Lee.org

I just scheduled my first COVID vaccine dose! Feb 2nd!

Here’s what Abigail did LAST WEEK in school. It’s astounding! Step One in Berkeley is an amazing school! I’m so proud and happy to be a part of it, for myself and my daughter!

(If you are using Chrome on Windows, here’s how to view this stupidly long image (sorry!) right-click | open link in new tab, then click on the image to zoom in on it)

My favorite food storage containers AKA “Tuppers” are the rectangular “Ikea 365+” line. Here’s why:

• The same top is used by ALL of the different sizes (34 ounce to 142 ounce) and materials (plastic and glass). No more rummaging for the right size lid!!!
• Having consistent dimensions, they stack well in the fridge and nest well on the storage shelf.
• Being rectangular, they use space more efficiently than a cylindrical or bowl shaped container.
• They are inexpensive and I can buy more of the exact same size, unlike the stupid “premium limited edition” food containers I’ve had in the past.
• Available in light & break-resistant plastic, and oven safe & stain-proof glass, I use them daily!

Here are the exact sizes I have, all with the same beautiful lids:

• 34 ounce plastic
• 34 ounce glass
• 68 ounce plastic
• 61 ounce glass (the mate for the 68 oz. glass)

I’ve had them now for a few years and they’ve stood up well. The plastic appear to be polypropylene, as they read “P.P.”

The 142 ounce containers use the same lids but I don’t have any yet.

The only downside I’ve found so far is that the 34 ounce size is too big for what you’d consider “small” leftovers. If it doesn’t make a mess, I will sometimes put two different small leftovers in the same container. They make a sectioning system that I should try out!

(I previously wrote about food storage)

I need to use earphones to hear my clients on Zoom. I tried the premium “Jabra Evolve 65T” bluetooth earbuds but they didn’t work for me at all (see my review below). I’ll pay a premium price. Any suggestions?

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My review of the Evolve 65T True Wireless Professional UC Headset, posted to Amazon 1-14-21

Several insurmountable problems led to a return

I was hoping to use these to do video Zoom chats on my Windows computer. Using them for listening to music and podcasts too. A couple issues forced me to return them:

– They occasionally make a very loud click in my ears. Once it happened when I walked away from my desk, maybe it lost bluetooth connection? Once it happened while I was trying to configure it. Earbuds should NEVER blast my ears with a loud click!

– The audio balance for music is often 90% to the left and can’t be fixed. I googled around and found several forums filled with people saying “yeah, that’s a problem. I called Jabra and they couldn’t fix it.” One fix seemed to work for some people: sticking a needle in the microphone port below the “R” on the right earbud and wiggling it around. I gently tried this (on my brand new earbuds) and it didn’t work.

– I had a bit of trouble configuring them to work. Making the sound path from Zoom/Spotify/default computer audio to the speakers wasn’t intuitive and the manual consisted of just 4 pictograms. I muddled through but a little more help from Jabra would have been nice. Here are some hints (that Jabra doesn’t mention!): The Jabra “Sound+” app for Android can help you configure the earbuds… but some forums say it is responsible for the left-balance problem. You should get the Jabra Direct Windows program to set up the Jabra USB Link 370 USB Adapter.

I welcome comments saying which earbuds will work well for Zoom on Windows! These were premium priced, I’d be happy to spend premium money to make it work!

I don’t want to leave this photo here but I have to. As a reminder.

Adam Christian Johnson

Here’s where I practice school-based OT at the beginning of 2021.

Chicken John tells the most real, most vital stories.

Find out about him and the San Francisco Institute of Possibility at his website

Here’s his Holiday Letter

December 22, 2020:
HAPPY HOLIDAYS FROM CHICKEN
So I invested some money in a novelty game called The Tricky
Triangle. It was a thing you bought bulk for distribution. I was done with the moving company, living in NYC in my $200 van, and I got a windfall of money selling my phone number to a rival
moving company. I sold a bunch of musical equipment and other stuff in preparation for my move to the West Coast. It was all the money I had, and I borrowed some: $8,500.

I got 10,000 Tricky Triangles. My plan was to get a vinyl sign made and sell them in malls or flea markets. They came 250 to a box. There were 40 boxes. So many, that with all my other stuff I had to sleep in the front seat of the van.

Tricky Triangle Great Stocking Stuffer

You already know how this ends up. It seemed totally reasonable. Totally doable. For $8,500, I got 10,000 of the product I could
easily sell for $3 to $6. At an average of $5 each, I would only need to sell 1,700 to make my investment back. If I could sell 50 to 100 per hour and there were 45 hours of holiday shopping for three weeks, I would sell out.

I ran the math over and over again. “What if I only sell 25 an hour?” Well, then I only make like half my investment back this year, and can try again next year. See, that’s the appeal. To break into a market to see what is what. I needed to make a living and I was very interested in stuff that was winter or Christmas-based, so I could be free in the summer for circus or other stuff…
I thought that if it got tough, I could go door to door. People did that back then. Go door to door in December selling stocking stuffers. People do that, right? I worked the numbers. Thinking of places that would be good to “set up” at. What kind of place would generate what kind of sales. I went over it again and again. I said to myself: “They are gonna stuff those stockings with something, right?”

Right?

You already know how this ends up. The feeling of failure and self loathing when I put 15 of the boxes on the curb next to the garbage cans so I could sleep laying down. The dejection. The emasculating horror of 100% rejection. The bitter cold of winter. The bald tires on the van in the ice and snow. Actual hunger but too proud and stubborn to admit to anyone (at the time) that I hadn’t sold a single one.

I thought for sure I was a natural for the flea market. For selling stuff. For 10 years I tried to sell things. On and off. I even had a junk store on 28th street in SF for a year: Shuck and Jive. Anyone ever go to that? Selling at the flea markets and doing sales requires you have certain ruthless traits. I possess not a drop of ruthless.

It was a cataclysmic mistake. I let more and more boxes go over the years. I have one Tricky Triangle left. I’m gonna put it in
Edsel’s stocking someday when he’s old enough to understand what it’s like to make an actual, tangible, shit just went sideways mistake.

I can’t remember 1990. I was a high-functioning drug addict. I have phone message pads that my moving company office took, and I have the job logs. So I can actually look through and see where I was on a day to day. I can’t remember any of it. Addiction is weird like that. It seems so impossible that I would gamble the last of my money with no way out on a stocking stuffer. I was truly out of my fucking mind.

Here it is, The Tricky Triangle for sale on Ebay in England for the equivalent of minimum wage in 1984 ($3.35). THIRTY YEARS LATER.

May 20th, 1992 was the first day to not do heroin on purpose. Some days we were doing other drugs. But when I knew it was the heroin that was the problem, I was shocked to find out that I was addicted. Because we were snorters, we didn’t think we were junkies. It’s kind of amazing that I wrote the date down somewhere. That it followed from one calendar to another. So I have that information now. Miraculous.

I’d like to think that it was the drugs that made me invest in the Tricky Triangle. I pepper any/all decisions I make with it’s spice: “the same mind that is making this choice also invested in the Tricky Triangle…” Ask my wife, she’ll tell you.*

So this is your Christmas Spirit holiday spotlight. Do you have a Tricky Triangle? Of course you do! I wanted to share something about the true meaning of the magic of the holidays, which is what is most important is that we are all here. Together. Laughing at our inabilities and our limitations. I didn’t make any money with the Tricky Triangle, but I learned that I could live in a van, and because I could do that, I did the circus. I didn’t have a wildly successful moving business, but I got good at moving stuff and I use those skills every day. I can’t remember 1990 but I can totally remember 1991, and that was an awesome year… I played with GG in that year and toyed with the idea of monastic training to be a Buddhist cleric: at the same time! It’s all just a big mess.

I hope your life is a mess too. This time of year is a great
opportunity to fuck everything up. If you are ending up with good stories, you’re doing it right.

Chicken

* Don’t actually ask my wife, thanks…

[Update 12-30-20: Fixed!! See below]
Can you help fix my domain’s spam reputation problem? I’m happy to pay for professional help.

Whenever I send email to a new person at gmail from my domain name, Lee.org, it falls into their spam folder. After they mark my email as “not spam”, recipients can receive further emails.

This is probably happening because, until July 2018, my domain was being used by spammers to send junk mail. I have since fixed the email settings (SPF, DMARC, DKIM, Google Postmaster Tools) to keep spammers from spoofing my domain but the reputation damage has been done! Mail hosts apparently still don’t trust me! My domain (Lee.org) is definitely not generating any spam and the volume of email sent is very light, there is only one user, me!

Do you have any suggestions as to how to fix my email reputation problem?
I found some random coders on fiverr.com that might help but I’m reluctant to give all my passwords to random people on the internets!

Update 12-30-20:
I wrote to Dreamhost and they responded, essentially, “Sorry about that, we fixed the thing that you couldn’t have possibly known was broken. You’re good now”

Some time ago, we started using a service called MailChannels to help us with our incoming and outgoing spam filtering. It looks like for some reason, your SPF record hadn’t been updated to authorize MailChannels, so, considering your DMARC settings, normal messages being sent from DreamHost were being marked as spam. I apologize about this, I’ve taken the correct steps to fix this and it should help with your outgoing messages not being marked as spam in the future.

I sent a few emails to friends (thanks Kayte and Carol!) and yeah, lee.org is now sending emails to not-spam-folders again! Hurray!

Just got back from a really enjoyable trip to the Sierra Nevada mountains with podmates. Feeling a bit more relaxed. Hurray!

The Pleiades peeking out from behind the trees at our place in the mountains