Brightknightie's friends

A random collection of notes because it's Friday and I've been vaguely meaning to organize them all day but I didn't!

Good news, the succulents in the planter look very well. One of them is growing a new... leaf? idk, succulents are alien plants.

Yesterday we took down the larger greenhouse because the big tree was getting sunburned at the edge of the patio (the sun was touching it for like a whole four hours a day, maybe, which was fine last year but I guess this year is different) and I needed to move it deeper into the shade, which is where the greenhouse was.

Today we installed a new air conditioner! Why do our air conditioners not last more than a year or two? Are we buying the wrong brand? Do we treat them badly? Our GE is going on its third year which is a record for us (we only moved in five years ago and we've already turned over at least three) so we got one of those Midea inverter units for upstairs because the Midea dehumidifier on the lowest level has been going strong since the summer we moved in.

Actually we moved in five years ago yesterday, I just realized. Happy house-iversary to us! We interviewed agents one weekend in April, viewed two homes the next weekend, and made an offer on Monday which was accepted that night. We moved in two months later. I had to take a day off from client meetings at work to close, and drove a Uhaul van for the first time the next day. Great decision. Best house.

I finished my first 50 hours of video-watching in Chinese and I am going to count monthly going forward because my tracker is not set up for arbitrary number targets. (Which is weird, because who doesn't love an arbitrary number target?) That means the easiest way to keep up is to do 50 hours a month. Ha ha. We'll see.

Lots more great challenges coming up: extrapenguin is advertising taggle as a battleshipex replacement (battleship isn't running this year), and beagoldfish is back immediately afterwards. Summer reading at the library starts somewhere in between, with what I assume will be another bingo challenge.

We were going to watch Project: Hail Mary tonight, but then we found out about taggle and had to sign up right away. We watched half of Project: Hail Mary afterwards. Online discussion of how accessible the movie title isn't in other languages is very entertaining. (A "hail mary" is defined in the movie as "what you americans would call a long shot," which is both humorously ironic in English and almost universally ineffective in translation.)