christian crumlish doing stuff
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One day at a time
I’ve been checking in with colleagues, peers, and mentors lately and when one asked me how I was handling things lately, I said “one day at a time” and she said something like that sounds like a good strategy. As if I have a choice! Still, there’s some wisdom in there. You can only game…
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Pharaoh made Ra angry
Spent most of the day in the studio at Goody Sound, mixing two more songs from the record. I posted them both to Soundcloud last night and the first one has nine listens so far and the second has 137. Go figure. Moses Took Us to the Water “Moses Took Us to the Water” (I…
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Balm in Gilead
Presidents’ Day is a federal holiday and for me this means I am back in the studio with my producers (David and Jeremy), working right now on the preliminary mix for “Moses Took Us to the Water.”
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Old man vines
OK so this off-hand clip about stirring risotto and steel-cut oats (“Stirring tips: No. 37”) quickly did 10x the usual views of my usual random and sporadic video post and more than 2x my previous best (which was a sloppy cover of “Pruno” by my friend Dan that I posted when I first set up…
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Beater tested
I was listening to one of my favorite podcasts, History of the Germans, and was surprised to hear the host refer to a King of the Romans’ plan as “beater tested” until I recalled that he lives in Britain and that “beta” is pronouced like “beet” there, and the “-a” sound on the end can…
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The reverse Mary Poppins
B looked out onto the sodden back deck and said “we don’t have an umbrella”! My mind at first went to the handheld kind till I saw what she was seeing. (normally there’s a green canvas table umbrella there. the round copper table on its side was already like that.) So I went outside to…
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A RIF by any other name
More than a day after being notified that they should expect to be dismissed during their probation period for reasons having nothing to do with performance, two people on my team were finally notified after 10 pm ET via email and attachment. I have to assume that hundreds if not thousands other across the fed…
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The fork not taken
Because these are very serious people treating us with respect, our new overlords declared once a judge lifted his stay, that the deferred resignation program was closed to new entrants at 4:20 on pacific time. Maybe now we can stop hearing about this meshugganah fork, at least? In the meantime, they semi rolled out a…
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Reporting for duty!
I’ve been working remotely since 2015. After we sold a startup to Dropbox, I had about six months off to chill and figure out what to do next. I took a playwriting class and got a lot of exercise. At the end of the period I joined another startup that was fully remote. I worked…
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Never miss a word
OK, I think I have the subscription widget working right, with a tucked-away version on both the main page and the page for each of these posts, just in case anyone wants to get an email notifying them when I’ve written something new here. No spam, promise!
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Waiting for the other shoe to drop
So it’s another day of doing my job while trying to understand what the plan is, what’s on pause, and what is going to happen next. The judge who stayed the deadline for forking ourselves heard arguments yesterday and then left the stay in place indefinitely (until he makes his decision). Meanwhile, inside the house…
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Warming up the tubes
OK looks like the last post notified the Test list, not the Main list. Trying this Rube Goldberg thing another time.
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Breaker, one-nine
OK, so I managed to install a little subscription thingie down there above the footer (hidden till you pull it down because it’s kind of fugly in my no-sidebar design here currently), and it seems to work in getting people signed up (me in a test account as my smarter older brother Mycroft and friend…
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Calm before the storm
One nice thing about the temporary restraining order (TRO) handed down by a judge in Massachusetts last Thursday is that by extending the deadline to take the “go fork yourself” offer from the stooges doing the bidding of the Project 2025 playbook (while Elon and his muskrats continue to root through our national privates), they…
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amanaplanacana
I hope to release my record, No One Does It Solo Only, later this year, maybe a little sooner if I suddenly have a lot of unstructured time on my hands, and anyhow true to the title of the record, the process of releasing it will be a team effort just as the songwriting, arranging,…
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Ladies and gentlemen, the weekend
I was anticipating the new season of Severance since they started announcing it last fall and now life has gotten so crazed I am tending to catch the newest episodes days late instead of right when they drop. And then all of a sudden a show about a job where the people at the top…
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Oath takers and oath breakers
The whole concept of swearing an oath can feel antique, or worse cringe-y. Sad creepy quasi-militia guys exchanging rings with their daughters, that kind of thing. But I have worked for two governments now, and three administrations. When I was appointed to a role in the California government I swore an oath to defend the…
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For those who don’t have the spoons
We will all do what we need to do to keep our loved ones safe in times of tribulation. For now, I choose the spoon, for myself and for those who can’t.
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Reports of our death…
I appreciate all the folks who’ve reached out (including some of our partners at work) concerned by what they’ve been reading about our team and wanted to send a brief acknowledgement to the folks out there that we are still in here fighting the good fight:
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Technical difficulties
If I seem at all distracted it may be that my new boss’s old boss who is also possibly the actual boss of the country’s new boss is currently attacking the team I work for, and doxxing my colleagues. 18F’s account on Twitter was apparently deleted (actually a good thing, if you ask me) but,…
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What a lot of people forget about the 80s
For nearly a year there smack in the middle of that decade of excess nobody was permitted to mess with anybody’s toot-toot. Jello remembered, thirty years later…