The three original members of Mastodon sat down and shot a quick remembrance of Brett Hinds, their former guitarist, who died in a motorcycle accident last year. They were honest about their experience with him, from the beginning to the end, and even without going into too much detail, it’s clear they all loved and miss him.
It’s been pretty quiet around here for the past couple of weeks. I’ve had my head down, working on projects for the 9-5 gig, and it’s been too goddamn hot to be outside doing much of anything. The dog is going mental because for various reasons she didn’t get a morning walk for most of last week. Friday morning we did go out for coffee, and when we left the house it was cool and slightly breezy, but Canada was thick in the air and the acrid taste of it was thick in the back of my throat. By the time we turned for home it was already hot, and we made it in the door just as the humidity really ramped up.
Jen and I did spend some time after dinner looking over the tomato situation by the greenhouse. Finley spent a couple of days weeding and cleaning it out last week, and apart from the usual clutter of pots and garden stuff, it’s really nice to be in there with thriving plants again. (Full disclosure: I’m also using it to store truck parts). Jen has four plants in the planters outside, where the day lilies used to be, and I’ve got six in containers inside. My plants all grew and fruited quickly, but my heirlooms developed blossom end rot from uneven watering. Her plants outside have gone bonkers—she has a cherry plant that is absolutely covered in fruit, and her heirlooms are heavy with big healthy, meaty tomatoes. We spent some time trimming, fastening branches to cages and poles, and fertilizing. As I was pulling dead leaves off my group, I noticed a strange object high on one of the plants—and realized it was a tomato hornworm, busily munching away. I pulled three more off, and Jen found one—her plants are also being nibbled on by deer, so we have to keep an eye on things daily to make sure we’re on top of the pests.
We bought and planted a peach tree on the other side of the yard last fall, and it seems to be very happy there. In the spring it blossomed and fruited very quickly, but Jen read that we should pull them off and trim the tree back in the first year to help it get stronger, so regretfully we pulled all but about four off the branches. They got pink and fuzzy, and Jen was getting excited to harvest—until they disappeared one morning. When we planted the tree, I installed six-foot deer netting around it to prevent them from eating the leaves, but somehow something got in there and stole the fruit. Our yard is a rest stop on the highway the deer use to get to and from the park, so I’m not surprised, but we’re going to have to step up our game.
This afternoon, I registered a new domain name and ordered some stickers with the URL Duganheavyindustries.com for the product I’m planning on selling. I’ve been using multiple URLs for various things, including oldlinestatebinders.com, but I decided it was finally time to centralize everything onto one site. I’ve been using the name for a while but I think it’s time to pull the trigger and make it official.
The motivating factor is the cupholder design, which is ready to go. I put together a quick installation guide for it, but I have to do the final pricing negotiation before I have the first batch made. I’ve also decided to make them out of stainless steel for both aesthetic and pragmatic reasons: if someone doesn’t paint it straight away, it won’t rust.
While that was happening, I got a request from someone about printing designs on pocket T-shirts, which Threadless, my current printer, doesn’t offer. I did some research and found a different vendor who does pocket T’s, as well as offer more customization than Threadless—and a better profit margin to boot. So I’m going to wait to hear how the shirt came out, and if that looks good, move my designs over to the new platform. Then I’ll have to go in and manually edit all of the YouTube videos to update the final card—which features a red Travelall and the URL of the Threadless site.
Here’s a long-delayed video update covering everything after Nationals to now, including yesterday’s excellent Travelall update: The truck is starting again, after I ran out to the 800, stole the ignition switch from that, and swapped it in. As I was testing the old one I found that the lock barrel was just spinning inside the switch, which is very much not supposed to happen. This was the unit from the replacement wiring harness, so it was probably 60+ years old, and definitely due for a replacement.
As the years have gone by, I’ve taken fewer and fewer pictures of the Catonsville parade, but I do still pick up the phone to shoot interesting things.
This year, the weather was so hot (“feels like 112˚”) there were probably 1/3 of the usual participants in the parade, and 1/2 the people normally watching. It was just miserable outside. As usual, we spent the day before preparing for it through the heat, and I was outside from about 8AM until 1:15 getting everything set up before I could run upstairs for a shower. Jen’s sister and her family were with us, and it was a low-key day, but it still took everything out of me.
As this beautiful shoebox Ford drove past, one of many classic cars, I commented to my sister-in-law that it was the one I’d want in my driveway out of all the others present. About 20 minutes later, a man tapped me on the shoulder and asked if he could charge his jump box from one of my outlets: it was Larry, the driver of the Ford, who told me the car had sputtered to a halt one house past ours, as the generator wasn’t charging the battery. I got him an extension cord and some water, and we stood in the shade while it started charging the box. Turns out Larry knew me from my trucks and figured I’d be the guy to ask; I didn’t recognize him because he wasn’t driving his sick blue T-bucket hot rod, which he normally has at Cars & Coffee. As I mentioned earlier, the parade ended early, so we walked up the street and were aided by four firemen who helped push the car back and into our driveway, where it cooled off under the tulip tree.
Once the jump pack was ready, I threw my tow straps into the Scout and followed Larry back to his house, where he tucked it into the garage. Along the way we saw another of the antique cars from the parade dead on the side of the road; I think it would be a huge gamble to take my trucks through a parade on such a hot day.
I think the only time any of us were outside was during the parade and its aftermath—it was just too hot to be outside. Our guests left at about 9:30, after a passing thunderstorm cooled things off a bit, and we all collapsed into bed. I had to tackle Hazel while the local pyromaniacs lit off fireworks until 11:30, and then we were able to go to sleep.
Over at the Autopian, founder and chief editor David Tracy had been periodically updating the site with progress on his latest crazy idea: building a new WW2 Jeep from parts sourced strictly through eBay. He’d gone dark for the last couple of months, but reading his July 4th article wrapping up the entire project, it’s clear why: he was working nonstop to get it done by the deadline, so he could drive it 900 miles to Moab for the Jeep Roundup. It’s a great story for anyone interested in foolish ideas, old Jeeps, or road-trip adventures.
Jason Kottke posted a response to an interview I hadn’t been aware of until now: Ezra Klein interviewed Ta-Nahesi Coates for the New York Times, contrasting the way they each see the current situation in America. Andrea Pitzer took a look at what they said, and contextualized the different ways they see things:
It might sound pessimistic to see, as Coates does, the likelihood of many losses looming ahead, even as we fight for wins. But if you consider the long history of the problem at hand, it releases you from bright-kid syndrome, from the illusion that you yourself are going to have every answer or fix the world. You understand that to do so is impossible. You are—at most—going to be one piece of that solution in a chain of many people that begins before you were born and continues after you die.
Her take on things is really smart, I think, and sums up a lot of what I’ve been struggling with for the last ten years: I can’t fix everything, but I have to stick to my core values and continue to do what’s right for my people and my little corner of the world.
This is a really interesting historical and technical background to the unique and sexy sound of Morphine, one of my dear departed favorite 90’s bands. I knew Mark Sandman played a heavily modified bass with two strings, but didn’t know he played everything with a slide—and the action on his strings so high.
I also like how the host goes into the interplay between Sandman and Dana Colley’s baritone sax and how the latter complimented both the bass and vocal melodies in such a unique way. There’s something about a tight group with a rock-solid drummer high in the mix that does it for me; see: Soul Coughing, Smashing Pumpkins, early Queens of the Stone Age. It also just occurred to me that Sandman died two years before I started this weblog.
Having seen the new Scout Motors models in person, and having talked directly to several of the company reps, I came away incredibly impressed with everything about them. But I haven’t put a $200 deposit down on either vehicle, as much as I’d like to. I have no idea what price point they’ll actually release at, but I’d wager it’ll start somewhere in the mid-$50K range, which is just too expensive for our family to justify. I would definitely go for the Traveler model at this point, as much as I’d like a pickup truck; the small dimensions of the bed pretty much negate any advantage having an outside box would bring. The primary reason I bought the Travelall was to have a 4-door SUV with hauling capabilities, and that need hasn’t changed any.
However, Slate is coming out with a no-frills EV truck platform they swear will start at $25K. it’s supposed to get about 200 miles of range, which is more than enough for 95% of the driving we typically do every year. And it’s customizable, where adding an extra $4K would build an SUV-style truck. This is more my budget and style; as much as I’d love a Traveler with the range extender, I see a Slate fitting in my driveway—and my wallet—a lot easier. We’ll see how it shakes out.
Tim Cook told the Wall Street Journal that Apple will have to raise its prices due to the skyrocketing demand for RAM and storage.
“Unfortunately, price increases are unavoidable,” he said. “We’re doing our best to mitigate the huge increases that are being passed to us, and we’ve been trying to shield our customers from the increases, but the situation has become unsustainable.”
I’m feeling pretty good about pulling the trigger on this new MacBook Air. It’s made editing videos much quicker, and I know it’ll be a solid workhorse for the next four or five years. Meanwhile, the M2 Air I got back from the estimator is now my walk-around machine, something I’m not afraid to bring out into the garage to look things up or follow a video tutorial on.
I spent the entire Juneteenth weekend at hard labor, taking advantage of unseasonably mild mid-June weather. The temperatures were in the mid-80’s but with little to no humidity, which made being outside pleasant, even if I was swinging Dad’s mattock into our rock-hard topsoil. We inherited a bunch of poorly-poured concrete sidewalks with this house, which I’ve slowly been removing over time, and this weekend I broke up and hauled out a section sitting right in front of the basement stairwell, itself a poured concrete structure set into the side of the house. During heavy rainstorms, water would over the top of the saturated grass and down the slab, which had settled backwards towards the house, up and over the edge of the stairwell and down into the basement. This was a primary cause of flooding during both of the 100-year storm events we shared with Ellicott City, requiring Jen and I to man the bilge pumps and shop-vac to bail out the house.
After knocking the slab into sections (it was only 2″ thick at its deepest) I hauled it over to the driveway and stacked it for future disposal. Then I trenched out a 8″ area around the stairwell about 14″ deep, built some plywood forms, and mixed 8 cubic yards of concrete to pour, bringing the next step up another 5″. I had to go out twice for more ready-mix, because the both internet and the instructions on the bag were completely incorrect for estimating how much I’d need. I also used the mattock to break up a section of topsoil where another area of sidewalk had been, mixed in some new lawn soil, and laid out a piece of sad-looking sod in the hopes that it will root and take. by 6PM I was beat, and after a shower I took it easy for the rest of the evening.
Saturday we were back at it, beginning the day by filling the back of the Scout full of garbage for a dump run. The County is getting squirrelly about everything, so I had to take the time to cut all of the wood down to 18″ sections, which took time. Jen and I went over to the church to break down the steel rack she’d bought to store donated food, and we continued working on the rest of the sidewalk, as well as excavating a section of lawn next to the garage for a new planter. I drank about five gallons of water and might have peed a thimbleful all day.
Sunday we got back at it, employing Finn with the mattock to finish up the sidewalk planting while Jen and I scoped out the garage planter. By about 4:00 we had the trench dug, lined with landscaping cloth, and filled with eight bags of river stones. All of this excavation yielded about six wheelbarrows full of extra dirt, so we spread it on the far side of the garage, cleaned up our tools, and went inside. Jen heated up our dinner and the girls went out to bring me back a shake for dessert, which I sipped on while laying on the couch on the front porch, a nervous dog snoozing under my feet.
This morning I’m moving slowly. My brain is foggy, and my joints are stiff. It feels good to have a lot of long-gestating projects closer to done, but that took a lot out of me.