Weeknote 0013

31 March 2023

My Mac came back. Hardware issue fixed but, annoyingly, they took it upon themselves to wipe the thing and reinstall the OS. How that helps with a blown speaker I do not know. Recovering a 2TB volume is a long and tedious series of niggles.
My back has been hurting for a few days, so went to the fancy hotel in town for a massage. A lovely use of an hour on a Sunday afternoon but, sadly, didn’t do the trick.
By coincidence, we also took delivery of a new mattress. God, I wish we’d done so sooner. A new mattress is always keen to point out how bad the old one was.
Succession is back. Love it. Lots of good TV going on right now: The Last of Us, Ted Lasso, Taskmaster and The Mandalorian. Also a new Wes Anderson film is coming up in a couple of months, which I expect I will love.
I realised I had a spare phone, identical to my dying Pixel 3 but with a cracked screen and missing power button. The battery, though, is still sound. I didn’t fancy Frankensteining the two together, but then it hit me: I could just remap the buttons and put up with the good-battery bad-screen combo for a few months.
During the week, almost nothing else happened apart from work and a trip to the local McDonalds for a McPlant and fries. It’s been that kind of week.

[In which Mo learns the bass guitar]

I took my bass to Andy the local luthier. He has been booked near-solidly since I bought it in January. I assumed he might have been dealing with a Covid-induced backlog but, it turns out, the lockdown kept him busier than ever. With everyone staying in, folks went up into their lofts and dug out their neglected guitars so that they could follow lessons on YouTube. So he has never been busier, and is making his way through piles of guitars needing his attention.
Instrument-makers are my kind of people. It’s the kind of pursuit that is part science, part art and, candidly, part blind faith. The first 90% of any service is procedural, but the magic happens in the final 10%. But there’s no real way of knowing how much time or effort will be needed to find that magic, so I have no sense of when I’ll get my bass back. It’s going to be measured in weeks, but then you can measure any period of time in weeks.