married to Larry David, who’s like 20 years older than I am, which is not that uncommon in Hollywood marriages, but I wouldn’t want his circumsised Jewish dick anywhere near me. With Bobby, he’s bloated and looks like Uncle Teddy so I enjoy getting that Kennedy magic.”
I think I need to reach into my little black plastic trash can and dry heave. Please forgive me.