Dave N. wrote: Tue Aug 26, 2025 8:50 am Lu is right. Fuck a summer fever. It feels strange and out of place. My bones feel like broken glass. Constant headache. Hot cold hot cold. This virus doesn’t exist ten seconds from now.

That's why I get vaxxed year round. Will be getting one rather soon I hope and then end of the year it's a flu shot.

SCIENCE FTW!

Today I went for a surf and after had a fantastic "shakerato" and now I'm at a tennis club in Malibu (one of my accounts) working and having lunch. After lunch I'll work some more. When the crew here finds some time I'll taste some wine with them before heading off to Chatsworth where I'll taste with another account, that will then feed me an incredible meal.

Days like today fucking rule.

My sister and I did a final walk-through of the now-empty childhood home, which is set to close tomorrow. (It's a relief, really.)

Maurice wrote: Thu Aug 28, 2025 10:09 pm My sister and I did a final walk-through of the now-empty childhood home, which is set to close tomorrow. (It's a relief, really.)

Ah man, that sounds heavy. Glad it's a relief!

Little details from yesterday: I swung by the grocery store on the way home and they had mislabeled a bunch of skirt steak at $6.99/lb, half of the correct price; I bought 6 lbs of it, threw most in the freezer, and used about 1.4 lbs to make fajitas.

When I got home I found a houseplant busted on the floor, not sure if it was a dog or the cats that knocked it over and the beautiful planter was in too many small pieces for my supergluing skills, but goddamn am I glad that thing is dead. It was as succulent and I love succulents, but it's one of those String Of Bananas-type plants that is more high maintenance than the water-it-when-you-feel-like-it of aloes or jades. Anyway, it was given to me when my mom moved in with us for a couple months in 2020. She'd gotten a divorce from the ding dong she'd married after my dad died, was moving back to Colorado to be closer to us, and she let us know a couple weeks before showing up in late March 2020. We had four foster kids at the time with a household of eight people (not counting her), six of whom were at home all day due to remote school. She got a job that required her to get up around 2:30am and would get mad at the kids, ranging from ages 9-18, as they did normal 8pm things like wrestle, jump around, make Hot Pockets, and fight. She was not at all cool to the fosters and I recall trying to get up the guts to tell her that this was their house and not hers, that she was a guest here, and that she'd need to be kinder to them if she was to continue staying with us, but she found her own place before I had to do that.

That plant has spent five years as a symbol of her imposition, losing leaves as cats and dogs run through it. Good fucking riddance.

Heavy stuff all around, wishing both of you some measure of peace – sounds like a welcome shift in both cases at least.

I'm trying to shed the last cling of jetlag: we got back from our annual summer trip to the Olympic Peninsula to see my mom a couple days ago. So much threading the family needle and grappling with my mom's ageing/decline that it's hard to process any of it for real while there or here either really after the fact.

Me and the little guy were just messing around with Koala sampler on the iPad before bed. He had started making squeaky noises with his fingers on the pages of his Minecraft medieval builds book after showing me what he tried to make today and I grabbed the iPad quick and recorded a bunch of samples that we then used to create weird sequences for twenty minutes or so, adding effects. That app rules so hard, as does Musyc, which we also revisted on vacation.

The fuckers from the delivery service have fucked up my delivery, so I went there and got my TV myself.

FUCK THEM!




It barely fit into the backseat. It's a 127cm TV! Now Xi Jinping can surveillance me when I jerk off, first thing Saturday morning! Hope he'll have a good time, I'm a world class onanirator!

Having a hell of a time snapping back from this bout of covid. I decided to go to work yesterday, and it was a big mistake. Feeling beat up. I’m accepting any advice on how to climb out of the post-covid doldrums.

Dave N. wrote: Mon Sep 01, 2025 2:16 pm Having a hell of a time snapping back from this bout of covid. I decided to go to work yesterday, and it was a big mistake. Feeling beat up. I’m accepting any advice on how to climb out of the post-covid doldrums.

Just let yourself rest. Getting over things is taking a fucking long time now as we get older. We don't snap back anymore, we just kind of slowly reform into our natural state. Like increasingly old rubber bands : )

Trust me you will get there!

The past six months have been the most momentous and bewildering of my life.

In the spring, we bought a new place (a brick-and-timber loft in an old industrial building) and sold our old condo, where we’d lived for the prior 17 years. The new condo is a bit of a dream home, though it’s required work (e.g., sound reduction for one of the walls, lots of furniture purchases).

In July, as I talked about in the RIP thread, my dad died unexpectedly. Thankfully, it happened very quickly. He had been the caregiver for my mom, who has advanced Alzheimer’s disease. My brother and a half-brother did the lion’s share of the work finding a care home for her and moving her into it. It took two moves, in fact: the first place, an assisted-living home, wasn’t equipped for her needs, so she was recently moved into a memory care facility. It’s heartbreaking, to be honest: she never knows where she is, she often can’t recognize people, and she sometimes doesn’t know who she herself is. My brother has had to shoulder the most responsibilities by far. He’s kind of been my hero—everyone’s hero—these past few months.

Our oldest left for college two weeks ago.

Later today, our youngest will board a plane for France, where she’ll spend her junior year of high school.

My wife and I are now reckoning with what it means to be empty nesters. We have lots of stuff planned for the month—dances, dance lessons, movies at the Music Box. I plan to buy a new (old) Victrola in a couple weeks. But we also wonder what it will be like on regular evenings, when the kids aren’t here, making noise.

I hope 2026 is less eventful.

Wood Goblin wrote: Thu Sep 04, 2025 9:30 am The past six months have been the most momentous and bewildering of my life.

Damn, that's a heckuva six months right there. I've lived through some similar experiences but not all at once.

Take some of that new "empty nest" time for yourself.

I wish you the very best.