Solid progress on nearly every front.

I've got eight runs of Cat5E under the house going where it needs to go. Which means I was able to relocate my network world to "beside the furnace" from "under the house". In the process I discovered that the horrible smell in 2004 wasn't the neighbor's cat spraying everywhere under the house, it was the other neighbor's cat dying. Fortunately he's long since stopped stinking. He's about two feet to my left and about three feet down as I write this; I may have to pull him out at some point but the crawlspace is only about 12-18" so it takes about ten minutes of tunnel-ratting under sagging fiberglass and over broken rock just to get to him. I put in about five hours in that environment last week and sincerely hope I never have to do that again.

This work permitted me to begin reassembling the studio in earnest, because the gear is now 4 pipes LAG'd to the server, meaning I can actually work on stuff across the network. I've managed to decant three (of five) giant boxes of cable onto the gear; it's impressive how many interconnects are necessary just to get things talking to each other. The move was fatal to a video monitor and to the Kyma, which let the smoke out day before yesterday when I powered it up. A melancholy moment as I spent $3200 on that thing back in 2002 but they don't update and they don't give you any credit to their new stuff and it's such a pain in the ass to use that I'd long since started doing most of my tweakage in Reaktor. On the plus side, disinviting Kyma from the setup freed up approximately 8 lbs of cable and peripherals. Also on the plus side, I noticed my environment up here is quiet enough that the noise of my Pro Tools I/O is annoyingly loud. This is not a problem you have in LA.

Our daughter is in a new daycare, and she loves it. We had to scramble to find one when we landed. She ended up at a place that got scarier with time; we were playing once and she said "you didn't listen so I'm giving you a time out and leaving you alone in the dark!" The new one sends us like pictures during the day. And she's learned the names of the other kids there (the old one, for some reason the lady never bothered learning them, even though she had to make a binder with sign-in sheets for all the kids). It feels more like dropping the kid off at a nurturing environment and less like sending her to a CIA black site. It didn't help that the only kid whose name she ever learned was "Isis" and we kept hearing "Isis didn't come today. We think she's sick."

Bosch has done the most amazingly shitty job of customer service I've ever encountered. It takes a special brand of callousness to give you a new dishwasher and a thousand bucks to fix your floor and make you swear off all their products forever. In part because the dishwasher they're giving us is still two weeks away (minimum), worth less than the one that burst into flame and utterly non-negotiable. In part because their insurance company knocked $15 (yes, fifteen fucking dollars) off our quote for "depreciation." Apparently this is the drop in value our floor experienced between the contractor coming out and Allianz Capital Partners getting their shit together and sending us a settlement. Between Bosch and VW I'm essentially done with the whole of the German economy. I've determined that the commonality of all German companies are (1) precision engineering (2) catastrophically bad failure modes and (3) cataclysmic customer service and I've decided that (1) simply isn't worth (2) and (3). Kinda bummin' because I'm still fond of Miele but seriously - fuck Germany and all things German. Thanks, Bosch. I might fuckin' Craigslist that piece-of-shit $800 dishwasher just because it'll make me mad every time I look at it. But that decision is still at least a week away, because when the Germans nearly burn your house down, they'll make you wait six weeks before making you whole again. But hey. Two weeks from now, I'll be able to have a dishwasher again. And at least (2) and (3) aren't going to take me by surprise.

AND WE HAVE PERMITS. City and state. The city one is contingent on our passing an asbestos inspection, which is hilarious because the building was built in 1985 and asbestos has been illegal since 1979. So why inspection? Because corruption. Frankly, I'll take it; I used to do design work in New York and we'd have to hide "envelope of $100 bills" in the budget somewhere because that's what it took to get permits in Manhattan. We've been doing obnoxious things like picking out tile and cabinets and countertops. My wife and I got in a massive blowout fight yesterday over ceiling tile of all things, which is just an exemplar of how stressful everything is because we fight like once a year. We've also gotten two mailing list sign-ups in the past couple days because of our sign (our $5,000 sign...) and my wife has a client interview next week despite the fact that she's not really in business and despite the fact that we're minimum 8 weeks from occupancy.

Which rules, but which sucks, because our model had us opening four months ago. If we're lucky we're six months behind schedule. It's a good thing I put in six solid weeks of suffering back in November/December (they still owe me the rerate, which is another story) because money. On the plus side, my wife is now in the power structure of the professional organizations up here that she's seen the actual data for the state and we're able to compare it to the modeling we did (with veen's help) in order to build the business. And if I knock about 25% off of all the numbers, the model is just about dead on. Which means, basically, our business assumptions were 25% more conservative than they needed to be, and our business assumptions still assumed we'd survive at 20% of the business we expect based on location and climate.

So yeah. Still haven't figured out if I'm suing our property manager and had a crazy-expensive gadget crap out on me this week, but overall, it's been the first positive week in a long-ass time. Maybe I'll even give blood today, knock that one off the morale menagerie. Cheers, Hubski.

EDIT: The soldering iron has also given up the ghost. RIP, Gen1 Weller Pyropen, 1996-2016. HOLY SHIT. I had that soldering iron for 20 years.