Never been one to let the carrier drop

Well – sadly I was hoping to get to 2000 hours and maybe get to a level of skill where I’d impress my dad – not easy 😉 However, he’s no longer with us. My project to become truly great at this remains though.

So, I’m coming up on 1500 hours. I had hoped that I’d make it to 2000 and actually manage to impress my dad with my musical skills, but alas, I ran out of time on that one. But, I’m still working on my skills, and I’m still enjoying the process. I’m trying to get a bit more experimental, take some more risks, in the hopes of finding more of whatever it is I’m looking for in the process of exploring solos.

I was pondering trying to use some AI tools to create a index of the 1500 hours of recordings of my practice. There will, of course, be many more hours by the time I’m done. It seems like automating the process of creating indexes and enabling people to find the songs they wanted – maybe even having the ability to rate different versions and to listen to your favorite version – might at some point be worth doing. I still have hopes that someday I’ll put together a patreon account. I wonder if I’ll ever actually find time to do it. And soemtimes I wonder if there’s any audience out there that wants, or will want, what I’m putting together.

I also need to do some more tracking. I’m aware of the fact that I’m putting it off, although I don’t exactly know why.

(Among other things these are the only way I have to communicate with her)

I do understand that you have a serious mental illness. I also understand that the person who strangled you – leaving bruises on your neck – wasn’t me. That is almost certainly where you picked up the PTSD. I’m sure many things I’ve done have triggered your PTSD – if I’d thought about the fact you had it, and understood how it happened, and not been all tied up with my own story, I would have behaved differently. I think I’ve already apologized for most of the things I’ve done. I also regret anything inappropriate I wrote in the letter to you while still in severe B-12 depletion and half-crazy from my time with Kayti while I was in Fred Brown. Or anything I’ve said while islanded / multiple during a manic phase that upset you.

You might *consider* apologizing for some of your behavior when we were younger. If you cared about me at all, which seems unlikely from where I currently sit.

I also understand I have made *no* attempt to contact you other than by paper letter lodged with our parents for *17 years*. The terrible danger that you’re in is in your mind. I’ve made every attempt to extend a olive branch and to apologize for the things I *did* do wrong. I’m not asking you to befriend me or even be in the same room. But it would be a big step forward if we could have *some* system of communication to at least do scheduling. This would be in your best interests since you *don’t* want to see me.

One of the definite bugs that’s been introduced via whatever I was exposed to in my childhood is I can’t cry when I want to. Like right now I feel like crying – I definitely feel like I’m being treated quite badly – my mom of course also can’t answer the phone while my sister is around, so I can’t talk to her about being kicked off my trip dates that she had agreed to without any attempt to apologize – so I feel like crying, but I can’t.

I can cry sometimes when listening to certain songs or watching certain movies, but I can’t cry when sad things happen. I still haven’t cried about my dad dying, for example.

I need to add a tag for my sister. Will probably make it easier for her to follow my blog since I imagine she only cares about the articles that mention her.

OK, that’s done. I’ll try and go back and tag some of the relevant articles. Anyway, the latest stunt is my planned trip in September must be moved. Now, keep in mind, I *asked for dates* repeatedly and didn’t get any. So I tried to pick some while I was there. There’s a paper calander I used to look for dates that my sister was not there. My sister clearly knew I was going to be at the memorial, because that’s why she didn’t go. (Her hate for me is bigger than her love for my mom, apparently). It had nothing. My mom’s iphone calendar had nothing. I asked my mom if the dates were okay. She said they were. I went back home and the next day bought tickets, and sent the itenerary to my mom. Nothing. Today – four days later – I get a email telling me I have to change my dates. No apology from my mom for making me jump through hoops, just her and my sister had already planned something for those days. Something not on the calander and hithero unknown. My sister clearly could have looked at the calander when she arrived and passed the message on to me *then*, but no.

This is not totally out of the realm of what goes on. I’ve been asked to change dates for my sister’s convenience before. And I do understand my sister has a severe mental illness, probably in fact worse than mine, and given that I do also have one if there’s anyone who should be understanding it should be me. But I do also feel like whenever a choice has to be made, I end up being the one who loses. Part of this is my sister is extremely good at manipulating people, and I generally try to just be compliant with whatever people want.

But it’s almost impossible for me to imagine that, especially if my mom’s memory gets worse, I’m ever going to get to see her. My sister has pretty much demonstrated to me that she has no interest in treating me fairly. I don’t think there’s going to be anyone to intercede to make sure I can be at the memorial service for my mom, or that I can see her in her last days.

So, I was going through my dad’s office and I found a front panel from a early ARPAnet router.

This led me eventaully to a memory of “Take your kid to work day” in 1988 or 1989. My dad took me to the Pentagon and set me down in front of a early Sun Sparcstation – I’m fairly sure a Sparc 1, in fact, from looking at photos and from the timeline. I also remember I was super fascinated by the NEXTcube that had just come out and it’s ability to emulate a modem in software, and DARPA had a few of those somewhere.

Anyway, my dad wandered off for a meeting, and I discovered the video teleconferencing software on the sparc and tried to open several video conferencing links. I am pretty sure I temporarily broke the ARPAnet, which it turns out was still made of 256kbit links.

Shortly thereafter, my dad decided to decomission the ARPAnet. I had never considered there as being any possible connection between those events until today, when I realised that it must have to him looked as a demonstration of how outdated the ARPAnet was. NSFnet was already held together with T1 lines, which were becoming the industry standard, and would not have broken quite so easily.

So, the US government has declared that if you don’t have a job, you deserve to die.

There’s no other way to put it. That’s what republicans believe. You exist to work. If you don’t work, please go away as quickly as possible. Nothing matters more than GDP and the billionares having another billion.

This is extra stupid because the billionares aren’t *using* the money they have. It’s just a score counter to them. So, people should *die* so they can have a fatter score.

It’s really disturbing that we can’t see through how evil and wrong this is and take other, more appropriate action.

For those of you playing along at home, I have been able to, at least in some sense, walk a mile in my sister’s moccasins and I’m no longer angry at her, nor do I believe she is doing this to hurt me.

For my sister, if you are reading this – I completely understand why you came to the conclusion you did about me being a threat. I would never, ever force you to do anything but I understand why you would react strongly to anything that felt at all threatening. I don’t expect to see you any time soon, if ever, but for whatever it is worth you have my support. One thing you need to know is odds are you do have *severe* PTSD and you probably do not remember the event that gave it to you. I really hope you find whatever help you need to feel safe and I will try my hardest to not trigger you in any way.

What happened didn’t involve me – and it was NOT YOUR FAULT – and it would have broken almost anyone. I hope reading this message isn’t triggering and I really, sincerely wish you the best of luck in healing.

So, you all may remember my experience with HVAC that resulted in me declaring I would be doing my own HVAC maintenance from now on – which reminds me I need to figure out if the blower motor or bearings need oiled, which sadly will require taking apart the air handler in my garage.. that’ll be on my todo list for this month.

Anyway, a new item has been added to the list of things I will not pay anyone to do again – or if I do, it’s going to be after *very* careful investigation of their bona fides: House painting.

I didn’t think this was something you could do *that* wrong at – but, a vendor quoted $9000 for painting the house. I expected a *really* nice job for $9000 – I was expecting a crew of two for a week, careful surface prep and sanding, careful cleaning, and then two coats neatly applied.

Then they wanted another $7000 to change some of the siding. Okay, I said.. after all, there was some of the paint that looked really scorched and I assumed that’s what they were addressing.

I’m not sure why they chose to change the siding on the *south* side of the house – but they started out getting on my shit list by not picking up dozens of nails in the driveway. Luckily I noticed a nail in a package and grabbed the magnet on a stick and walked the driveway several times, listening to the ‘clink-clink’ of nails being grabbed.

I wrote what would turn out to be the first of many emails to CribCare, LLC. At this point I was not yet annoyed, just figured they had overlooked this kind of important detail.

However, they chose not to apply primer to the new wood. As a result, the new siding looks *totally* different from the rest of the house, with all the wood grain showing through. This, sadly, was just the beginning of what I am going to refer to as the most amatuar paint job I have ever seen.

They started out by making their job considerably harder by using a power washer, applied way too close to the building. The paint job was completely intact when they started – you could see no wood color, just brown. They blew a bunch of paint off the house with the power washer, but unevenly, so paint applied to those shingles would be mottled. I actually offered to pay $1000 extra in order to get some of the very worst spots where this had been done replaced – and then, in one case, they cut out half a board – with the mottling – when the other half was split. I can’t even fathom what they were thinking. Increasingly, I started to suspect they weren’t – especially when they *painted over the house numbers*. Even worse, they painted over a nickel plated bus bar. And a service box for a microcontroller helium system. And *half* of the conduit and air conditioner wiring and pipes. But only half. Just to make sure it looked as amateur as possible.

They used a spray gun. Now, when I paint exterior, I use something called a power roller – it’s just a regular roller with a squeeze trigger that automatically reloads it from the paint can. You get really good results this way, fairly easily. Honestly, most of my house painting was done with a regular, rub it in the pan roller and a paintbrush. You also get good results this way. It’s a bit slower, especially on the higher parts of the house.

It is not easy to get good results with a spray gun, though. Overspray is inevitable. Another hint we were in trouble was when I saw that the trim had been oversprayed – after which of course it was painted the trim color. Also, the trim on the soffit had been painted the primary color.. and was obviously going to stay that way. There were of course places where the paint had run, and places where there were bugs in the paint. They had taped to the fresh paint and there are still places where it pulled off. Anywhere conduit or other similar things interrupted the spray, the result was glomming. Some of the shingles that should have been sanded prior to paint have a very.. let’s say, rough appearance. I haven’t even begun to catalog all the places where the paint is in the wrong place but I’m guessing it’s going to be long. I found *thumb tacks* they hadn’t bothered to remove.

I’m not even sure where to start with fixing it. Obviously I need to scrape and sand all the rough spots, repaint all the new wood with primer and then with paint. We’ll see if paint thinner will take off some of the paint from the AC lines and wiring. The bus bar will have to be replaced.. no way I’d ever trust it again.

I don’t normally name names.. but this was especially terrible. DO NOT LET CRIBCARE LLC DO ANY PAINTING. After we’ve done the final walkthrough I’ll add photos and also file one star reviews in all the usual places with those photos.

Now, to be fair, they do amazing concrete work, they are good at woodworking, they’re good at general handiman tasks. But they are TRULY not housepainters. I’m out $18,000 and I don’t know if this job is even going to last. Part of what’s sad is I’m guessing my one star review will be the end of our working relationship – but I feel like the world needs warned here, and also I want to make them *really* understand that they screwed up, in the hopes they will change their behavior.

So, I’ve come to have a pretty good understanding of most of the process.

First of all, it seems like my subconcous plans for these even though my concisous mind doesn’t know about them. I am not sure why although one thing I would note is I come back each time with new abilities and they have also enabled me to fight a entity in my mind which isn’t me and which wanted me dead. (I have a feeling that I’ve largely won that war with this particular battle, although maybe this is just the optimism of coming back fresh from a slaughter)

Anyway, first, I get the urge to stay awake for long periods of time. Staying awake often feels very good for the first 48 hours or so, and then starts to feel, um, less good, but I get the urge to continue anyway. Somewhere around 96 hours, it becomes necessary for my brain to do the maintenance that normally is done during sleep. This is largely releasing neurotransmitters that have been uptoken – uptook? – during neural firing. There is a *reason* this is normally done during sleep. When I have it happen while I am conscious, I lose access to most of my memories for a while. In fact, I have to do a repair process to get anchored at all. I will normally check myself into a mental hospital or do something that cues society to do so, because I shouldn’t be working on anything computer related while I’m doing the restart procedure.

The restart and repair process takes a few days. The fastest way to cue it is to force sleep, for which normally 100mg of seroquel is adequate. Using larger doses of seroquel is not advised unless 100mg is not adequate, because Seroquel is actually antagonistic to restorative sleep, but of course, you have to get into the sleep process. There is also a self-test procedure that I will automatically run, mostly involving remembering song lyrics, parts of my past, skills, etc. Often there will be many neural chains that have to be relinked – this usually presents as me not being able to remember lyrics and reworking the same song over and over until I can.