pfeh.

The job I wanted fell through last week: I assume they have a funding squeeze (real or imagined, probably passed down from the Board). It was a really good fit, too, in terms of shared principles, with lots of room to grow over time. But here we are, and no one will do any hiring until they sober up from New Year’s, so it’s a good time to bang on my various projects. One in particular, building a sort of rolling practice cabinet so I can have multiple violins out of their cases at once, feels ambitious but doable, since I can use the goodies down at the makerspace.

Of course, I was down there yesterday afternoon, failing to make a relatively simple jig to sharpen my chisels and plane irons. I think part of the secret sauce is to just buy actual wood and then build the thing, instead of trying to economize with scrap wood. And

It’s raining again, which is delightful in itself and sorely needed in general, but also we had a lot of epic flooding last year, areas of the city we didn’t know could flood: we were supposed to go to a friend’s house for dinner on New Year’s Eve—only a couple miles away, but as we watched the news and alerts, it became clear that even if we could get there, we wouldn’t be able to get back.

So maybe not all the rain at once.

PROJECTS

One of my pretty durable hobbies—I’m pretty sure I’ll keep doing it as long as my body holds out—is music, for which I have acquired a fine set of instruments and other tools. I have such good taste that the two instruments I’ve sold to my favorite music shop in Berkeley were immediately sold to the same guy—the first one while I was still in the store. Not particularly expensive taste, but very good, and I love buying instruments so much that I get really excited about helping other people buy instruments, because I only buy what I think I’ll play, and I (eventually) get rid of whatever I don’t.

But, with ADHD brain, I often want to use a bunch of instruments in sequence: guitars or mandolins or fiddles or whatever. Occasionally I have non-ADHD desires to hear how something will sound on a different fiddle, but mostly it’s ADHD. Similarly, getting things out of their cases takes up a lot of space and means I don’t play them as much; that, plus the fact they’re pretty, are why we have a house full of display cases. But for sitting down and playing, I want instruments right there, without taking up the square footage needed for all the cases. Just the guitar stand and music stand take up a ton of floor space.

…I can just build something. I’m all certified for the woodshop tools at the local makerspace. I’d used, and often owned, everything except the jointer, planer, and router. It had been a minute since I used a table saw, and they’re more hazardous than I remember—although they have a SawStop, an absolutely incredible safety innovation. Few things focus my attention like sharp objects, and the more dangerous, the greater the focus. They have a simple logic to them that makes for straightforward rules:

• It can’t cut anything it’s not touching.
• Edges can only cut along one axis.
• Blades attached to motors are more dangerous.

So you can roll out corollaries like:

• Keep everything about yourself as far away from the cutting action of the blade as you possibly can.

Anyway. I own a bunch of tools, and have access to a bunch more, and I can probably manage to knock together a stable, rolling furniture…thing. Cubbyholes to safely hold violins. Pegs or a flat drawer for bows. Sheet music storage. Some kind of music stand facility that is not a music stand.

This is a thing that has to be designed, so I went and measured the violins and viola. The 5-string I got over the summer is a beast: the older one is the same length and width (620mm x 220mm), but the height on the newer one is 120mm to the old one’s 90mm. It’s basically a small viola, which is of course why the C string is so delightful. I have a single regular 4-string violin, and it is absolutely adorably tiny by comparison.

I’m also working on a mute for 5-strings, since such a thing doesn’t exist. Not that it can’t be done, it’s just been waiting for someone who both plays 5-strings and also knows how to shape metal. Or me, at any rate. I made a dodgy mute years ago by taking two double-stacks of dime-sized magnets, assembled with gaffer’s tape, one on each side of the bridge, and the mass dampens the bridge vibrations. It’s not great to mess around with your bridge if you don’t have to, though, and it’s just so…inelegant. "Crufty," we would say in software development. Sure, it works, but it’s far from the best idea and not exactly something you want to put your name on.

This is my favorite mass-damper design:

Besides the charming wood camouflage, it’s identical halves, bolted together. There are a few ways to go about fabricating it, but probably roughing it out on the bandsaw is fastest, drill the holes, then cut the fingers with a mill. I have a 4"x4" brick of aluminum that’s just been waiting for a project, and I can prototype in aluminum with my tools at home, even as neglected and unaligned as they are.

Whenever I get motivated to learn 3D modeling, I can share the design out and people can finally make their own…

turns out I love my work.

I’ve been interviewing with a couple companies, which I’ve actually enjoyed! They’ve asked good questions, like "How did you get started in management?", to which the answer is "Let me tell you about college a cappella groups…". This past year has let me make my story coherent enough that I can plausibly talk about my life before Computer Science 101, which itself happened where the Internet was so far along that there were a whole six (6) of we avant-garde who had websites.

I do love working with computers, and I’m an excellent software engineer. I just love working with people more, and I’m better at it. Software development is an utterly human endeavor, and it depends entirely on we squishy, analog humans communicating. We exist as systems on so many levels: cultures, communities, guilds, cities, towns, villages, hamlets, ecosystems, microbiomes, tissue cells. Workplaces, chat rooms, housemates, marriages, friendships, families, minds.

I can see those systems, and I can help people be awesome. And, as a role, being in management makes sense to me, which is not always the case.

I hired an engineer onto a very specifically particular team, but the team and the organization were involved in some slogging work, and they quite rightly brought this up in a 1-1 after a couple months.

"I feel like there are decisions being made where I can’t see them, in meetings I’m not invited to. Am I being paranoid?"

 "No, you are absolutely correct, we have these meetings about The Project, and we can read you into it if you want, but they are meetings which have made both me and Matt visibly angry."

[Matt is justifiably legendary for his patience and kindness, and while I’m no slouch in the patience-and-kindness department, it is known that me getting visibly angry takes a lot.]

"Oh. Shit. Okay. Never mind."

Patrick Rothfuss’s masterwork The Wise Man’s Fear gets its title from a saying in that world:

"There are three things all wise men fear: the sea in storm, a night with no moon, and the anger of a gentle man."

Managers can be extremely non-creative, partly because they don’t know what else to be, but also because there’s a sad mode of management where the job is being a "bullshit umbrella," protecting teams from the rest of the company. At large companies this is most commonly all you’re allowed to do, unless you also enjoy throwing elbows in institutional—let’s say bureaucratic—politics (which some people do). But it’s so much more fun to treat it like a collaboration with the engineers, because the two jobs are radically different: woe be unto ye whose only way to promote an engineer is to make them a manager.

So, sure, see what I did there? I’m not hiding anything, and I’ll be as transparent as I can, but no one with good sense wants to deal with work which is not their job, which is making multiple gentle men angry.

smaller world than I thought.

I got to hang out a bit with a local fiddler, who’s selling a Very Nice Violin and dropped it at the house for me to try overnight. This kind of loan is common with orchestral strings and bows, often up to a few weeks, because tradition aside, you need to hear the instrument in the places and contexts you would be playing it. Plus, no one wants to (or can) deal with payments and refunds even for $10,000, let alone $100,000 and up. People will take photocopy your driver’s license, and maybe sign a receipt, but overall an honor system that goes bad relatively rarely, all things considered.

This Very Nice Violin was a 2010 and actually just been refitted by an extraordinarily gifted and energetic luthier who manages to be at every folk music-related event in North America, living in San Francisco or Nashville in between. That luthier knows me, so we had that point of connection.

We got to talking about what music I play, so Swedish/Scandi music came up, and I pointed him to Timbre Folk & Baroque as the only place in driving distance to try and buy Scandi instruments. I mentioned this guy down in L.A., who’s a lawyer, but also a pro-quality musician, who’s already been down this kind of Scandi music rabbit hole, and the seller and I took a minute to come up with his name, as the seller said "I should know this, he’s dating my friend L—…".

(I met them both when I was in Bellingham last year, as they turned out to be staying above the cat-free Airbnb I rented to replace the cat-inhabited one. They’re very nice, and fabulous musicians together.)

So then we were talking about the nyckelharpa.

"A friend of mine is moving to Sweden to study it!"

"Amy H—?"

"Yeah!"

I would be stunned if Amy remembered me, because we met at the Fiddle Tunes festival before the pandemic, where she was one of the instructors. The owner of Timbre Folk—who seems to know every professional player of Swedish music that has passed through the Bay Area in the past thirty years—called her "Probably the best nyckelharpa player on this side of the ocean."

(I passed on the Very Nice Violin. Just not the one for me.)

On the one hand, I wish so many people could make a living playing music that it was a crowd of strangers.

On the other hand…this is what community looks like.

that new-violin smell.

Seriously, though, I can still smell the varnish. I think it was finished a week or two before I picked it up.

When learning to ride a motorcycle, one cognitive challenge we have is the genuinely alarming angles we have to tilt over in a curve. It’s freaky, and 100% necessary.

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Motorcycle tires are an amazing technology, and the truth is that on pure dry pavement, and often wet as well, tires will grip really well at extreme angles. That’s why motorcycle tires have a round profile, instead of a car’s square profile.

So we tell each other: go ahead and lean the bike. The tires are better than you are.

This violin is better than me. I learn just by playing it. It has more dynamic range (quiet/loud), more depth of sound, crystal-clear high notes, a much more powerful (i.e. viola-like) C string. I know it makes me a better violinist because when I go back to any of my factory violins, I play them better as well.

It’s just very nice, and I love it.

another addition to the zoo.

Today is the 6-year(!) anniversary of picking up the violin! I thought it was 7, but my teacher points out he forgets, on account of the, uh…I dunno. 30-35 years of making music before that? The trumpet was a loss because I had braces and a developing case of PTSD from school, but I learned to read music, and when I went to boarding school I took guitar lessons and started singing. I still play guitar a lot. I don’t know how much I’ve improved over the years, but it’s my mother instrument. Piano would have ultimately been more useful, though it would have required a special education teacher to help me make sense of piano scores.

(I have trouble distinguishing details in a bunch of identical straight lines, which makes music an adventure, and piano scores just make my brain shut down.)

I’m buying a Nice Violin™: a 5-string by a guy who has mastered his craft and loves experimenting. He’s been collaborating with a fiddler/luthier who knows 5-strings inside and out and has been coaching the maker on what the sound and playability should be. The maker takes that back to his shop and just does his thing to make it sound like that. This is his fourth 5-string, so "#4" for short.

(I visited him over the summer: we thought we’d combine that with visiting Honor’s cousin in the same town. The cousin said "Oh, yeah! He’s a couple doors down, I helped him move his fridge." It cut down some travel time.)

It turns out I saw this one "in the white" in his workshop, unvarnished; he didn’t have it strung up, so I didn’t play it, but I did get to hold it up alongside the Dahlia (the model name for my current violin I’ve played for three years now). I’ll take pictures, but it’s a little silly how different they are.

I’m keeping the Dahlia, because while it’s an uncommonly good factory-built violin from China, if I take it out to a bar or whatever and it goes missing, that will be sad,  but it is replaceable. As is the bow I (will continue to) use, which is carbon fiber. The Dahlia also has a really, really good piezoelectric pickup in it, which is a handy thing to have around. Also I like playing it and it looks cool.

#4 deserves a name, and to tell the truth, the Dahlia might also. We’ll see what #4 tells me, beyond "you have a lot of practicing to do."

surprise!

I got occasional arcane updates about the progress of J’s birth certificate: an email from Juvenile Court saying they sent a form to the state, a letter from the state saying they did their thing and handed it off to the next state, and then finally a letter saying the birth records have been updated! Awesome, that was like 2-3 months, instead of the year the Court told us it would take.

I ordered 3 copies of the new birth certificate, and they’re gorgeous: too: all I had growing up was notarized copies, but no, this is full color, on heavy paper. And they listed me as the father!

In an unexpected twist, the mother was "Not Stated."

The city clerk said, "It was the natural mother blank? Yeah, I think I know what happened. We have this new system for entering adoptions…". She sent replacements, and an envelope to send the bad ones back—practices you want to see in a city clerk—and now it’s all official, with both parents and everything!

So the preparations to send him off to college now also include changing his name, which would be a lot easier if we had gotten him a state ID with his deadname, but it’s his deadname, so we sort of didn’t want to, and also didn’t get around to it. Now we change the Social Security number so it matches the birth certificate, then comes the state ID, and after that pretty much everything is easy.

It’s a nice feeling. All three of us have worked really hard for this. It’s good.

self-revision.

At the end of the day, who we are is a story. We tell it to the world, to tell it how to treat us. (Whether it listens or not.) We tell it to ourselves, to remember who we were yesterday, and who we want to be tomorrow. Our sense of self is a little like cooking: no amount of skill can make up for crappy ingredients. I make a killer salt-crusted roast chicken, but not if the chicken was bought several days past due from Grocery Outlet.

Growing up, I was the nerdy, book-absorbed kid, and Tim and Ben were so profoundly gifted with their bodies, that I always felt like I was also the awkward, uncoordinated one. In the team sports that were prioritized, that was absolutely true. I was, and remain, mostly rubbish at baseball, basketball, and soccer. I’m sure I would have sucked at football. I was dropped into a gymnastics class that was unable to help me. Martial arts were off the table, because that was fighting. (Or something. It’s complicated, and I'm not 100% sure what the problem was. My life would have unfolded differently, for sure.)

It emerged that I was pretty good at tennis. In the violent, traumatic time of 7th and 8th grades, I carved out some space for myself by being good at the ersatz handball played between the two classroom buildings. (We used a racquetball and no gloves, so you needed a baseline pain tolerance.) My boarding school requires you to do some sort of sporty thing every term, so I did tennis, volleyball, softball, soccer, and weights. I was still good at tennis, and I turned out to be quite good at volleyball. (Softball and soccer were still a bit of a waste, but with nobody pretending the game is anything more than a curriculum requirement, who cares?)

For some reason, I joined the swim team as a diver. I wish I remembered why. It was appalling. Incredibly anxiety-provoking. When you dive, failure is painful. I was bad at it. Senior year, a kid broke his ankle, and I was on the varsity team. I did really poorly. I hit my head on the board at an away meet. Clearly I was gawky and uncoordinated.

Except...I'm not, actually. Even before aikido got me inhabiting my body properly, I was naturally good at a whole bunch of stuff:

• tennis
• racquetball
• handball
• volleyball
• sharp objects
• hitting people with sticks
• climbing
• not falling down cliffs

Ben and I used to have these crappy dart launchers, the kind of rubber suction-cup darts that often don't quite fit and are never really straight, and even if they were, they have the aerodynamics of a handful of wet sand. I was pretty consistently able to hit the outside of Ben's ear, from 15 feet away. I knew how the launcher worked, I knew how the shape of the dart affected its flight. Straightforward enough, but my therapist assures me it's atypical, as is being able to grab an insect out of the air. (Even if all I can do is crush it. Not flies, but mosquitos, gnats, and moths.)

Remember that time I made friends by flawlessly throwing a hatchet? I had literally never thrown a hatchet before.

(It's vastly easier and safer than throwing knives, which is why people have been opening axe-throwing franchises for parties, not knife-throwing. I think the difference is in how closely a hatchet's mass is concentrated around its axis of rotation, meaning the blade is not going as fast as a knife blade does. The mass's inertia keeps it in alignment in flight. And, finally, the blade is heavier and has a lot more energy behind it, which knives don't, which is why just getting knives to stick in a target—never mind hitting what you were aiming at—is an achievement.)

So it's not that I didn't get my share of the sporty genes, as though to compensate for getting more than my share of the bookish genes; it's just that, as happens, my growth was asymmetrical, and it took a long time to find the body stuff I'm good at. Oddly, this excludes dancing, which is so hard for me it's not fun at all. Same with video games.

And now I can read and play viola music, leaving me no wiggle room to doubt that I am, inter alia, a viola player. One of the violin challenges is knowing—feeling—where the notes are on the fingerboard.

One of the viola challenges is that the notes are in a different place from the violin.

Guess who doesn’t have a ton of trouble playing in tune on a viola.

maybe some other time.

You may have suspected that I enjoy the process of shopping for, buying, and playing musical instruments. You may not have suspected that I enjoy it so much, I get really excited about helping other people shop for and buy musical instruments. I am limited in time, space, and money, but also the right instrument for me isn’t going to be the right one for anyone else. Five years ago I could not have imagined the violins I play now, which are…not persnickety, exactly. But you have to ask them the right way.

(I’ve tried some violins in the 1800-1875 range, and they are fascinating, but not so much that I want the project of owning one. They require maintenance, like your 1953 British motorcycle that leaks and burns a quart of oil every week. Very particular maintenance.)

It’s weird to anthropomorphize instruments, or anything else, but everything we make ends up with its own set of quirks so distinctive it makes more sense to just call it "personality." This is true with sailboats: on Outward Bound we sailed as a pair of 30’ wooden boats, built by the same people to the same pattern, but my boat topped out at 6 knots, while the other boat, in the same wind, would do 7 knots. Wood is obviously organic, but in the aggregate, it’s true of the 98%-synthetic Sunfish sailboats too.

We are fortunate to have some world-class instrument sales and service shops here, which is how I got to play a $110,000 guitar yesterday. It’s a 1940 Martin D-28, which my 70s Japanese pseudo-Martin so faithfully copies. I was not interested in playing it, but an older gentleman came in and asked to try it, and we got to chatting. He said "I would love this, but I don’t quite have the cash right now," which I would not have taken at face value before living here, where there’s a Ferrari dealership across from Taquería El Camarón.

(Until fairly recently it was also a Maserati and I think McLaren dealer. Maybe the pandemic forced them to cut back.)

I gathered he has more than a few Martins at home, collectible enough that $110,000 is a price range he’s familiar with. Aside from the starting challenge of having $110,000, it’s actually really hard to spend $110,000 on an ordinary performing guitar! If an instrument isn’t famous by association—like $1 million for a vintage guitar from Keith "I Can’t Believe I’m Not Dead By Now" Richards—you’ll have to call around just to find one. A gorgeous 1888 guitar (#SE-124) by Antonio de Torres, who more or less created the guitar as we know it, is entirely playable and costs $275,000. (Higher than they seem to sell for at auction.) By contrast, if you want a $275,000 violin, I know a couple local places off the top of my head that can probably give you several to try out. It’s not quite a joke when we say you can translate guitar prices to violins by adding a zero on the end.

ANYWAY.

This 1940 Martin really does glow, but only somewhat more than my not-Martin. It is loud, easily the loudest dreadnought I’ve ever heard. I played it briefly. And it’s…fine? It’s a vintage Martin D-28. I basically already have a vintage Martin D-28. And I’m not the world’s best guitar player, so it’s likely wasted on me unless/until I really put the time in to study the guitar in the way I’ve studied the violin. And by then, I might have developed a different (and certainly less expensive) taste.

I think $110,000 will buy me 1/3 of a Ferrari, though…

how to start your weekend.

Most of San Mateo County’s operations are in the county seat, but for departments that don’t have a lot of traffic with the downtown offices—the county library system, the coroner—are up the hill in San Mateo in what I can only describe as a citadel. It’s cleverly set in terrain that offers remarkable privacy, and chunks of it are somewhat fortified, because the biggest occupant is Juvenile Court, including detention, and a variety of things that look like they’re there for the children of juvenile offenders.

When I picked a date for the hearing, they told me all adoption hearings are on Fridays, and it didn’t occur to me to wonder why until we were there, and the staff was relaxed and happy. There are signals of what a more ordinary day is like: signs like "NO HATS IN COURTROOM" and "GENTLEMEN, TUCK IN THOSE SHIRTS.’ Adoptions are obviously one of the most joy-inducing things they do, so it makes sense to just pick a day of the week where people show up for court and they’re there to make a family.

The courtroom blew my mind. There’s the usual judge…podium? pseudo-throne? pulpit?…arrangement, but when the judge entered, she brought a giant smile down to a floor-level lectern. The walls had two-foot wide emojis, lined up like shields in a medieval great hall: "To acknowledge that all emotions are valid in this room." There was a five-foot tall teddy bear, with dozens of smaller bears surrounding it.

And in a final surprise, by tradition, adoptees pick a bear to take home.

just like that.

I’ve never really looked at the child adoption procedure. In part this is because we’ve had no adoptees in the extended family until my cousin adopted her stepson. Normally at this point I would say "Right, suuuure you don’t," except that the genetic variation goes from this:

all the way down to this:

Good luck telling the guys apart on the telephone.

Adoption results in a new birth certificate, which is obvious when you think about it, since the entire purpose of a birth certificate is to legally define the parent-child relationships via the circumstances of birth. I find it weird for a bunch of reasons:

• Rewriting history is not really something my brain will do. I can usually remember what we’re supposed to say about the past (true or false), but I also remember the past.

• I’ve never been a legal parent before, and I always very carefully avoided the word "father." (And still will, really: the birth certificate will list us both as "parent." J’s word for "adult male who shows up with patience and kindness" is just "Chris.")

• A birth certificate will now attest that I had a kid a few years before I met the kid—the form said "Enter your name as of the date of the child’s birth." I remember that year very clearly, and the most I could claim was being uncle or uncle-like to a marvelous trio or two of girls.

In my world growing up, birth certificates were static, authoritative documents, not just because I come from a line of lawyers, but because our genes allow no doubt about where we came from. We look, sound, smile the same. When my grandmother died and I went back to the Rust Belt village my grandfather settled in after leaving Pittsburgh, I went into the one coffee shop, and the owner, Marit, came out from the back and said "You’re a D—, aren’t you." (My cousin tells me Marit loves telling the story as much as I do.) All but one of Generation #4 is through high school. My uncle was on the School Board for a bunch of years. His father was a judge, whose portrait is in the courthouse.

I tell a story, and I hear the more or less uniform voice the men have. I make an expression with my face, and it’s the same smile gifted to a few dozen other people on the planet. 

So in my life to date, a birth certificate is a set-in-concrete record of past events involving biological parents, the ironclad thing you use to sign up for soccer teams or get a passport. It’s wonderful that we can alter the law’s view on our relationship, but it’s also just viscerally odd.

sleepy now

We returned from an epic college road trip up to the delightful greenery of Oregon, and we will be launching J to college up there for the coming year. It's a transitional program, with a couple dozen students, where they take a couple courses to learn How To College, and spend the rest of their time learning the many skills of How To Adult, like interpersonal and life skills stuff. It was amazing to watch J show up as himself, and the program staff really love him for it, and everybody all around settling in to the idea that he will live and thrive there. It was so perfect that we decided that we don't really need to be nearby while he's there, as we've always figured we would: having us available has always been the surest way for him not to need us.

But, we also know that he's capable of amazing things without us around, especially these days, and this place will help him as needed. The student:staff ratio approaches 1:1, and each student has 5 case managers in different areas, meeting with of them through the week. Sending him off on his own feels odd, but the core parenting goal is to raise a functioning adult, so...here we are.

It's a lovely college city, and it's entirely possible J could just continue there, since the university has good programs for what interests him, and he'll have spent a year getting to know the place. Plenty of time before that decision, though.

We brought the dog, because we were driving, and Leela's been getting older (obviously) and a bit more anxious lately, and not really in a good brainspace to be separated from us for 4 days. This was the first time we traveled with her since right after we got her in 2016, and she totally nailed it. We stopped every hour or so, to switch drivers and let her have a sniff and pee on things, and as we got up to the Oregon forests, you could see her tiny, tiny inner wolf perk up at all the new sights and sounds. We stayed in a very comfy 2-bedroom at the Marriott Residence Inn, which loves dogs in addition to having full kitchens.

Happily, we'll be back.

Another One Bites The FDIC Receivership

You've probably heard about the mysterious Silicon Valley Bank disappearing into the hyper-efficient, government-backed maw of the FDIC, followed quickly by the even more mysterious Signature Bank. A decade ago, I had never heard of either one, because as a software engineer, you're probably only going to see the company's financial infrastructure if you try really hard. As it is, I'd never heard of Signature, because it was a bank for cryptocurrency nonsense, which I avoid like the plague, because it's too dazzlingly stupid I can't even get a foothold in it.

SVB had been around a long time, and you might correctly think that startups, which tend not to have things like "profits"—whatever those are—are not a terrific class of customers if you're a bank, and that's true, but not for the obvious reason that they usually disappear. Instead, the problem is that startups deposit and spend money on short timescales. SVB invested their deposits in long-term, fixed-rate assets, and then when everyone's board of directors ordered everyone to act like there was a recession, VC funding rounds dried up, and SVB's depositors started spending more of their deposits. SVB tried to get short-term liquidity to back up the deposits, depositors went to get their money out while they could, and we had a good old-fashioned bank run.

Don't be misled by venture capitalists talking about how smart they are, about "disruption" and "innovation": among themselves, they are a flock of sheep, clad in Patagonia vests.

Ultimately, since I have cleverly avoided having a job for the moment, this doesn't directly affect us. Neither SVB nor Signature were banks for human beings. I did call our finance guy about some strategy stuff, and right now we don't need to do much; but he spent the entire weekend fielding calls from his much more alarmed and high-maintenance clients. He's a friend, and has pretty well absorbed that we don't pay much attention to the stock market, because we want him to do it for us, but when things like this happen, I do call to check in.

We don't seem to be doing a 2008, which is good, as I was making my finance guy laugh thinking of the time interest rates went negative: which is to say, people were telling BNY Mellon, "I will give you $100, and I will let you keep $1 if you just guarantee I will get the other $99," which, like stagflation, is not one of those things anyone imagines to see in a lifetime.

Stay safe, healthy, and warm!

and in conclusion...

I finally acquired an attorney, from a friend's recommendation, and who is delightful. They opened the conversation with "Okay, so I've read the demand letter, and I've read the contracts...and to be honest, I'm a little confused about the letter in relation to the contracts, so maybe you can give me an overview."

Because, yes, when someone writes a settlement demand letter alleging some sort of contract fraud, but fails to mention a single line of the contract, or any other piece of evidence, that is some Hail-Mary scammy bullshit right there. The response letter is magnificent, with the attorney even finding one or two juicy tidbits I'd forgotten, like the clauses that say "we all agree we have all the information we need, and we don't all have the same information, and that's fine," or "we have our own sources of information independent of Chris, and we're happy with what we know."

Hapless Stock Guys know this, of course, since they provided the contract and drove the whole process, soup to nuts; they screwed up and blew a hole in their balance sheet, and the ROI of having an attorney spend an hour sending me a threatening letter is so huge it doesn't make sense not to try, even knowing I'm the kind of person who quoted the contract back to them from memory, without prep.

It doesn't mean they're not assholes, though.

for fuck's sake.

As a country, we have apparently lost our goddamn minds, where California alone has managed 3 mass shootings in the last couple days. Two of them just yesterday: I just heard about Oakland, but yesterday I saw several cop cars, going extremely fast, on different highways, all headed towards Half Moon Bay.

It's hard to escape the conclusion that it's getting worse.

A couple friends were suddenly able to move to Ontario a little while ago, sooner than planned, so their 4-year old "doesn't grow up thinking little kids getting murdered at school is just a thing that happens sometimes." Most of Canada, of course, means leaving behind a lot of things that make living here really nice, especially during a respiratory pandemic: world-class medical resources, a fairly solid vaccination rate, and with minimal adjustments, like a gazebo and a propane heater, you can enjoyably be outside even in the cold months.

(There's the not inconsiderable downside of the now-annual wildfire smoke. Everything is trade-offs.)

Hopefully our education consultant has some suggestions about a transition year for J, who is now 18, ending the power of Angry Biodad to interfere or slow-roll or any of the other fuckery that emerged out of his miserable narcissism. (One particularly salty school psychologist dubbed him "Mr. Happy.") We've long dreamt of moving to the Pacific Northwest, but wherever the kid goes, we'll be nearby.

This fucking country.

only keep going.

This was the second Christmas without Tim, coming up fast on two years since he departed. When he died, I hadn't seen him in several years, though we'd talked to catch up a bit right after Christmas, and it's both irrational and undeniably real to be so affected by the calendar. It's annoying, is what it is. I think about Tim all the time, in all kinds of contexts, and not for a moment does his suicide leave my awareness. Why should I feel the pressure building in my thoughts as December counts away? (My therapist has a technical term for a conditioned response to a single event, but I didn't take notes.)

It builds, then Christmas releases some of it, then some more building, and finally the first week of the New Year has passed, and it's back to the regular slog. I'll need a job at some point, I guess.

The Hapless Stock Guys, who flubbed everything by overpricing my shares, are now threatening to sue me because I knew about a pre-IPO stock split and didn't tell them. I didn't know, as it happens, and there are emails to that effect at the time, and if I'd known, it's likely that telling them would have violated my NDA. Plus, I am the descendant of many lawyers, and so I knew the contract has many gems like this one:

5.3. Purchaser and Seller represent to each other that on the date hereof and as of the Transfer Date:

(i) they are entering into this Agreement voluntarily and they are not under any form of duress; 

(ii) they have had the opportunity to review the form of this Agreement with their legal and tax counsel and/or other advisors prior to executing it and are fully satisfied that its terms are fair and that it effects, and at all times hereunder will effect, a fair exchange of value; 

(iii) they are familiar with, or have been advised by their respective counsel of, applicable securities laws regarding the Forward Transaction, and are responsible for ensuring that their entry into the Forward Transaction is in compliance with such laws; 

(iv) they are not relying on any express or implied legal or investment advice or information from the other with respect to the prospects or value of the Company or the Shares or any other aspect of the Forward Transaction; 

(v) they acknowledge and accept that the other party to the Forward Transaction may have material, non-public information about the Company that they do not have and which has not been disclosed; 

(vi) they hereby irrevocably waive any right to, and agree to refrain from pursuing against the other party to the Forward Transaction or against any other party, any and all actions, suits, litigations, arbitrations, proceedings, investigations, claims or liabilities of whatever nature (including but not limited to under SEC Rule 10b-5 or similar laws) that relate to the other party’s potential possession of material, non-public information about the Company; and 

(vii) other than as explicitly stated herein, they have not relied upon any other representation or warranty of the other, or any third party.

So they would first have to convince a judge that something merits nullifying extraordinarily explicit and broad clauses like these, just to get a hearing, then convince a judge or jury that I knew a variety of insider things that I didn't (like the stock split), or that I'd sold some stock earlier at N/2 the price they paid me, and thus I knew it was only worth N/2. (The stock I'd sold earlier was waaaay below N/2.) At the end, if somehow they get to a trial (they won't), they'll end up arguing that a techie middle manager, with indifferent financial skills, somehow conned two guys who make some phone calls and activate investment groups with millions of dollars, and who signed the contract that they themselves provided, which makes all of it ridiculous, and then they'll have to pay my legal fees and expenses.

That sort of interrupted my week of moping about or being reflective. I've never gotten a legal nastygram before! It's really unpleasant.

One more day until Tim's yahrzeit. The new year can start on Monday.