My arm is still messed up and it's very annoying. It's getting better, but it sure is taking it's sweet time. I suspect there's a pinched nerve. I mowed the lawn and weeded some dandelions and my elbow popped, so I've either fixed something or made it worse. My gardening projects have been on hold (also because neighbor cat has decided the new flower bed is a pooping spot made especially for him, so I'm waiting on some wire fencing before I plant my seed starts so they won't get uprooted and destroyed) and this is annoying. Spring lagged a couple weeks due to the piles of snow that had to melt, but the tulips have bloomed and faded and trees have fully leafed out now and we are approaching the summer solstice. Finally getting some nice weather.

We haven't had much trouble with the slappers for months, ever since spouse went over and talked with them about not crowding our garbage bin (I figured since they are religious they would respond better to a man. Plus spouse is "the nice one".). They said the garbage truck wouldn't pick up their bins if they put them elsewhere, but we told them the rules say we need 30" clear around our bin (which means there isn't room for their other two bins all crammed with ours in the strip between our driveways) and after that they did put their bins on the far side of their driveway and there doesn't seem to be any problem with trash pickup, so once again, they are liars. Didn't have any further problems with them until this past week when they started choir practice in their backyard again, several times in a row, 6-8pm, 20-25 people singing religious music 6 ft from our house so we have to close the windows and doors and stay inside to drown it out. Hate it, hate it, hate it. Hate being made to feel like I can't go about my business doing normal things I planned to do (like mow the lawn) or I'm the asshole disrupting their activity. I need that fence built. On the bright side they haven't tried to park across our driveway or fucked with spouse's parking spot in front of our house, so I guess that's something. Since winter they also don't have the three cars permanently parked in front of their house anymore so there isn't a need to yoink extra parking from their neighbors. So things are better than last year but this choir practice bullshit really gets on my nerves. They are a pacific islander family/group and I think their songs are in hawaiian, so it's not like they're singing the christian worship music I grew up with (which would be SO much worse!!!!) but all worship music has that processed cheese quality of soft core emotional manipulation and it doesn't matter what language the words are, you can tell right away it's gaslighting garbage.

Something good has come of it, though. I was pissed off about their choir practice, and we finally had a dry sunshiny day, so I decided to reorganize the garage and shed and do some cleaning. I fired up the bluetooth speaker in the garage playing gogol bordello at a volume that I would say is loud, and I'm thinking to myself, if they try to have choir practice again I'm going to crank it up so I don't have to hear them and we'll see how they like being made to listen to my music. If you can imagine trying to sing hawaiian worship songs over gogol bordello ...

So I'm all pissed off and I've got stuff from the garage and shed spread all over the backyard. I'm going back and forth from the shed to the house to the front yard - all over. I realize 1) that even though my music seems excessively loud by my standards, especially in the garage, the sound doesn't carry that far and it's not likely to bother our rear neighbors or anyone passing by. Which means the slappers are definitely getting the worst of it. And 2) I'm extra sensitive about the noise I make because I have been conditioned after living in rental apartments for so long. I don't really play loud music or use machines past 9pm, etc. I feel guilty about running power tools - I hate using the angle grinder just because it's so loud. Stuff like that. I've taken away my own permission to make noise. But if the slappers are going to make noise, then it's fair that I get to make noise, and the great thing is is that the noise pollution I generate in the garage goes right into their carport. I can play music. I can run power tools. They've broken the pact with their stupid choir practice so fair's fair. There's a scene in Lilo and Stitch where Dr Jumba gets fired and he suddenly becomes very happy and he says "now we do it MY way!" That is the vibe.

The garage is so much more functional now. I changed the location of the painting corner and I'm going to line the walls with plastic and have attachments on the ceiling to hang things for HVLP spraying. It'll be easy to set up for quick spray painting, but with the folding tables put away, it can still be a garage. We have some unused furniture taking up space, but one of our gaming group friends will be getting a new apartment soon and we're going to let him call dibs. I want to have a garage sale for whatever's leftover. The goal is to be able to park the car in it this coming winter.

I'm slowly gearing up to paint the kitchen cabinets. It's going to be a big project but I think it will make a dramatic difference in making the house feel more finished. Also I am really sick of looking at the sloppy current paint job. It's terrible and this mid grey is depressing.

Oh gosh, what else? I got that other phone line in anticipation of needing it for work. So now I have three phones. My old phone with no cell service, that I use on wifi for household stuff like controlling the smart lighting. My personal "clean phone" that I never linked to google (I cheat, tho, I'm still logged into google stuff on the household phone). And now the new "dirty phone" for work connections and whatever. I immediately became paranoid about the "dirty phone" and doing what I can to keep it separate from the "clean phone", which I know in some ways is very silly because everything is linked to the same service account with my real name. Like, for instance, I'm not going to give the dirty phone access to our wifi. I went to walmart to use the free wifi to download updates. I think my tattoo artist bloodborne pathogen paranoia is bleeding over into my tech habits, somehow? The dirty phone mustn't touch things the clean phone touches. But it's nonsense because there's so much going on behind the scenes I have no control over for them to be truly separate. But I try anyway, for reasons???

The really funny thing is that spouse is working in cybercrime (I don't think I've mentioned). He says some days he's a professional facebook stalker. He's working various cases and he talks about how many hoops he has to jump through to legally get info from tech companies and cell phone service providers, etc. So I'm not too worried about the government. (Granted, we've seen how quickly government can go batshit scary if the wrong people are holding the reins, so just because I'm not worried now doesn't mean that won't change.) What I don't like is being spied on and manipulated by the corps, and I also don't like my whole digital identity being at their mercy. If you buy into the google ecosystem, if you rely on a big tech platform as a middleman for communication or business, you become beholden to a profit driven power that can change the rules of the game on a whim and crush everything you've built overnight. Justly or unjustly. It's happened over and over and over to the point that it seems inevitable with all services. So the main reason for clean phone/dirty phone is to build in a safety buffer and not put all my digital identity eggs in one basket. Also, in case I run afoul of weirdo lulus in my work life, I can ditch my dirty identity and get a new number. The flame wars of the old internet seem kinda cute compared to the bullying mob mentality of the new internet. I can be more aware of what details I share with my dirty accounts just to cut down on the chances of being doxxed.

Also, it gives me the freedom to experiment with degoogling and trying alternate services on my clean phone. I just recently discovered libertube and vimusic - for the past year I've had to use the household phone as a crutch to access youtube. Now I finally have a way to get youtube access on my personal phone with libertube. Choosing to avoid google takes some extra effort (aurora store is having trouble right now and that blows), but having a "clean phone" means I can experiment more freely. I'd love to try grapheneOS but I don't have a pixel.

Spouse is amused by clean phone/dirty phone, but he knows darn well cybersecurity is important so he doesn't make fun. He got his sans certification just recently. It's so adorable when he talks linux because he's never been a hard tech person. I don't think he's ever built his own computer or written his own website (I have). I'm really happy he's working on cybercrime because it means we have more tech stuff in common now. Especially since I am interested in breaking away from the mainstream internet, it means he doesn't look at me like I've grown horns. It's quite nice.

The reddit blackout has started today. Spouse and I have been using baconreader because reddit got so awful to browse without a third party app. If baconreader stops working at the end of the month ... my reddit browsing will drop like a stone. If I'm not searching for specific info, I'll probably avoid. This isn't a bad thing - I waste too much time looking at garbage anyway. I have been investigating lemmy and using the jerboa app, but I haven't bothered to apply for a login yet. I looked at kbin too and I'm suffering from analysis paralysis. I got used to being a lurker on reddit because when the site is so large there doesn't seem to be much point to contributing. There's plenty of people to upvote/downvote/comment - the site doesn't need my input and I don't care about internet points. Plus, seems like every time you post on the internet you run the risk of someone choosing to shit all over you. I'm not sure I can overcome my lurking inertia to be active on lemmy, but I don't want to be a leech either. Anyway, I'll probably get my random browsing fix with lemmy and metafilter from now on. I got spouse to download jerboa. The downside of this is knowing I've introduced one of Uncle Sam's stooges to the pioneering edge of the internet. I've never told him about gemini or the smol internet, just because I like having my own space. Everybody deserves some privacy. I'm always aware that spouse and Uncle Sam are a package deal.

I got super lucky and found a great chair for tattooing clients. It's a real toe cracker made in 1972 by Emeco. It's in great shape, comfortable, adjustable, cleanable, a person can sit backwards in it for working on the back, and I found it at the habitat for humanity ReStore thrift shop for $15. Perfect. I'm getting the supplies I need and hopefully I can get back to practicing soon.

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Couple days later - so I did get a login on one of the lemmy instances and I'm messing around. There's fun drama because one of the larger instances decided to defederate with two other larger instances, so some of the reddit refugees are shockedpikachu. Lemmy is really blowing up and there's plenty to browse, but I feel like people are going overboard recreating reddit subs like some kind of tech security blankie. Let it go, let it die. We don't need to prop the corpse up and pretend it's the same.

I also browsed mastodon on a whim and someone made an alaskan focused server just recently, so I got on that. Then I remembered why mastodon didn't stick for me - it's the fucking hashtags. Hate 'em. There's a philosophical paradox there that really bugs me. 1) If you post something but don't use hashtags, you want to be read but you're being a bit emo and passive aggressive in that you want them to want to find you to read your shit. 2) If you post something with hashtags, you're effectively yelling LOOK AT THIS LOOK AT THIS I HAVE A #CAT into a crowded convention hall. Also I get super messed up trying to guess how many hashtags and WHICH hashtags and frankly it is way more overthinking than I need to do. It's also why instagram isn't any fun. I don't want to game the system to get eyeballs, I just want to make a little post. But if you aren't trying to get eyeballs then why are you even posting at all??!! See, I hate hashtags, they make me go all psyduck.

So I'm trying out lemmy and mastodon and the differences between the two are interesting. Mastodon feels more for personal, user focused stuff, while lemmy (like reddit) is grouped by topic and intended to be an open, shared conversation. I feel like being on a small focused mastodon server is the key to enjoying the experience for me. We'll see. I've been wanting to make community connections and the internet has to be a part of that, one way or another. If I have a place I can direct people, it's an introduction to "offroad" open source social media and a better place for a community.

I got spouse to crack my back (cross your arms over your chest and get another person to bear hug you from behind) and it really helped. I'm like 90% better and I slept through the night last night instead of getting woken up by shoulder pain and having to roll around on a lacrosse ball.

One lone morning glory seed has bloomed in my planters and I'm starting to feel like a gardening failure. I can't be sure if any of the things I planted have sprouted. I keep thinking maybe? Or maybe that's a weed? That darn neighbor cat ruined all my icelandic poppy seeds, pretty sure.