Day: July 6, 2018

“You Amaze Me” – La Force. I’m not sure how to describe this song. There are hints of neo-R&B, but I wouldn’t say it’s a modern R&B song. There’s a healthy amount of indie rock to it, but it also doesn’t sound like standard indie rock fare. Nor is it straight, modern pop. Regardless, this ode by Broken Social Scene member Ariel Engel to her husband, fellow BSS member Andrew Whiteman, is excellent.

“Someday” – Phantagram. I planned on sharing this song a month ago when it was first released, just as I began having issues embedding Spotify playlists here. It remains worthy of sharing not just because it is a good song, but also because of its message. Sarah Barthel wrote it in honor of her sister, who succumbed to mental illness just over two years ago. Proceeds from its sales go to mental health awareness organizations. Given the losses of Scott Hutchison, Kate Spade, and Anthony Bourdain, this seems like about the best cause an artist can be for these days. I hear some common threads with Julien Baker’s “When I Turn Out the Lights,” another song about mental illness, in the opening lines.

“Queens of the Breakers” – The Barr Brothers. I believe I checked out some of The Barr Brothers music last fall when they released their most recent album. There was some buzz about them falling into the same broad area of music where The War on Drugs lives. At the time, I don’t think that comparison struck me as valid. But re-listening to this song recently, I now hear it.

“Mirrors” – Crocodiles. This one goes back a few years, to 2011, but it seems like a good song to crank up in the summer.

Time for an end-of-the-week update, as it has been an interesting few days.

I’ll share the good first: we actually have some movement in getting our house connected to the internet and world of cable television! Thursday morning L came and found me and asked, “Who is that creepy guy in the backyard?” I looked out and, sure enough, there was a creepy guy pushing one of those bicycle-wheel measuring things across our backyard.(fn) I went outside, greeted him, and asked what he was measuring. He was difficult to understand, but I gathered he was there to run a cable line.

“Great, we’ve been waiting on you!” I said. I asked how long after he was done it would take to get the house hooked up. His response, as best as I could make it out, was that as soon as he was done, he would call it in as completed and connecting the house should happen pretty soon after that. Of course he, or someone else, was supposed to have done his job three weeks ago, so I took his “pretty soon” with a big ol’ grain of salt.

I went back inside and the girls and I watched him and his partner run the line from the street to the power line behind our house. I thought it was very interesting the cable service is above ground. That’s what you get for moving into an old neighborhood, I guess.

Anyway, progress and there is a line about 100 feet from our house now. If we can just get it extended from there to our house, and then someone inside the house to get us hooked up, we’ll finally be cooking with the gas of the sweet, sweet internet.

Now for the not-so-good news: the deal to sell our home here fell apart this week. Although I think this site is pretty locked down in terms of privacy, I still don’t want to reveal too much yet since the house is officially back on the market. For now I’ll just share that we had a major disagreement regarding the results of the inspection – our realtor and we believe the inspector made an inappropriate observation in his report that caused the potential buyers to make an unreasonable request – so we gave them an F-you response and they walked away.

So, starting over. We have painters going in today and are doing some other repairs we wanted to hold off on to use as a bargaining tool. Between those improvements and the fact that our neighbors’ house has now closed at higher than their asking price, we’re hopeful that we can get a better selling price the second time around. We’ll see; we’re a little disillusioned and cynical after round one. And we’re bummed we missed two weeks of potential showings dealing with those dickwads.

What else has been going on?

We’ve arranged to have our lawn mowed. This was hard for me to do. I’ve taken care of our yard for 15 years. We don’t always have the nicest yard on the block, but I kind of liked the 30–40 minutes it took to knock out the old yard. But we agreed that even if I got a riding mower, the new lawn would just require too much of a time investment to take care of. Luckily we had some friends who suggested some guys who ended up being affordable, so they’re going to start taking care of it next week.

Thursday, on the lawn guys’ suggestion, I bought a tripod sprinkler. Yes, our yard is so big I have to use implements often found on football or baseball fields. Naturally it rained for three hours the day I bought it.

We’ve also been making daily purchases from hardware stores. We’ve literally made at least on purchase from Lowe’s, Menard’s, Home Depot, or a local hardware store every day the past week. And we keep ordering stuff from Home Depot online that, for some reason, causes our credit card company to freak out. I have to text a confirmation to the card company that, yes, the purchase was legit, and then call Home Depot and have them crank my order through again. That’s happened two nights in a row. But when I dropped four times as much on the card for a deposit for some house repairs it went straight through. I guess my card company has something against Home Depot.

The other big thing right now is just getting used to where things are and how they operate. Fifteen years of turning right to get a utensil for the stove is hard to forget when the utensils are now on the left. The thing that has really thrown us is having the door to our basement beverage fridge open on the opposite side. Every single time S or I go down to grab a beer, we grab the left side of the handle instead of the right. I imagine we’ll start getting this stuff figured out sometime in the next 2–17 weeks.