Muse

Apparently a person's name actually influences who you grow up to become. Like if your name's Dennis, you're slightly more likely to become a dentist. It's true. You're attracted to things that sound like your name. And like Larry's are more likely to be lawyers. I thought about it. My name's Joe, one letter away from joke. I was like, oh my goodness. And the more you look for in the world, the more you see it. Bernie Madoff, Don't give that guy your money. Last name's Madoff. I looked up the guy who started Craigslist. First name's Craig. That's spooky. Wow. What are the odds? Andre the Giant was seven feet tall. Yeah, last name was the giant. TBTN.

Ask you a question? Well, possibly. Um, the... What the hell am I doing here? Is that the question? What was the question, sir? The man or beast that I run from ain't been born, and his mama's already dead.

I think we're pretty heavy on the bad news right now, so maybe just sprinkle in some positive, a spoonful of sugar and such.

Sometimes people say that my head is too big for my body, and then I say, compared to what?

I'm the president of rap music, and I need to work with you right away.

Well, alright. Hello, good morning, and welcome everyone to a Monday edition of TBTL, the show that just might be too beautiful to live.

It's like someone punching your brain, but in a weirdly satisfying way.

My name is Luke Burbank. I am your host.

Is this something you can share with the rest of us amazing, Larry?

Coming to you for the first time ever as a full-time resident of Southern Washington here at the River House Studio, perched high above the mighty Columbia River.

This is special. This is special.

Yes, I live here now, apparently. um and i have in the last 24 hours that i've been here with my stuff and kind of surveying things here at this house that i've been trying to get remodeled i'm vacillating between utter despair when i look at how much work needs to be done and how uninhabitable so much of the house is it was literally a major disaster and then just like unbridled joy i love it when i'm like looking out at a sailboat sailing down the columbia river like i'm doing right now it's a beautiful and for me meditative thing so anyway uh then there's the question of how i am going to figure out how to actually uh pay for the significant amount of work that still needs to be done on the

brink of a financial crash that i currently cannot afford i even as i've just been sitting

here and i was listening to that intro tape by the way that's the very funny comedian joe zimmerman who we love around these parts uh doing the initial bit of audio even as i was listening to that i was googling uh how to install your own baseboard molding because i am gonna have to figure out how to do a lot of the stuff around here stuff that i haven't maybe done before in my life because i gotta try to figure out how to save some money anyway uh let's figure out how to do episode 4004 in a collector's series together.

Let the fun begin.

Oh, I am going to list some pros and cons of my new living situation. So we'll talk about that. Oh, and we'll talk to this guy. Longest running co-bro of the show, maybe best known for his depictions of the tall ships. I'm not the only one who had an adventurous weekend. He was... It was a P-A-R-T-Y Because Veeves said so I'm an activist and house party enthusiast He's Andrew Walsh and he's joining me right now Good morning, my friend

Good morning, Luke I just saw a little note here from our friend Chris O'Leary Posting in the TBTL Stens page on Slack

Does he know how to install your own baseboard molding? Because that's what I'm really in the market for right now Some advice on that topic

Not sure about that That's not what this topic is about But he said here's a little Easter egg in my beer newsletter this week Of course, Chris is very much in the brewing scene. And you and I have been talking a lot lately about how hard it is to say brewery, especially with certain words before and after it. And here's a little blurb from Chris O'Leary's beer newsletter to Burlington, Vermont. I don't know what we're listing here.

This is number two to Burlington, Vermont. Vermont's beer claim to fame has often been rooted in more rural breweries. But the beer in the state's largest city is nothing to sneeze at. Excuse me for the death rattle you might have just heard in my voice. It's been a long it was a long weekend. But yeah, rural breweries has been raising its head on TBTL quite a bit lately. And there it is in the newsletter.

And I said, I think, yeah, and I think you said it pretty well. Well, I think that came up because one of the pre-parties for the 4000th episode was at a brewery in the U District. Yes. And I think I was sort of saying, would anyone have the, I don't know, the chutzpah to name their brewery the rural brewery just to mess with people? And so there it is. Chris found some, maybe it's not actually a place named that, but it is where the word rural and the word brewery are abutted.

Exactly. So anyway, I'm not sure if I should have started with that in hindsight. That was a great comment on the Slack page, but I don't know if I needed to lead the show with it on this Monday. How are you doing there in your new setting?

I am. Well, as I said in the intro, I'm I'm whip sawing Andrew emotionally. Like one minute, I feel incredibly down about just the conditions around here. and and and to be honest with you my inability personally to impact them in a positive way and also just the sheer amount of well let me put it this way in the words of the bard drake andrew when i look around this i mean where should i really even start like it is so there's so many different things that need to be done just for this to be a place i can even live in like it's been a construction site and it will when i can get folks back out here it will once again be a construction site but in the meantime it's a place where i'm trying to live there's just dust everywhere there's like it's just it's it's it's like living in it's like and then everything is kind of everything relates to everything i was like do i start with trying to do i start with cleaning the kitchen because i'm going to use the kitchen a lot and it's like there's dust settled on every surface and but the problem is uh if i clean the kitchen and i haven't figured out some kind of a like door or blanket situation to keep the kitchen dust free then cleaning the kitchen kind of makes no sense for now because there is not a door between where the kitchen is and where the construction is right so i have to figure like it's just that's just how the house was designed or whatever like there's not there never was a door there so what do i do do i put some like visqueen up over it which is i'm going to be flapping in the wind all day so i have to figure out how to like block the kitchen off from all the rest of the dust before I clean the kitchen because if I clean the kitchen first and then it gets dusty again that was a waste of time but then do I also vac like I tried to use the shop vac yesterday that I just bought this Ryobi electric like it's battery powered and it did not work it just I had the thing for like six months and it just broke on me um and and so like I had to go to the Home Depot luckily they gave me a new one which was amazing because i did not have the receipt so it wasn't a battery issue is actually the no no i in fact because i have the like it's i don't know how this is going to this should not turn into an ad for ryobi considering they sold me a bum a wet dry shop vac but it uses the same like like i have a weed whacker from them and this shop all of these ryobi products use the same kind of battery that's just rechargeable and interchangeable we have like we have a bunch of

like power equipment that is all the same brand but every battery is different and it irritates the hell out of me but i mean kind of makes sense a lawnmower needs a much bigger battery than a

head trimmer but still so i i checked the battery and it wasn't the battery and i anyway it was this weird thing where when i turned it on it wouldn't do anything and i've used it before and it worked i don't know what happened but then when i would take when i would open up the shop vac and sort of pick up the whole motor apparatus if i touched one part of the cage of the motor it turned on like like somehow i was completing some circuit with my body was shorting out yeah something was shorting out in my body although it didn't hurt oddly enough my body was able to conduct

so my wait a second that sounds awesome by the way you should have kept like you're kind of like

half man half vacuum at this point like what a superpower only you would think that's the cool

superpower do you know that hannah and i had this conversation on spotless my cleaning podcast i do with hannah like if we could replace one of our limbs with some sort of cleaning apparatus what would it be that would be amazing and i think i chose like a i think i can't remember exactly how it went down i think i thought like you know turn my left hand into like a vacuum basically like a shop vac yeah the only thing is i think what was brought up then is does that mean that the dust lives inside of me exactly is your body now an incinerator like what happens

Thank you.

to all yeah or do i digest it you know am i but well so i you know i had and it was not a cheap the reason i bought i can't believe that now of all the things that are going on i'm going to spend a good a solid 20 minutes talking about this battery-powered shop vac but i bought this particular one because it doesn't have a cord and i thought this will be so much easier than having to constantly find an extension cord and plug it in and i just thought oh this will be so great and i used it i mean i probably bought it almost a year ago and i had used it and it was sort of fine and then it just stopped working recently and i think my typical thought is like well first of all i was frustrated but i knew i hadn't like i hadn't signed up for the warranty right i hadn't kept the receipt i hadn't done any of the things that a responsible person would do and so then my response usually is to that is like well this whole entire this house i'm in right now it needs everything in it needs to be vacuumed there's dust on everything and not just like normal you're in your house and you have dust bunny stuff it's just it's it's gross like i don't know if you can hear i'm like extra stuffed up i'm also very it helps that i'm also very sensitive to dust like it causes me to have a lot of congestion and sneezing and things so this is like a particularly bad fit but anyway normally what i would do i had made up to do this i was like i gotta go to home depot and i gotta buy a new shop vac and it didn't even occur to me that I should just at least bring it in and see what they say. And I brought it in, and I showed it to the very nice person at the customer service, Allie. And I was like, this is the weirdest thing, but it doesn't work. But then when I take it out of the thing and I touch this part of the mechanism, it turns on. And it totally did it, thank God, because I would have looked like an insane person. Hi, Allie. I have a superpower. My body conducts electricity. Would you like to see it?

So, Allie, hear me out. I was bitten by a radioactive spider.

let's start here also do you have any old appliance cardboard boxes that i could live in in the back of the store because i'm clearly dealing with a mental health crisis no but it did it did the the weird thing so she she knew what was up but she was like did you um did you get the warranty i was like no i didn't she goes okay i go i think i might have bought it with my home depot card she goes all right i go i just want another one the same thing that works she goes oh are you kidding me i'll go get you one right now i get one with nail polish by 2 p.m like what i learned was if you go into one of those stores at least this particular home depot and all you want is a replacement of the thing you had it also helped that i still had the box i had been using the box andrew as a nightstand next to my inflatable bed anyway things are going well around here why don't you just get like an apartment in the city somewhere by the way part of when when my emotions vacillate into unbridled joy it's when i think about only having one cable subscription oh yeah you know what i did yesterday i went to that xfinity store and i gave them back a bunch of a bunch of stuff yeah yeah and i said please cancel all service to

this account are you gonna stick with like are you gonna stick with some sort of cable service in the new place are you gonna just do like you know all the cord cutting that kids like i've been

messing i don't i don't i'm i'm old-fashioned they were trying to sell me on some cord cutting And what I kept saying was, am I going to have root sports? That's all I care about because our Seattle Mariners, in a real unlikely turn of events, seem to have learned how to play baseball recently.

Is there anybody more relieved than Jerry DePoto? Like, in the world, is there anybody more relieved than Jerry DePoto after the trade deadline when everybody was just slamming him?

That the Cade Marlowe move paid off the way only DePoto knew it would? anyway i am like i'm here in this i'm very isolated up here right it's like it's not super walkable my neighborhood i mean it's fine but there's i'm on kind of a steep hill and there's not a great shoulder and i worry that like like i just worry somebody will be bombing down the hill in a truck and they'll just kind of veer a little bit too far off to the side and they'll thwack me so i'm kind of up here i'm a little bit isolated and i feel like my connection to the world will be watching the seattle mariners and texting you all about it so it was extremely important to me they kept saying oh yeah you just need to the guy again i found something more boring than the shop vac to talk about andrew and it's called non cord cutting so the guy in the xfinity store is trying to sell me on oh just do the our so and so it's our streaming package and i was like okay well my tv is a smart tv it's probably streaming everything anyway but will i be able to turn on a live baseball game was oh yeah well if you get the hulu on demand package and i was like i don't know if i like how that sounds like he was like no but hulu has all the sports and i was like yeah

that's what they always say yeah local blackouts though right like i just want to turn on my

television at 7 p.m on a wednesday night and observe the mariners playing baseball that's what i want to be able to do and guess what andrew Thank you. That, plus my internet, will cost me a cool $180 a month. Yeah, exactly. That's the cost of... And I just don't... I don't, like... Although I have had some success at times with, you know, finding the games on the internet and things like that. I just like... I also like DVRs. Again, I feel like I'm just so old. Like, I like that I have my DVR setting, at least at my old place. It recorded All In With Chris Hayes every single day. It recorded every Mariner game that happened. It recorded every Seahawks game. It recorded every new episode of Dateline NBC. It recorded every episode of Jeopardy. And I just there was something comforting about that. Now, are those all things that I can find through other means at this point? I'm sure. But I'm set in my ways. And if I could have, like, rabbit ears on my TV, I probably would at this point. So I guess for a while I'm going to pay this – oh, that was a whole other thing this morning. So I realized that this little room that I'm in right now, which is the same room that my dad and I usually hole up in when we're working here because it's the only sort of relatively less dusty area of the house. It doesn't have, like, a place to hook the cable. There's not a coax, like, outlet in this room, if that makes sense, which I guess if you still have the cord, you still need that. I mean, that feels very antiquated, right? Like, where's my coax go? So I had to call the Xfinity people this morning, and it turns out that if you just want to have somebody come out to your house to do, like, a one-time service, you have to practically renegotiate the entire contract with them, which was very annoying. I got a person, my guess would be not based in the United States, who was like, well, we can have somebody out on Friday. This is how much it costs. And I was like, all right, well, I'll have them come do this. And they were like, okay, but you need to approve of this fee, either through text or verbally. And I was like, great, I'll do verbal. I agree to the fee. And she was like, oh, no, I have to play this thing. And then she proceeds to hit play on a robot voice, Andrew, that was just reading the terms and conditions. In other words, if I would have said, just text me, I could have done what I always do, which is scroll right past all terms and conditions and go, yeah, fine, I agree.

Wait, really? You're not reading the details? That kind of shocks me.

I know that's pretty shocking knowing me.

Most people do, and then knowing your persnickety-ness with this as well.

yes but the idea that that would be presented to me as we can do a verbal confirmation or we can do a text wouldn't you think the verbal confirmation would be the faster of the two options well yes

until you explained it which is of course like you're not going to get around it it's going to be all this like legal language that nobody how long did it how long it was literally three minutes

i believe that it was a sped up robot voice reading all of the minutiae and this is where i almost got into it with this person because at the end of it she goes something like you know you can press one you know she was like it will prompt you to press one or something and then she just hits play on this thing and then i'm just walking around the house i have this on speaker phone for like literally three minutes as it's going through all of these various things about my discount i'm getting but if i break the contract this is all has nothing to do with the thing i'd signed up for yesterday it's just a one-time thing but i guess every time you know you add a cost it makes you i basically had to go re-go through the whole signup process anyway it's talking it's talking it's talking and then the woman goes comes back on the line and she goes uh you didn't press one and i go my friend it did not prompt me to press one i was waiting for the moment when it said if you agree press one it never said it and she goes no i know there's a lot of detail it's like i go yeah i noticed um but it never said press one and she goes well i was listening and it said press one and i was like i will fight you i will fly to whatever country you're in my friend and we will have it out over this so then i was like can you just text it to me she goes yeah so you did it that way i ended up doing the text anyway and i just said i agree and and then you know we've got it done but it's there's a lot of stuff like that this is what i mean when i say i don't really know where to start with a lot of this because i just feel like there are when you when a person moves typically there's a lot to do but the presumably the home itself is or whatever place you're moving to it's kind of there and now you set up if you're gonna have cable like me you set up the cable you switch the like water and power bill into your name you do all these little paperworky things i've got to do all of that but in addition to that i have to figure out how to make this house like livable like i have to like set up a whole punch list of projects i've got to like start harassing people including my own father to come down here and help me with it it just and again so many things are predicated on other things that it's i'm feeling a little overwhelmed because i kind of don't even know where to start yeah yeah yeah

well i don't have any advice for you other than

get yourself a Pieterterre in the city somewhere. Did I say that right? I think I learned that word from you, Pieterterre. Is that how you say it? Okay, I need to relearn it. Peter Deterra, who was in Chicago

and then later did a duet with Amy Grant next time I fall in love. Now, there have been some moments of happiness in all of this, Andrew, including when I got out here with the movers on um well i'm watching a cat literally catch a field mouse andrew there's a big orange

neighborhood okay so it's not your cat okay i was trying to no no no bubbles is still at

becca's house because i'm getting some things locked down here but i'm watching this big huge tabby no i love a tabby who kind of like just sort of lives in i think in the field maybe maybe people put food out for this cat but i just watched this cat literally stalk and pounce on a mouse and now it's eating the mouse how are you feeling about that um i guess it's the circle of life yeah you know i mean i don't i don't like any animal dying but i also feel like it's you know it's just kind of how things go um so i was packing every i was thinking about you on saturday because while you were having a wild time partying down like you do i was just like in the absolute just the thick of packing up my entire place in portland and like i told you on friday that i had just done this approach of just buying so many boxes thinking i'll take some of these back i had to go buy more boxes like this was a kind of a two-bedroom apartment one of the bedrooms was just being used as a studio i thought i'm this is a pretty like i'm leave i kind of a light footprint

here no i did not my friend what's your what's your level of detail on the packing this you came close to talking about this last Friday when you said I'm just the key is just over buy on boxes just like have too many of them and just load them up but I wasn't sure if you were also sort of implying that like and don't overthink like you know this is a kitchen box and this is a bedroom but like are you pretty meticulous about labeling and putting things of a kind together or because this move is sort of chaotic anyway did you have more of a like let's just get it all over

there and figure it out where we land no i started very meticulously because i had these nice fancy boxes i had purchased like i said none of them said um you know a bombay sapphire gin or whatever like these were all like new uh you know sort of uh cardboard boxes that i labeled all of them but i will tell you i started off being extremely careful about what i was putting in every box and how i was labeling it and what room it was going to go to and really thinking really meditating on like what's going to be the least hassle i'm paying people to carry these i can have them carry them anywhere in the house what's going to make this make the most sense when i'm unpacking all of this and by saturday night at about 11 30 at night i was just dumping an entire junk drawer into a garbage bag tying the garbage bag together and putting in a box that just said

kitchen question mark tying the bag to the end of a stick throwing it over my throwing it over

my shoulder and just hitting the rails yeah dude it was like one of those how it started how it's going videos like i was just by by the time that you were probably hitting your your wall on set i mean you and i were talking about this before the show but the great irony is i was spending a saturday night basically puttering listening to podcasts and doing kind of busy work by the way i was listening to the latest from cereal it's called the retrievals it's hosted by susan burton it is fascinating it also could be very triggering for people but it's about this thing that happened at the yale university hospital reproductive health center or like basically where they help um you know people who are looking to um become parents but they need you know in vitro and things like that it's called the retrievals it's really well done very intense but i'm puttering around i'm listening to a podcast and i'm putting things into boxes and writing names on boxes and i'm thinking andrew is just at a freaking party right now at his house but then i realized you would probably trade places with me in this moment like i was living your fantasy and you were living my fantasy just we were doing it in different places yes and no

I would say yes to, like, the activity that you were doing, but I would never trade places with anybody who's in the middle of a move. I mean, because, yes, having that night where you're, like, kind of packing everything up and listening to a podcast is nice, but it's also, like, it can be, first of all, it's fraught in a lot of different ways because you know that this is just the first step. And even a more normal move, like, moving just sucks and packing up, like, you're doing this game of, like, okay, well, I still have one more night here. Should I leave out one pan so I can make an egg In the morning or what you're doing all this shit

Yes and I suffer from real I mean, I keep saying this, but I think that's part of why I'm feeling really stressed about what to do next here. Like for somebody who I think of myself as being fairly capable of like decision making and not feeling a lot of regret about decisions and things like that in these kind of moments. And like you said, when I was packing everything, I was standing there and maybe I was just tired, too. I was standing there at midnight just going like I was fully perplexed about what needed to be in a box and not in a box based on trying to think through logically what might I need to use tomorrow.

Yeah, that is that. And then also knowing that, like, there's at least something about unpacking. I mean, it sort of sounds like in your situation, unpacking is going to be fraught in its own way as well. But, you know, if you want to trade places with someone on a puttering night, it would be like, OK, well, we're in our new place, assuming that it's right of a finished place. And now I can listen to my podcast and and, you know, unwrap the glasses and give them a rinse and put them in the shelves or whatever. like that's packing up like honestly as much as i had a lot of awkward encounters at the my of my own doing at this party on saturday i don't know that i would have traded uh positions with you because i uh just packing for a move is just really stressful i think you're right i think

that's one of the things that that's hanging me up a little bit is i'm unpacking into a kitchen that i am then going to tear down at some point and build a new kitchen what would be amazing would be unpacking into the new finished kitchen where it's been very thought out and there's a place for everything and i can kind of imagine my life with this stuff in this space but that's sort of part of it is i have all these boxes and all this stuff that needs to go somewhere and yet there's nowhere for it to go and there probably won't be for a good six months to a year i mean there's just just the scale i mean just the scale of of all the stuff that still needs to happen now Now, one thing that that happened that would really put some wind in my sails that I'm literally still kind of high off of this one comment that happened. So the movers show up on Sunday morning and the one guy there, a couple of guys from Africa originally. So there's a little bit of a language barrier, although I would say that their English was far superior to me speaking whatever their native language might have been. But there was the guy kind of running it Who was a little terse And then there was his assistant Who was extremely nice But had like a pretty limited English So I was like And I was going back and forth Taking stuff to my car And I would pass them in the hall Of my apartment building And I would like When I would pass the kind of The second guy He'd give me a big smile And it would seem like Everything was going okay And when I would pass The kind of guy in charge of it He would sort of glower Or like maybe I had, you know, I had reserved the elevator, but it wasn't locked, if that makes any sense. So there was a sign that said this elevator is reserved for moving. But because it was a Sunday, nobody from the leasing office was there to actually like do something to the elevator, which would make it so only my fob could control it. That's normally what happens. But because it was a Sunday, that wasn't possible. and I kind of like the one of the things that the guy the little more terse guy said when he got there and he like he surveyed my entire apartment which I was very proud to say Andrew everything was in a box when they showed up it sounds like this guy would have made you feel like you were in trouble if you hadn't ever yeah and I was like I mean you know me it would have been also it would have been equally possible they show up and like half the house isn't packed and I'm like you just take what's packed and I'll just I'll be packing behind you like I was very proud that everything was everything was boxed up they walked into an apartment where it was like somebody had i'd clearly like gotten this together before they got there but even so he was like kind of looking at the bed like wondering if he had to take it apart or not like and which i had talked to the moving person they had brought tools like the supervisor and then he was like um uh is the other house an apartment he's like first of all how far away is the other house and i was like well it's like 45 minutes um again all of this had been run through the people that i had booked this through and he was like is it um is it an apartment too and i was like no no it's a house i didn't tell him there's like some really steep stairs but i just felt a little the whole time

like i don't know this guy just he just wasn't like the warmest dude and then also this weird thing and this is just in my own head and probably my own vanity and my own i don't even know what but i was like what are these guys gonna think when we drive all of this stuff up to this house and then i have them like bring it into a disaster area like they're not bringing this into a finished house they're bringing this to a place where if you look at it you're like i'm really surprised someone's living here right now right i and i don't know why i cared what these two random movers thought but i was just like i was i literally left my apartment early to get here to try to, like, not even organize the place, but just, I don't know, get eyes on it. So I could try to make it look a certain way before they got here, which, again, makes like literally no sense.

Well, doesn't it? I mean, just to explore it for a second, like, OK, the thing that doesn't make sense is we talk about like the idea of hiring a housekeeper and then cleaning the house before they get there. Right. Like that's kind of a very common human impulse. I think with moving it and again, like we're we, the customers are paying money for a service. but the thing is not all service in this case is equal right like they have to make an estimate based on the amount of time and labor it's going to take to do this job and let's just do super extremes right let's say that somebody comes to your house sometimes they do this they come to your house to like look at all of your stuff and then give you an estimate but they don't go to the place where stuff is arriving and if the stuff is uh arriving like you said like it's it's a big hole in the ground you know they're going they're moving to right what is it a cooper pd cooper pd what was the cooper pd in the middle of australia like the opal capital yeah it's kind of like oh wait you you live underground with mole people and that's where i'm moving you like that would be something that would affect the estimate you know so in a certain way just as being like kind of you know upfront about things and letting people know what the final destination is because that could make things harder and also take more time and they're probably budgeting hey do we have time for another job in this day or just one job you know on this particular moving

day but i was also again and this is where it's just a vanity thing like the upstairs of this house has these two weird janky bedrooms like when one of the construction people was here at one point they go oh yeah this is one of these uh one and a half floor houses that they made i go is that a thing he goes yeah one and a half stories like for some reason i don't know if people in the 1930s were just much much shorter but like this house was built in such a way that the upstairs feels like it was not designed for people to live in it like it feels like an attic that somebody decided to throw some carpet in and that's where i'm sleeping and with like i'll send you a picture of the wallpaper andrew it is straight up uh i think becca called it uh a very um a very laura ashley special wallpaper like it's little hearts and bouquets of flowers and like the carpet is kind of ratty but i don't want to change the carpet because at some point i want to redo the upstairs so i don't want to like put new money into carpet that is then going to end up getting replaced anyway and i wanted to get this weird little bedroom where i'm going to have them drag a king size mattress up to i wanted it to at least be kind of i don't know aired out straightened up something or other like i wanted to get ahead of this situation anyway i get here can i tell a

quick joke please one and a half stories is my favorite jd salinger novel go ahead is that the

follow-up to franny and zoe i think so yes like and so i um i guess the reason that i say it was it was pointless for me to get here early because i'm not going to be able to put the entire floor down and sheetrock the ceiling and um finish the deck like the the fundamental in in completion that's not a word the fundamental issues of this home are were not not things i could fix in 20 minutes getting a head start on the guys um which is why it was a little bit silly of me but i just wanted i didn't want to roll up here with them i wanted to at least be here a little before them anyway they're the guy they walk into the house and the guy who's kind of terse goes this is the most amazing view i've ever seen we go stand the deck is just there's just a bunch of random plywood on there that the construction guys were using like it's not the actual decking and it's actually kind of unsafe we walk out there and he goes i would live here until i'm 104 wow that's what you want to hear that was exactly what i wanted to hear but i'll tell you what 105 i'm out of here absolutely um well there's a lot of stairs and so you know there may be some mobility stuff at 105 also the kids moved out at that point it was the most unexpected thing Because, again, I have a vision for this place, and I can imagine it being really pretty awesome at some point, but it is really far from that. And this guy had kind of just been, like I said, pretty serious the whole time. And then for him to literally let go, I would live here until I'm 104. I was like, that means a lot. I didn't say this, but I was just thinking, that is exactly what I needed, dude. like some confirmation that i'm not totally insane because i really was feeling like an insane person yesterday like i'm not trying to harp on the same thing over and over and over again but it's like this is this is a year away from being done i don't exactly know how i'm going to pay for it i can't do a lot of the work myself i'm leaving a totally functional nice apartment i could have just bought an apartment in portland long ago like i could have just the place that i was living in Portland.

I could have bought something like it and just lived in Portland like a normal person and just had that be my home. Like why I have to do this kind of crap all the time where I like buy some house kind of in the middle of nowhere and then have it torn apart with no real good plan for putting it back together. Like I do this stuff and I was having a lot of just kind of like, why do I subject myself to this yesterday? And then he said I would live here until I was 104. I was like, oh, my God, that really made my day. That might have made my entire week.

yeah I think you and I are both people who need just constant especially from somebody who's somewhat gruff and not monitoring their tone it helped that he was not

effusive before that

it's just so easy for people just to like all they have to do is withhold to us and they just have us in their palm of their hands

oh my gosh totally and then I got to meet my neighbor Gail who was walking her Pomeranian cotton down the street and i found out that she's just basically basically low key been observing this entire construction project from afar and i was like hey i don't think we've met i'm luke and she goes she's lived here for 58 years on this street she goes um i'm gay well my name's gail but people call me gay but gay is a bad word now so you can call me gail and i was like i don't know if that's how that works but all right i'll go with whatever you prefer that's a bad word now She goes, my sister-in-law is Gail, so people call me gay to differentiate. And I was like, okay, Gail. But she was a piece of work. She was telling me the number – I mean, she was a super sweetheart, and her dog was so adorable. I'm not usually a Pomeranian guy, but this dog, Cotton, was one of the cutest Pomeranians I've ever seen. and what i really really took away from this is gail aka gay is very mad don't worry i'll beep it that she didn't buy this house when she could have bought it for seven thousand dollars because like that was literally all that she would talk about with me was that she and her husband who had passed away 25 years ago although and i'm not saying this i hope this doesn't sound in any way um glib it's really interesting how people process grief and how people process um the loss of a spouse or a partner because to talk to her it was as if her late husband had been gone for one day like in the 25 minute conversation we had standing in my driveway he was dawn was his name was brought up easily 30 times and then she mentioned it had been 25 years since he had passed away and i thought boy that is a and i'm not saying she's doing it wrong it's just really interesting to see uh you know somebody who is you know it's very it it felt like it was something

that was still very fresh for her i can relate to that i'll bet you i'd be the same way i'd be i i cannot get through the fact that i have not raised genevieve's name yet on this show is a miracle like i think i told you when i used to be on the radio like the producers had one time i mentioned genevieve or something i saw a producer live on the radio sort of snicker and i asked him why or something he said well we have a game about like how far you can get into a story before you bring up your partner and I was like anyway that sounds mean-spirited I don't think it was mean spirited I just thought it was funny and a good observation and I since Genevieve is my point of reference for everything I could see depending on what my what becomes of my life 25 years later still basically having that be my point of reference yeah absolutely and of course we were

also talking about this neighborhood um that I made and so that you know when she and her husband moved into their house she was telling me it was 100 square feet and they paid twelve hundred dollars for it wow and they expanded it to uh 1300 square feet which is the still the current size and she was explaining to me that don when he got back from the service he um he always wanted to be a carpenter but instead he worked for the county but he was very good with his hands and so he was able to build all of the stuff um to expand their house and um but but what she kept bringing up again was what i think was legitimately a regret on her part that she that they didn't buy this house that i bought when they could have bought it with nine acres for seven thousand dollars um and all that has been i'm not on nine acres i think i'm on like an acre and a half or something most of which is like a steep hillside that i can't quite use but uh she she brought that up to the point where i was like this lady wants me to give her this house yeah no kidding calm down

this is getting into some um uh oh geez louise um what about bob vibes here you know the people who are like the the locals who want to buy the house from the rich psychiatrist felt like and i

was like gail i was like if you would like to see it she goes well i noticed um that there was a lot more daylight coming through your door and i was like okay would you like to see it and then she

took one step down the stairs and then cotton started growling she's like he doesn't feel safe i was like all right hey no pressure so she she declined to she declined to check out this thing that she's been like walking down to the end because i'm on it's a dead end my house is the dead end of this street she's been walking down to the dead end for the last two years observing this house that she's known for 58 years but she was like yeah no uh cotton's not feeling i was like all right that's fair well you guys have the rest of your lives that's what i said to her i was She's like, Gail, you are invited any time you want to come by and check it out, with or without cotton, if you want to sit in the yard. She was telling me about various places she likes to go sit and look at the river. Oh, that sounds like your alley. Oh, I know. She goes, I just love it. I love it when the sun is setting. I tell my son, it's diamonds on the river. I was like, hey, if you ever want to just grab a lawn chair and sit in the yard, go for it.

I don't care. That's one of my favorite Tom Waits songs. Just keep going with that format today.

Hello and welcome to Top Story.

All right. I have one more thing I want to say about yesterday. But before that, because this is a really great way to tell a story, I want to talk about your weekend, Andrew. All we've been talking about is me. You had this big party that I know was kind of, you were excited to see a lot of people, but also I know those things create a certain amount of stress for you. And now, as we talk on this Monday, that's behind you, meaning, like, you got through it. You don't have that much, like, another big social event like that, as I understand, on the calendar. Like, how did it go? How are you feeling?

Well, I was telling you before the show that, like, last night, so Sunday night, when I was done with my volunteer gig, which was also pretty fun and relaxing on a nice, beautiful day, but I came home. I cooked up a little bit of food. I had nothing to do for the first time in months and months and months. I didn't have some sort of huge thing looming over my head. In this case, like, you know, having a party shouldn't be a huge thing that looms over your head. But, you know, this is really Genevieve's party. She invites, you know, a lot of people over and it does have an energy around it that I am not super great at. Now, Genevieve usually does this no matter where we're living about once a year or big summer party. And sometimes it ends and I'm kind of like, well, that was just a lot of fun. It was it was a good vibe all around. Sometimes I'm like, wow, I really had about one hundred and four awkward encounters. And that is a little bit in that. So I want to say this in a way that doesn't make anybody who is there or interacting with me. A feel like I was put out or B feel like what he was. He felt awkward when he was talking to me. It seemed fine. I had I had some nice regular conversations that night, but it was also I really had a hard time getting into a social rhythm. on saturday with so many people like old friends there was a friend who i didn't realize was coming from um who's like from high school and i'd like saw her and met her a partner for the first time and i said oh my god hold on i'm delivering this ice i'll be back in one second and then i never came back around and then the next day i'm just like oh my god i didn't even talk to debbie at all like so it was kind of like i woke up actually i didn't even wake up with a lot of bad feelings i went to bed just thinking like i okay let me make a list of all the people i owe apologies to like the people that i either ignored or the people that i didn't ignore but for for various reasons i was so people i know we can dismiss people who we think of as like very outgoing and gregarious or whatever but then they'll be like oh i'm so awkward and you're like you're not that awkward like it's that's you you might think you are or maybe this is a character you're playing and maybe people think that about me because hey yes you host a podcast hey like you were on stage last weekend I had last weekend aside from not having the not not spending more time with 10s after the show last weekend I didn't really have any bad feelings I'm like we're on stage you know like I might have said something silly here or there but I wasn't racked with my usual like regret and I gotta say the party was more difficult like I felt like aside from a few just nice casual conversations I was able to act like an adult in um like there were just so many that I I was like, oh, my God, like it was not in my head. I had that thing where people were looking at me like and it might have been a combination of the beer I was drinking along with the along with the anxiety of it or whatever. But it really was a night that ended with me thinking, OK, I need to apologize to this person for being super awkward. I started like a friend was over here. We're playing darts. I started negging her sort of.

And I and I could tell that got awkward because she got very defensive and I felt terrible about it. I was just like all of my energy. was just off on saturday so i need to get over it and uh you know like again i i it was so nice to see so many people but that's not a great that's just not a great way to catch up with a hundred of your favorite friends or i don't think a hundred people were here but it was a pretty big party 50 i don't know i do think that part of what is a

little bit maybe hard for somebody like me to wrap my mind around interacting with you is because i i mean like literally there is nobody in my life who i talk to more than you at this point maybe becca but like we don't even live together like you and veeves have you know 23 other hours of the day when you're potentially together but i talk to you so much and i'm around you so much and we go on trips and everything and i always have a pleasant time and i find you to be very social and very sociable but i think what i don't always realize is how much kind of like behind the scenes work you might be doing and maybe it's lessened with me because we know each

other yeah you and me driving a van to polsbo isn't is not stressing me out um other than when those cars were cutting me off and i got a little bit heated um but no you know i guess what i mean is like flitting around and trying to like trying to be a lot to a lot of people and again nobody's expecting anything of me it's just that you know like there were some people there who i i think there were a lot of people there who i don't know that well but who i like and want to hang out with more and so maybe i was just like you know that takes up a certain amount of of processing power and then there are like there was a there are several people there who it's like there's i know i know you but i can't remember from exactly where and then there's like the and you know one thing that i'd like to do and i don't like to offer this advice to everybody no matter who you're talking to unless it's your best friend just always remind people who you are because there were a couple of times where I was kind of like hey you and they just like looked at me and then later on I'd be like Genevieve who was that person and she'd tell me I'd be like you know what I think it was a reasonable expectation that I wouldn't know who that person was like they couldn't say hey Andrew in case you don't remember I'm so and so from such and such that happened like once or twice and usually I feel bad about it but I will say there was one or two times the next day i was like wait that was so and so they should have let me know like that should have been part of the contract this is one person i met twice 10 years ago they could have been like they could have given me a little primer but anyway so i just sort of felt like it was all that it was all me worrying about forgetting somebody's name introducing them to a circle of people even if it's somebody that i know really well like my brain will start to like fritz out sort of i don't think fritz out is the word i'm looking for there but i think that was an example of my brain fritzing out but yeah so it really was like it was so good to see so many people again people who are listening to this who were there by the way i'm assuming that today's numbers will be pretty good because i feel like people listen to tbtl after they hang out with one or one of us you know and so there's a lot of people who are like i want to know gays listening right exactly so anyway um i you know i I hope everybody had a good time. I felt bad for like not having much time to talk to some people who I was very excited to see. And then I sort of felt bad for the interactions I did have with other people that I think that I was not making a lot of sense in some scenarios.

I know that this won't do anything to change how you feel about the interactions. But again, I've been to that party with you. I mean, I've been to that party at you and you're in various places and you always are totally charming. And I've never I've never thought Boy Andrews being weird. I'm sure that the way you feel about it is is really kind of amplified in your own mind over what the how other people felt about talking to you. But I know that that does absolutely no good. Like that doesn't convince you of anything. But I'm sure that it was not nearly as awkward as you kind of as you're telling yourself or as your as your brain is telling you it was.

It's probably not as bad as it feels as far as some of the conversations that I have that I felt were really awkward. But I also know from looking at the faces of the people around me during some of these moments, I also know that there was legit, like, measurable awkwardness that I was offering in some of these cases as well. But you also have face blindness, so which is it?

Are you reading people's faces or not reading their faces?

Well, no, that's a good point. No, I can tell when somebody's disappointed in me. I might just not know who they are.

And that's your superpower. hours i have a vacuum hand um i well i don't know if this counts as an awkward interaction but i am i am feeling an unusual amount of i don't know not regret but just kind of like i feel a little embarrassed about a instagram post that i put up yesterday from the house here because i did not come off the way that i sort of intended it to come off i thought well you know I've been talking a lot about this move, and I don't know if I've really shown what the inside of this place looks like. And so I thought, well, I'll make a little quick video because my sense of it, as I've now made abundantly clear and I've been talking about for the last 40 minutes straight, is that this place is. a real is really in kind of rough shape and there's boxes everywhere and this kitchen is like nothing functions in the kitchen by the way that's one of my cons told you i've got some pros and cons one of the cons uh is that um uh is that oh here's my con sound one of the cons is that the dishwasher if you try to run it it just dumps water on the floor so the whole floor is like is like all spongy from water damage but then you run the floor washer the stove the stove is so old that all of the numbers are worn off, so I don't know how hot anything is. Like, if I'm baking something, like I was yesterday at Papa Murphy's Pizza, I just have to kind of go by vibe. Is that gas, by the way? No, it's electric. By the way, I almost import-bought a Frigidaire induction stove yesterday at the Home Depot when I was returning the Ryobi, and then I didn't, and that was good because when I got home and Googled it, this super markdown price, like, they were like, this stove is normally two thousand dollars and today only it's one thousand because it's an extra and but you have to literally leave you have to drive it out of here today like you have to rent a truck i was like wow and then i got home and googled it you can buy it for the same price from best buy and they'll deliver it to your house so and i'm you know me andrew like i was so close to buying this stove because i there's no gas here it's electric and i am interested in induction I almost just impulse bought a stove with no sense of what the actual dimensions were, and I didn't. I stopped myself. I'm glad you didn't.

Well, that would be a heck of an impulse purchase.

I know, and yet it seems on brand for me. Anyway, the point is, the point of my video was I thought people would find it kind of interesting, this place that I'm in, and also they could kind of see how jacked up it is still, but also the potential because it has a really cool view, and the sun was setting. It was kind of pretty. so i make this little video of me kind of walking through the house and i really am thinking the point of this is to demonstrate that this house is it's a sort of before shot like this is there's boxes stacked everywhere this kitchen is completely funky and non-functional um that walls are all torn down there's no ceilings like and then there's this really beautiful view on this kind of like ramshackle deck project that has no decking on it that was what i was trying to put out to the universe like people might be interested in the kind of before and after and also because i do think it has a really pretty view and that does make me very happy so i that's what i thought i was putting out to the world was hey this is like boy i've got a i got a lot of work ahead of me but there's some real potential here that was the vibe i was going for again i thought the tens who follow me on instagram would be interested to just see what the inside of this thing looks like the project you know where it's at but i think maybe because i walked through too quickly the all the things about the house that are still really really really a work in progress they just went by really quickly and so it just seemed like a total flex and also just kind of a thirst trap like a house thirst trap because the responses i mean it was very nice but it was just all these people just being like oh my god i have had five people from my real life text me and go do you own that house where are you what is happening can i come over like the video that i post on instagram did not it came off as way thirstier and way more like hey can you please put a comment up saying nice house than i intended it to i think i maybe intended it to be five percent that but it came off as 95 percent that just because of like basically my inattention as a filmmaker and i'm feeling kind of embarrassed about it because it feels well now

you're calling yourself a filmmaker so that just add that on top it just came off as so much more

thirsty i mean again i would be lying if i said there wasn't like two percent of thirst because i end the video looking at the sunset it is definitely saying hey look this has a really pretty view so that's thirsty but the rest of it was supposed to be pointing out how janky this place is as kind of like i said a little before and after and also an update on my life but i think it just came off as it came off as way thirstier and also the things that i thought were going to show up in the video i think they went by too quickly so people just think i'm living in some kind of like or at least like i'm telling you in my own life like last night in this morning i have had various people reaching out to me going oh my god i saw the video seriously you live there like it did not have the desired it did not send the desired message okay well let's

slow down here i want to have a real conversation with you um and i want to say some stuff that might seem hurtful no i'm not not hurt not hurtful but i'm going to try to think of a way to say this but i want to be able to be blunt with you here but in a way that i'm not trying not trying to be hurtful but just pretend we're at a party on saturday and this is one of the awkward

conversations that i hope you can see my face right now andrew because it's very very perplexed

it's very judgmental have you been drinking uh is what the look on your face says to me no um but you are you are doing this you you are doing this as a lot of people do to varying degrees you you've entered into this herculean herculean um effort to create this thing so that you can have people say what a beautiful house like you love dwell magazine you get you we've talked forever on the show about the feeling the mixed feelings you have when you see a beautiful place and you will it'll be a mix of envy and and you want that and you're trying to create that and you have this moment in your this is your new coat hook moment is like to have everybody over to see your house for a summer party and and of course like i'm not saying that i'm right i live my life like a troll but like i'm the type i'm like the larry david when people say do you want to tour nope i'm good you do get you do get troll magazine i do get troll magazine like i'm the type of person like okay yeah you can spin around the house if you want to like whatever like i'm not usually like i don't usually give tours and honestly i don't want the tours like that was a joke on a larry david show um why am i blanking your enthusiasm just like troll your enthusiasm troll your enthusiasm like do you want a tour nope i'm good and like that's kind of me like i don't want the tour and so i know that i'm the other end of that but like you are putting together a show house i mean what right like that's the word show like you are proud of it and that's why you're doing all of this but here's the thing

I I think if I can actually get the project done and if the house actually turns out the way that I'm hoping it's the kind of thing that I would be very proud to have a bunch of people over to and have a barbecue and say isn't this a nice place to be I probably wouldn't put a video on instagram of it because that would feel like uh or i wouldn't do like a house tour on instagram or something i wouldn't do something that felt to me like it was an intentionally trying to flex or be like get a load of me i wouldn't mind people getting a load of me in person that sounds much more sexual also than i meant it to gail would definitely not be cool with that verbiage but i like um norwood cotton tell you that you wonder why cotton got a bad feeling about coming over yeah um i don't like i'm just being totally honest with you like yes of course of course part of what i'm hoping i mean really the big thing that i hope i'm hoping for if i can make this all happen and it will 100 involve me cashing out at least one of my last two 401ks that's not even a joke i am hoping that it will become a really comfortable enjoyable place for me to live so that i can get up in the morning and make a cup of coffee and look out at the river and and have a nice feeling i like that feeling um so most of it's for me but then also i wouldn't be sad if when people come over they're like admiring of this house that i'm living in because of all the hard work that's gone into it it's not that i don't ever want that to be the thing what i probably wouldn't do and what i don't think you know the house that the the burbank springs broadcast center up in bellingham after a lot of work and after a cashing out of other retirement plans that house really came together and it was a pretty nice house and i i was i loved living there and i loved getting to enjoy it i don't remember someone will probably prove me wrong on this i don't remember doing some kind of a video where i walk around the house and i go and here's this mid-century fireplace that we refurbished and this is you know these are the hardwood floors we had put in and this is you know i don't remember doing that maybe i did and i forget but like it's weird what feels like overly thirsty to me and what feels okay like i'm not saying it's consistent but yes i am doing all this because at some point it wouldn't make me sad if somebody was like damn dude that's a sweet pad i'm that's definitely part of it but i did wasn't actually trying to do that yesterday if that makes any sense i was trying to say man can like have you ever like have you ever been living in a construction zone maybe you can relate to this But because I didn't realize, I literally didn't realize the speed at which I was walking through the house, that none of that stuff really reads in the video. It just reads as like, I'm going through this kind of, I don't know what, this house that seems kind of cool, and then I end up standing and looking at a sunset. It was more of that kind of a thirst trap than I really meant it to be for yesterday, if that makes any sense. But now I don't want to delete it because that seems weird.

It just felt like I was saying to everyone, hey, please put a comment up that says, nice house, Luke. And that's what everybody did, and now I feel kind of embarrassed about that.

Yeah, no, no, I definitely feel that, but also it is interesting that, again, if you were the last man on Earth. Which I plan to be. But wait for it. And you love reading, but your glasses broke. Okay, well, one out of two ain't bad. Your glasses break. No, if you're just like, okay, I'm the last man on Earth, and I guess I just have to survive for a while, there's a chance that you would still put this house together because of the feelings it gives you so I definitely want to acknowledge that but also I understand I think that we're

We're getting to the difference between like kind of like maybe our relationship with social media as well. Like because you're definitely doing this, though, because I mean, listen, I do it. And again, I've portrayed myself as being like just kind of trolly when it comes to this stuff. But like my obsession with having a tidy house or a clean house is somewhat driven by this weird compulsion I have in the back of my head that somebody could stop by at any moment. And when they do, I want to present to them a clean looking life that I live. You know what I mean? Like, no dishes in the sink, no broken glass in the sink, because bingo went on the counters today, even though he's not allowed to, and knocked over the jar that I was trying to propagate a jade sprig in. That didn't, yeah, he was, you know, that cat was in the doghouse this morning, Luke, let's just put it that way. But anyway, like there when we're just renovating our little basement bathroom here, which is, you know, not fancy. That's not like I'm not competing for Dwell magazine coverage on that. But like it is the cover story, though, on Troll Monthly. I'm just going to keep bringing that joke back. It really is. Yeah. I wonder if there is a Troll Monthly. But anyway, like I'll find out there is in the back of your head. Oh, when somebody comes into here, they will have this experience. You know what I mean? Like it is the most human thing. So I'm not trying to sit over here and call you a look at me, Louie. But if you're putting tons to borrow a phrase from another podcast I listened to that I've never mentioned on the show before. But like, you know, you are putting together literally what would be described as a show house. So it was it's kind of hard to kind of find what the lines are. And it might have to do with it might have to do with our relationship to social media and also based on our generation and, you know, our relationship to social media.

based on that totally by the way there is a troll magazine the monthly mail order magazine products from games workshop some it's something to do with gaming i think maybe tabletop gaming oh and and there is like the number three issue was called thunderhawk gunship of the monthly uh let's see troll magazine games workshop mail order monthly magazine this is very confusing

to me that's what i say when i'm on my jogs and i gotta go up the hill i go thunderhawk

I know that about you. I believe so. Let me do some quick pros and cons, okay? Because I made a list today, Andrew, and I'll be gosh darned if we don't get through it. And one of the pros, I'm telling you, I'm experiencing one of the pros in real time, Andrew. And now I'm excited and mildly embarrassed, okay? So one of the pros that I have of this new place that I'm living, this new living experience, is all of my deliveries are coming directly to me now. No more Luxor packaging system where like, you know, just there's some code that gets generated and then I'm supposed to go use it to redeem. And then like they take my suits, get sent back to wherever and then they're lost forever. Andrew, before the show today, I realized that I need an additional power cable or charger, you might say, for my computer because it's kind of hard to get under this table where I'm currently talking to you from. I'm not in the real actual broadcast center yet here. I'm in just this little room because that area is also not done. But I don't want to be constantly climbing under this table to unplug and replug this laptop I'm using. So I thought I'll buy another power thing That I'll leave permanently plugged in So that when I need to plug this computer in I just have something ready to go I ordered that at about 9 this morning It's on my front porch My friend They delivered it It was one of those things where like We'll bring it by this afternoon The Amazon person while I was talking to you Pulled up I guess I know this because I'm looking at a photograph of this porch I'm like I'm two feet from where the person dropped this package off And I had no idea But the package is here. I could walk out and get it right now. There's no other intermediaries. And that, my friend, that's a big pro. I like that I get my mail here and I get my package delivery here. And it's a house. And nobody is going to mess with my stuff. This is not the kind of neighborhood where there's going to be anybody coming and grabbing things off my porch. So that's pretty awesome.

Yeah, I know you have a list. I won't try to take up too much time here. But that happened to me for the first time yesterday where I ordered something and it came later in the day and I could not have been happier. Now, of course, I ordered it through Amazon, which always gives me a bad feeling because I don't think that it's necessarily a good company and I have a lot of issues with it. Right. But I'm also, I don't know, a hypocrite or just somebody who also loves the convenience of something that is being offered. And we pay for Amazon Prime, which means we have free shipping. And so I've needed a new coffee grinder for a long time. And I think I told you I used.

this as an example recently of like i realized my coffee grinder was getting too hot and shutting down if i was grinding too much at once which i often do on sundays when i need to make a lot of coffee and so um i for a long time i've decided okay i need to replace this thing then our friend broadcast barry who owns several coffee shops and knows a lot about coffee said i recommend getting this new coffee grinder and i really appreciated that because i didn't know where to begin but once I decided all right eventually I'm going to buy that coffee grinder I didn't buy it because I'm like now that I have a plan I'm going to run this old one into the ground I'm like that with things I'm just like yeah now that's just bonus that's something to look forward to so I kept using this old one kept using this old one it kept overheating shutting down on me and then finally this Sunday morning it shut down on me in a way that really messed up my day it made me late for something and it kind of ticked me off so I'm like you know what I'm right now I'm going to buy that coffee grinder I went to their website was going to buy it directly I can't remember the brand off the top of my head but I'm like I should probably just check Amazon since shipping would be free since we pay for Prime there it is on Amazon for I think the exact same price maybe even slightly less money I order it and I'm like oh I can't wait until later this week that new one's going to come and I'm going to it's really going to be something to look forward to I came home from my volunteer gig and there it was waiting for me and I came home and I plugged it in and i just wanted to grind coffee beans all night it felt the feeling that i got doing that and again like how many people had to have a terrible experience at a warehouse how many people had to like wear diapers to bring that to me how many taxes were not paid here in seattle that is leading to an income divide that is destroying the city yet capitalism man it was they provide a service that is so hard to compete with i know and i'm glad that like i'm there's something about i agree

with everything you just said and with all of the same sort of like um i don't know i wouldn't say self-loathing but just the like being mad at myself that i am so addicted to the convenience of this company that i'm also just excited that they'll just bring it right up to my freaking steps like like i don't even have to get in an elevator and go down to the lobby of the payton apartments yeah now i can say the name andrew you know what i'll tell you what fancy apartments i'll tell you what fancy apartments really love doing now they love posting the lyrics of the talking head song naive melody they love writing this must be the place in tile that they did that at my place at my apartment they did it at another apartment building i was walking by the other day in portland they love posting that in the lobby um anyway i love that it's just When you and I are done talking, I'm just going to walk through the kitchen, I'm going to step around various piles of boxes, I'm going to walk out to the front door of the house, and I'm going to grab the package that the person brought me. And I'm sad about how happy I am about that, if that makes any sense. And I'm going to grind some beans. Okay, what else is on your list? That went longer than I thought. So that was a pro. So the pro is no more Luxor system. A con is that I've already mentioned this, but nothing in the kitchen works. and I so my tendency is to want to like get a new dishwasher and get a new stove but then I'm going to ultimately have I'm going to try to build a new kitchen and I don't know if these things will fit I don't want to like trap myself with something that's not the right size for what I'm going to be trying to build later so I think I'm just going to be hand washing dishes here for the foreseeable future which it's just me that's not that hard of a thing the main bummer is that the dishwasher has been full for three months and every time I come out here i try to run it because the dishes are getting grosser yeah that's great and then i run it and then when i check on it it hasn't worked like the dishwasher is just fully busted at this point so uh when i'm done enjoying my amazon package later i then have to like get the hottest water going you've ever seen oh that's another con by the way uh the hot water i don't know if it's just like where the hot water heater is is really far away from everything but in the shower and when running the faucet here it's a good like almost an entire minute before

the water turns to hot oh interesting i thought you're gonna say it doesn't get hot enough and obviously you know you can adjust that but i see yeah it takes a long time yeah that's gonna waste

the water i've been in places like that it's traveling too far i think but anyway so i need to get like uh i'm gonna have to do i'm gonna have to wash all of those disgusting dishes that have been moldering in the dishwasher for literally like three months so that's kind of a con let

them soak for a while and here's my advice for you yeah number one piece of advice this is the most important lean into it try not to like like just like schedule the time and say i'm going to listen to this podcast you've been listening to the cereal one whatever it is um have yourself a glass of wine whatever it is but like kind of lean into it and more practically i would say maybe the first note is like get that water hot and then fill up the sink as much as you can with hot sudsy water we'll put the dishes in there however remember

any fit and let him soak for a little bit i think that's a really smart idea now here's the thing

though first i need to get some bon ami and uh and and some good like scouring something and really clean the living tweedle out of the sink good itself yes okay yes there's no garbage disposal here and so because we're on a septic and so um although i am going to get one eventually just one that's like super macerates like one that just really really just chops the heck out of everything because i'm addicted to having a garbage disposal oh really convenient feature

we have one now um i've never i mean i actually i i think i've come around i don't know when we first moved in here i was anti-garbage disposal we only have we have a sink that is not divided into two so some people have like a sink that is divided a sink divided cannot stand what you know what i mean and maybe you even have it's like a drain on one side and a disposal on the other that's a little bit better but we just have you know one basin and it's a garbage disposal and for me especially living with somebody who like just kind of stacks dishes in the sink like it's a recipe for having spoons and forks slip down there we compost anyway we have a compost bin on our on our counter that we keep nice and clean um but also use a lot and so like i just never felt the need for it it it has come in handy i guess i'm so i'm sort of coming around on it but it's also kind of just a big gaping maw at the bottom of the sink that can a sarlacc yeah that can eat

things that it's not supposed to um i the last few places i've lived i've had one and so i think i'm just very used to kind of done and i've lived in apartments too that might be different here because actually i have some raised beds very excited about i was jealous of of uh your tomatoes that are coming in at your house the other day oh yeah that's just all genevieve yeah but i think maybe i won't need one as much i mean for a long time i've been living in apartments where it's like what are you going to do with this like food waste right yeah you're going to throw it in your garbage can i guess like or i guess i could compost it tabletop style but the the disposal was very very handy maybe i don't need one as much here because i could just walk stuff outside and

throw it in a compost bin you should get one of those eventually i think you'll actually end up liking it but although i know what you're going to get you're i can't think of the brand but you're going to get one of those composters that sits on the counter but then can compost it in like 36 hours or whatever have you seen i didn't even know that was a thing but yes yes my neighbor told me about it and i didn't i didn't realize at the moment that it's the most luke thing i've

ever heard of my life i've never heard of it but yes i will be but anyway the sink itself my point is and this is this is back to the same thing i've been saying it's like i do need to fill the sink up with soapy water and soak the dishes that are in the dishwasher that doesn't work but first i need to go to the store and get the proper stuff to clean the sink yes so that when i put the soapy water in there it's not gross water and that's where that's just you know i mean that's just every to do every item on the list there's like two things to do before i can to do that yeah yeah that's why they call it a cantaloupe list uh other pros let's see um oh you know what no no one and i mean no one is going to complain about how loud my sean colvin music is that is true or your npr or my npr or me doing this show i really did have a lot of anxiety at my old maybe not a lot but a certain amount of anxiety at my old place about how much of my talking to you was audible to the other people in my building because the door of my apartment the x the door that went out to the hallway didn't come all the way down like you know flush with the with the door jam or whatever you call the threshold and i noticed when i'd be walking around the apartment that I could hear whatever anyone was watching on TV in other rooms because none of the doors went all the way down to the threshold. So people having conversations, people having arguments, people watching TV, people gaming, if you were walking down the hall, you're hearing all of it. And I thought, well, I'm talking in a fairly loud voice for a minimum of an hour every weekday to my friend Andrew. How much of this is just kind of radiating out into the hallway? And should I be embarrassed about that? And also after I had that couple of kind of not great interactions with that neighbor of mine about my music it really did a number on me like getting ready in the morning i'd be listening to like uh oregon public broadcasting but i'd be trying to like do it really quietly or make sure the speaker was like facing away from the mirror because i started to assume that that was the entry point from like basically one of my bathroom walls was a shared wall with her so i was always worried if the speaker because i have a i have a um a bluetooth speaker that i listened to the howard stern show on and if that speaker if i was in the shower i'd have it turned out pretty loud but i would try to make sure the speaker wasn't pointing against the wall because i thought that was making it worse for her just like weird little stuff like that well uh none of that applies to where i am now so i can i can i'm as free as a bird andrew nice now that i take it there being that loud there are no contractors there today but that

will probably change a little bit if people are working in the house right Amen. Yes, but I'm thinking by the time they're back out here, I may have actually moved to the official TBTL studio. Oh, that's so, that's that imminent? That's great. Well, I mean, really all the TBTL studio needs is for me to put, for me to watch a YouTube video about how to install base, like base trim, baseboard trim. And I need to also run the internet out there because I don't have the internet hard lined out there yet. But those are two, and then there's, I mean, there's a bunch of other stuff that's not done. It has a bathroom that has nothing in it It has a laundry area with nothing in it I don't know how when I'll do the laundry out there But all of that is to say Contractors aren't here today And in fact they won't be here for another few weeks But I've kind of broken through with them Like they all know that I do something like this I think they think it's just like a weird Some weird Delusion that I have And they all just let me have it They let me sit in here talking into this microphone I felt oddly less embarrassed about that than I expected And I can't exactly explain why Like, why is he talking to himself? He's like, he's the guy who touches the vacuum to get it to work. Now, another con, Andrew, there is only one bathroom in this house and it's downstairs and and the upstairs is where I sleep. And it's not very convenient for my 47 year old bladder. I've been trying I'm trying to be careful, you know, make sure that I, you know, use the bathroom before I go to sleep and maybe try to like pound too much water. but um i may or may not have i'm not going to confirm or deny i may or may not have peed in a gatorade uh empty gatorade bottle last night and um i may do it again tonight andrew i don't know it's like i'm i'm at the age where i do wake up in the middle of the night needing to pee and if i go all the way downstairs and all the way back upstairs i may not fall right back asleep like it's the it's the collision of two things my prostate being huge and my just general sleep kind of like ability to sleep getting more brittle over the years well what's your long-term plan for that i'm assuming that gatorade bottles are not the long-term plan i'm gonna just put so many together you know how they do that nesting of like the the beer cups at like games sometimes in boston have you ever seen that it's actually a really i don't know if you would like it or if you would think it's annoying so what they do is you know like when you get a beer at a baseball game it's in a plastic cup and what they will do like in left field just for fun is get everyone empty plastic beer cup and then they will put them together they will nest them one in the other and they will try to make the longest snake of empty beer cups so it's on its side it's not a tower going up it's not a tower going up it's like a long it's it's like you know they that movie really ruined centipede references andrew like it's kind of like a centipede not a human centipede it's kind of like a centipede um and i think it's the kind of thing that happens when your team's losing and there's a lot of downtime you just start collecting all the empty beer cups you can

but um no the answer is uh my dad whenever i can that's a whole other thing what my dad's like well i can kind of i can get down there in early september and i'm like what are you what are you doing until then well i'm working for the annonsons i'm like you're doing handyman work for a different family that watches fox news all the time giving them a better rate if i recall i think he raised thank god i think he raised the rate on them so now at least i'm paying the same price it doesn't help you any but at least it's but at least it's no my price isn't going down yeah but there's just going up and that's what i care about as long as i'm not paying more than people who are unrelated to him but i'm like really dad you don't want to come live with your son and watch bbc content and uh and work on this place with me but anyway when i can get him down here uh we are going to put a very um simple and small little um a bathroom in upstairs there's a little kind of nice i don't even know what you would call it like it's a nook really like it's not even a room but it's probably just big enough to put a a toilet and a sink and that's it and um and we're going to do that so there will be eventually uh and this is a good time to do it because there are like the ceiling down here on the floor that i'm on there's no ceiling there is actually no ceiling so we can get to everything that's the other part of it what i would love to do is just snap my fingers and put a new hardwood floor in and a new sheet rock and like basically like basically um you know what's the word finish off the interior space of this house like basically just make it so it has a nice floor and a nice ceiling and nice walls that would feel so good to me but i can't because so much work needs to be done within those walls of running pipes and electrical and moving all this stuff i have to do all of this much less fun less sexy stuff so that when those walls go up the stuff is where it's going to be ultimately and you know that's a very un-Luke thing like I'm really just about I'm really about show and not go and so it's killing me to not just like overpay to have somebody come in and just like spiff it up in here because i know that's actually a bad idea um but we're going to put a a toilet upstairs when i can get my dad to finally come down here and help me with this nice okay and let me see other pros and other cons um well the the big pro is uh you know i do like staring at the river i'm enjoying that now here's a con i can't decide andrew am i listening to i'm in washington state Now, am I listening to KUOW or am I listening to OPB now? Because I'm much closer to Portland than I am to Seattle, but I'm in Washington and there feels to me something weird. I've been an OPB guy for the last few years.

Well, it sounds like KNKX would like a word.

Well, because that's further south. They've always been the rivals. I mean, yeah, no, KNKX makes more sense than KUOW, but I've never, I mean, I know some folks that work there. I've always, I was always, I was a KUOW man. Like my father and his father before him

He's never a KPLU person I know and KPLU has some really great programming too And some really good journalists but I'm kind of with you Because I moved to Seattle and I'm sort of You know kind of volunteering and then working At KOW immediately like That's always been sort of my Yeah my connector point it's always like Sometimes the NPR One app Will be like do you want to Actually I might even have NPR One Pointing towards KNKX as a little bit Of trying to get me to Branch out a little bit more I'm boring

myself you know you know my favorite tacoma radio station andrew right cairo

seattle's morning news on that on that tacoma radio station can we explain can we explain that

yeah yeah uh that we did this interview with a current magazine which is the official publication of i think public broadcasting probably radio and tv and it was about tbtl and it was really it was a nice conversation i thought they wrote a really nice article there was one little funny thing though which was um they were referencing that we had worked at cairo um and they were insistent that cairo is a tacoma washington-based radio station and you and i both well there are two

things there first of all i mean this was and i don't want to throw the reporter jenna under the bus i think jenna did a great job and i'm actually really and there's a great piece for us it was great publicity so it was awesome i don't want to throw the reporter under the bus but there was one mistake as will happen um that sort of said that you work on live wire a radio show that's on the tacoma radio station cairo and i kind of flagged in like oh there's two things wrong with that first of all luke's show is on a bunch of public radio stations around the country it's not on cairo at all and also cairo is not a tacoma radio station it's a seattle radio station and so um john reached out to let them know and i think this is not on the reporter but on the editors and they they fixed the live wire thing but they said no we're going to keep on calling Cairo at Tacoma radio station because that's where the license is and legally that would be true you would like they must have station IDs that are aired probably somewhat subtly that identify it as Cairo Tacoma or they must because legally you have to do that but it is if you look up Cairo radio it says like Seattle's news talk station the morning show is called Seattle's morning news like it is in like it is broadcast in Seattle you know like we like in Seattle proper like we worked there like it's a seattle radio station and the fact that they're kind of like leaning into no it's a tacoma radio station anybody who's in for people who aren't in the know it doesn't matter and but for those who are local it's actually kind of confusing it's actually they're being they're sticking to the letter of the law but it's actually that's not what journalism is like journalism is about context too and like it is not a tacoma radio station

well and i thought i came up with a pretty good analogy on the fly which was it's like saying that the Yankees are a New Jersey-based baseball team because that's where their merch warehouse is.

Or where, or, yeah, I mean, yeah, I mean, merch would be more tangential, but it would be like if the ownership met in Jersey or something like that, yeah.

Yeah, if they're whatever, they're, do you think they're an S-Corp? You think they're an LLC? What are the New York Yankees? It has a business. But like if their business was somehow, you know. Incorporated. Incorporated, that's the word I was looking for. yeah um it you know then but anyway so uh that was why i just want everyone to understand why the best joke that i got off today and maybe in a long time the thing that made you laugh the most made no sense to anyone who's not us and john yeah but again i don't want to sound um i don't

want to sound petty about that article because it was really people are like oh my gosh i mean you could not have asked for a better write-up of tbtl like i think the nuance was captured and

yeah totally and also again in our world like the people that we kick it with or at least some of the people we kick it with it's like being in current magazine is a thing right like i don't think i've ever i don't i've ever worked on something that was written up in there so like if you know you know it's like it's like being in troll monthly yeah no i've been in the

gaming community you know i i that's a little bit of a pay-to-play situation so i've definitely taking up some space in the back.

of Troll Monthly in the The personals. The missed connections, actually.

Here I go once again with the email. Every week, I hope that it's from a female. Oh, man! It's not from a female.

It's funny, I was talking about that Amazon order, and then I looked down and I had a note, or like a indicator from Amazon that said you have a message from your Amazon delivery person? Oh, no. And I thought it was going to be them saying, what the hell were you doing in that room

is it just a photo of it being dropped off on your

porch or something well it was literally like some auto generated thing that said I'll be by soon to drop this off like it was just a totally like we just it was a normal thing but I literally in my mind thought because again I can't I can't over state this I am I'm in this room it's got actually kind of a lot of windows and they're all open for ventilation right now did I just hear a voice is there

somebody there no just

me but

are you sure sorry this is me starting a new narrative where i try to convince you that

your house is haunted by this talking in a goofy voice i do um uh i have wondered about that a little bit because not that is the house haunted i don't believe in that but you know this is a different living environment than uh where i was living certainly and uh i would i would heavily dissuade people from coming out here please thank you very much even though it's unfortunately probably a knowable thing but like uh it it is not the same as living in like the interior of a very secure apartment building with a door that locks really you know like really securely and kind of like i'm like huh like when the wind whistles through here and i'm like oh okay well this is all right that was a creaking sound i'm not used to as i'm just here you know um kind of by myself you know it's it's a it's a like i said it's a different living uh situation that i'm getting used to i do also like that my neighbors the the neighbors are all really kind of great around here like they really keep an eye on everything i'm not in a i don't think in one of those ways that i know you've pointed out andrew can be kind of negative you know like sort of not wanting certain kind of people in the neighborhood it's just more like everyone like if if the wrong if the package goes to the wrong person's house they'll bring it down to your house or if your garbage needs to get rolled up like literally one of my neighbors it's like rolled my garbage up to the pickup because i wasn't here oh you know just like it's like a neighborly place which i like so i feel like if you know if i did have a haunting situation i could

get some help from either bob or brian so that's nice nice yeah have them on speed dial for that um meantime let me play a voicemail for you here luke it's um related to found money of course this comes up from time to time on the show because my biggest goal in life is to find a large sum of money on the ground um i don't live a very fulfilling life obviously um but or very i don't dream that big but ever since i saw an episode of cheers where uh the gang is looking for a hidden money belt uh i've been convinced that there is a hidden money belt in my life and in my future somewhere so i love finding money on the ground there's money in this house there is i mean that's what i'm saying that's why you gotta tear the whole thing apart looking for it

we tore the whole dang thing although you know what it was the shady contractor who did the demo

right found something that's why you gotta do it all yourself anyway um so i love finding money on the ground and that's come up and in fact i see i have several voicemails and emails about this topic i've only been able to listen to this one so far this is from listener nicole with a um

tale of warning hi it's listener nicole calling from minnesota i'm hesitant to do this because Andrew, I don't want to ruin the joy of picking up found money, but I have to tell you, I was cured of the picking up found money in the early 2000s when I was visiting my younger sister at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. We were at a football game, and outside the stadium, there was a dollar, and one of us went to grab it on the ground, and my sister grabbed her arm. she was horrified she's like stop never pick up money out here and we're like why and she's like poo dollar we're like what did you say poo dollar and i don't even know if i want to describe what these college kids would do for entertainment but maybe you can just figure out what the rules are but they would leave money around for entertainment and have people pick those up

sorry if i'm ruining that for you andrew bye that is why i only pick up money with my teeth yes because i don't want to get the poo on my hands uh have we talked people have sent in similar warnings i can't remember if they made the air or not i picked up a dollar in my parking garage well you would know i think if you're part of the prank like it's not i don't think it's subtle i think like i think the deal is that the dollar sort of covers it up but then

You pick it up, and it's a mess underneath there and on the dollar. And some people have written in about that. Maybe I shielded you and the listeners from that, but I appreciate Nicole putting that in the voicemail line. So I got to be honest with you. It is not going to change my behavior other than maybe being a little bit more careful. But my guess is the vast majority of dollar bills you find on the ground are not poo dollars, unless maybe you're in a college town where prankerism maybe has higher rates.

i i mean i guess if you wanted to be safe you could just say i'm not going to pick up a dollar bill because i think that's probably the most amount of money a college student can afford to wipe the poo on like they don't they're not generally going to be able to like do that with a hundred dollar bill so if you just made the choice i'm going to leave dollar bills alone you might that might just insulate you uh against the whole problem i guess

you're just gonna step over a dollar bill i mean again now i might consider it i andrew well this was just be careful let's just be careful out there maybe maybe give it a little kick with your uh with your toe or something kiss give it a little just give it a little kiss and see how

it tastes i'm trying to make like one of those popping sounds like they do on tim and eric like right after they talk about giving each other a little kiss didn't really that didn't really play that didn't really come through the mic but um okay well thank you nicole that's good to know um i will um i'll be careful with that stuff i do need to find i don't know on the subject of walking i do have to figure out what my walking route is around here because i do enjoy that i really enjoyed that about portland and i don't like being kind of on top of a hill where i'm a little bit there's also somebody with a let's go brandon flag oh no really like down on the main kind of road not next to me thank god i don't think i necessarily want to go too deep with the politics of some of my neighbors but there's nobody that's like going hardcore you know weird trump flag stuff around here there's a couple of american flags but it's you know people around here seem relatively kind of you know i guess calm on that topic but if you go out to the main road and you start walking down this again it's very windy and there's kind of not much of a shoulder and i'm also just thinking so i go for a walk well when i come home i'm gonna have to walk up a steep ass hill which is kind of not that relaxing but i'll have to figure something out or i'll just have to put it like a quarter mile high school track around my house and then

just do laps on that yeah okay that sounds good put a pickleball court in the middle of it probably

i do have i do have at the down at the base of you know maybe what i should do is at the base of my property i've talked about this before there is like a little kind of stretch of what used to be i'm told by my neighbor brian the before i-5 before any roads the first road that used to be able to take to get from like san francisco up to like the northwest is at the end of my yard it's called old military road and it used to be the only road to get you up into washington state supposedly and it's at the edge it's like literally at the base of my yard and

And that's the one that your neighbor is sort of like trying to preserve and clear out and maintain it.

But I think there's about, I don't know, a half a mile of it that he's been taking care of. So I should be able, I could do that. That could be my little half mile walk. Yeah, that'd be really nice. That seems right up your alley. Except I'm a little afraid because there are bears and cougars down there because he also has a wildlife camera and he sent me pictures of them. But anyway. Get yourself some bear spray, though, for real. I am actually going to do that because the other thing I want to find, sorry, I'm just staring at like the hills and then just saying what comes into my brain, which is never a good recipe for podcasting but um i also want to find some logging roads around here i loved that in bellingham i had found a couple of logging roads that were maybe not technically legal to walk on but no one stopped you and it's just like the best because it's like a good hike but it's also wide and kind of maintained so you're not like fully going off

the trail and then you can put the steel spikes and the trees right exactly go straight up earth Some very light eco-terrorism You know what I'm going to talk about tomorrow, Andrew? I don't know if that's the preferred term

What I'm going to talk about tomorrow is I'm becoming a binoculars guy I'm becoming a binoculars boy Seeing your neighbor's windows and stuff Well, I mean, that was the idea But now I'm just birding with them I'm watching a I mean, I got into it for the right reasons But now it's been totally co-opted by birding

Now you're being weird and looking at birds And they're nude

I'm looking at nude birds right now, Andrew. A giant flock of geese is just flying in a V formation up the Columbia River, and I'm looking at it through my little binoculars. Okay, I'll stop now. This has been more than enough for me for one day. I have good news, though. If you like this kind of thing, we are going to be back here tomorrow with more imaginary radio for all of you. So please do join us for that. I will give you an update tomorrow on how the shit goes. Shop vacking has been going where we're at. I do. I want a battery shop vac so bad. Well, you know what I have to do first, though? I have to drive back to Portland today and finish cleaning my apartment. Because yesterday we were moving everything out, but then I need to go back in and sweep it all up. Yeah. I have a feeling that it's going to be tidy, but it's going to be short of how clean it would be if you were there. Yeah, it's also Dark Star, like whatever. Thank you, Gray Star, but I think they should be called Dark Star. Yeah. All right. We'll see you tomorrow, everyone. In the meantime, have a great Monday. Take care of yourselves. And please remember, no mountain too tall. And good luck to all. Power out.