Our front porch. Not AI.
My old truck gave out in 2024, and I bought a 2024 truck.
Any normal man woulda got ridda the old truck, but apparently, I’ve got attachment issues, because … I’ve still got the truck.
The easiest thing to do was to just park the truck on the lawn and forget about it.
And since I only drove the new truck, we just mowed around the old one.
So here it is, 2026, and the old truck has sat on the lawn for 2 winters. The tires are flat, the battery is dead. WTF?
Finally, I snapped out of it. I asked AI: “how do you sell a junker online?”
And it gave me the names of places that want to give me thousands of dollars, plus free towing. And I filled out the form for one of them.
ONE of them.
And my phone started ringing.
This is Matt. This is Zach. This is Nick.
In Indiana. In North Carolina. In New York.
From Wheelzy. From ClunkerJunker. From SellYourCar.
“Have I got a deal for you!”
I started out confused, and I even called one of them back. Pro tip: Don’t.
Two days later, someone gave me thousands of dollars, and they towed my truck away for free.
But not before the wrecker got stuck and needed another wrecker to pull it out.
My birthday was a BFD. Seventy.
We had a celebrity visit from my very own flesh and blood, and we had more food than exercise. The Green House was decorated in my honor, they toasted to my health, and they sang the fucking song. It was a good excuse to get the family together.
I think they watered down the drinks, and it took me two tries to blow out the candles.
Birthday dinners are always a big deal, and the cooks in the kitchen were working out the details while I sipped my second drink. One of them approached me and asked:
“We just want to make sure we’re doing this right, so … four times one and a half is six, right?”
“Right.” I said. I sipped my gin and waited.
“Good,” she said, and walked back to the kitchen.
Yep. Reid’s still got it.
If I’d known they were making drinks, I’d have told her ten.
There was a time when my basement looked like a lot of room.
I remember when I first plunked down my ten foot long workbench in the middle of it, and the bench looked small and lonely.
Fourteen years and fourteen hundred projects later, the basement is chuck full, and it’s feeling small.
And here I am, churning out fixtures so I can churn out spiral dressers, and I’ve run out of places to put the pieces.
Something’s gotta give.
It doesn’t take a mental giant to see that I’ve got a lot of stuff down there that I could just … get rid of, and nobody would know the difference.
All I gotta do is decide what to get rid of.
What am I never going to use again?
And that was hard.
I needed to set up my new gluing fixture, and I needed room for it. Fifty square feet would do it.
And the best place for it, hands down, was where C3PR sat. Dusty, lonely, sad, abandoned, and in the way.
After an emotional tussle with myself, I took C3PR apart and hung the body from the ceiling like a trophy, where I can admire my work, cannibalize it for parts, and bump my head on it.
Then I turned this …
… into several of these.
While shaping one of the stacks, I cut into a buried beetle burrow, and (ahem) I’m trying to decide whether to call it a bug or a feature.
It was cool in the shop, and my epoxy wasn’t curing very well, and the bulb in the lamp I use as a heat source had died, and I searched high and low for an olde tyme incandescent light bulb, because those damned newfangled LED bulbs they sell nowadays don’t throw any heat.
Flame off.
You can’t spell Armageddon without Garden, and I’ll be ready when it happens.
We’ve got the whole garden planted with stuff we can store.
Potatoes, garlic, onions, carrots, tomatoes, squash.
Galore, galore, galore.
Now I’m not saying that the end is near, or that the food supply is going to collapse, but it never hurts to have a well-stocked root cellar.
Just in case.
I set them down because I couldn’t see through them.
Then I stepped on them because I couldn’t see them.
In the past, most of my gardens have failed due to lack of water.
In Westford, I buried miles of pipe, tubes, and wires in the ground. I ran the pipes to the pond for water, and I ran the wires to a Controller. I had it all figured out, on paper.
But then, the pond water clogged everything, and by the time I had it figured out, the season was over. It was a fail, and I haven’t done much better since. Ask me about my blueberries.
Near as I can tell, automatic watering just doesn’t work.
But when the alternative is starving, I’m giving it another try, and
This time, it’s gonna be different.
This time, I’m going to follow the instructions.
This time, it’s going to work.
I used to scoff at the Internet Of Things. But since low tech hasn’t worked, I’ve gone high tech. Wireless hub. Remote telemetry. Soon, I’ll be watering my gardens from a world away, with a highball in one hand and my phone in the other.
What can go wrong?
The first brand I bought was highly rated. AI told me so.
It musta been hallucinating, though, because the range was waaay too short, and it wasn’t gonna work. I sent it back with a few stern words.
AI and I had a little chat about that, and I bought a different brand, and now my gardens are getting exactly the right amount of water every day. Automatically.
Except on days when it rains.
A few months back, I “found the problem” with the Kawasaki, and I predicted that, come Spring, it would “start right up and ride like the wind.”
Spring came, and it started right up. Yay!
It took me to the bottom of the hill at a lively clip, but then the trouble started. It didn’t want to go uphill. I finally made it home, but it was sputtering and wheezing and shifting the whole way. It was not pretty. My neighbor was walking his dog, and he observed the whole debacle.
I googled it. I had a chat with AI about it. I read the instructions. I took it apart.
I found a vacuum leak. It took me three tries but, by God, I finally plugged it. I felt confident that my troubles were over.
But on my test drive, it still didn’t like the hill.
I sync’d it. And it still didn’t like the hill.
I cleaned the pilot circuit and I tuned the fuel mixture, but it started raining before I could try it on the hill again. I’d about lost hope by then and, sure enough, when I tried it, it didn’t like it.
I know it’s a cliffhanger, but I gotta go.
Maggie is 41
