Not Fun and then Fun

It is 3:30pm and it is already the longest day in the history of the universe.

I went to sleep at about 10:30pm last night. Later than I would have liked, but earlier than most days over the past month or so. I woke up at about 2:15am needing to go to the bathroom. I’m old. It happens. Deal with it. When I was done I fell right back to sleep.

Then at 3:51am my phone rang. It was work. The overnight staff were dealing with a customer issue that was causing the customer a lot of stress. I knew what the issue was but I wasn’t sure how to find the process that was causing it. Fortunately the overnight guy I was on the phone with mentioned one little detail which set off a trigger in my teeny tiny little mostly still asleep brain and I knew where I had to go to set things right. By 4:15 I was off the call. I took a few minutes to write a message to all of my staff members who would be involved in the follow up during normal business hours and I went to bed. I didn’t sleep much before my alarm went off at 5:30am, but I did manage to snooze a little.

All of that was not fun. Not fun at all. It was a lot less catastrophic than it could have been, but it is never fun having work call in the middle of the night. I’m just glad I was able to help. Even though the situation was not fun, I felt pretty good about myself when it was over.

By 6:00 I was out of bed and starting the day. By 6:15 I was in the cellar starting my daily exercise. The ball was rolling. An hour later the fun part of the day was starting. Guitars, babie!

On Monday I wrote two new songs and started recording demos. Bass and drums were MIDI instruments, rhythm guitars were the real thing, the melody was sketched out on a keyboard and lyrics were written stream of consciousness style to fit the melody. Yesterday before work my laptop and I drove to an empty parking lot in town and I recorded the vocal tracks for both songs. Today before work I recorded the lead guitar parts. Normally the lead guitars are my favorite part of the song demo process but right now I am so out of playing shape that there are no calluses on my finger tips and playing for more than a few minutes hurts. The strings start to feel like razor blades, especially when you play like I do and you bend strings all over the place. Ouch.

Still, despite the pain, I was able to finish tracking both new songs. Now all I have to do is mix them so that they are somewhat listenable (relatively speaking, of course) and then they are done. A few years ago I was writing 10+ songs each month over the course of the whole year. Last year I did the RPM Challenge in February (write and record an album’s worth of music all within the month of February) and then nothing for the rest of the year. This year was starting to look the same. I finished RPM in February and then it wasn’t until Memorial Day weekend that I even thought about doing anything more. Now that I am feeling like I am back in the saddle again, or some horse shit like that (get it? Saddle? Horse shit? Oh, come on!) I am thinking about trying to write a bunch in June and then do the fifty ninety challenge over the summer (that challenge is to write 50 songs in 90 days between July 4th and October 1st). We’ll see if I can stick to that.

So on this fine Friday in May, in fact the last Friday in May, the day started off not fun, and then for a little blast of time it was fun, and then it was just the usual… right up until about an hour after lunch when the lack of sleep caught up with me and now I am completely out of gas with 93 minutes left in my work day.

It’s going to be a long afternoon.

Hey, Screw You Ticketmaster

I’m going to a concert next week. Triumph. I saw them in 1986. It was my first concert. My Uncle Johnny took me. I was 15. Now here we are 40 years later and out of nowhere the band announced a 50th anniversary tour and I got me a ticket. Uncle Johnny is no longer with us, but he’ll be going to the show with me in spirit, I am sure.

That’s not the story with this post though. Not directly at least. No, the point is that ticketmaster is an asshole and I want them to fuck right off.

Over the last week they have been sending me emails reminding me that I have a ticket to a conert. As if I would have forgotten, you know? Not bloody likely. Today though, they put a new spin on the spam. Today’s email reminded me that if I wanted to sell my ticket I can do so through their reseller option.

Ah… no thank you, fuckwads. I do not want to sell the ticket to the show that I have been waiting 40 years for. Fuck you right the fuck off. To borrow a line or two from The Book of Mormon, fuck ticketmaster right in the eye and then fuck ticketmaster right in the other eye.

Blah, Again

Yesterday was a tough day. Today has been tougher. I need (another) vacation. That’s a common theme around here.

I don’t have to work in the office tomorrow. That’s nice. Maybe if I get up early enough I’ll have some time to work on those two new songs I wrote on Sunday. They both need two tracks of vocals and at least one track of lead guitar. Maybe I can get some of that done tomorrow and then the rest on Friday. We’ll see.

The last two work days (including today, which is down to the final 36 minutes) have been insanely, absurdly, busy. I haven’t had a minute to catch my breath. It’s frustrating. I’ll be heading home soon for the day. Hopefully I won’t have a repeat of last night’s commute. There was an accident on route 495. Google Maps detoured me around it, but it also detoured 1000000 other commuters and it resulted in a monster traffic jam on a side street. It cost me more than half an hour of my life.

On unrelated commute news, I had to stop at a rest area on route 128 today in order to get gas. My tank was almost empty. I had enough gas to get me the rest of the way to work, but not enough to get my home afterward. As I was pumping gas, I saw something I’d never seen before. I saw a tractor trailer truck… do a donut. Sort of. He pulled out of a parking spot. He should have turned right and gotten onto the highway. He didn’t. He turned left… and kept turning left… he did a full 360 degree turn. Effectively he did a donut, but a donut in slow motion. He also blocked the ramp onto the highway and had 3–4 cars stuck waiting for him to get his dumb ass out of the way. It was a very weird thing.

Okay. I have 31 minutes left in my work day. Time to hit publish and squeeze in some more work. Thanks for reading my pointless, useless, bullshit. I appreciate the effort. I’ll try to write something more interesting tomorrow.

Blah

Memorial Day Weekend: Three days of rain and gloom and cold.

The Tuesday after Memorial Day Weekend: Blue skies, sun, 80 degrees.

Mutha puss bucket.

It was a good weekend otherwise. We tried to have a cookout but had a cook-in instead. I was hoping my step son would be able to join us but he was too busy. My step daughter was away for the start of it but she came home Sunday afternoon. That was nice.

I didn’t go out to take pictures or anything, not just because of the shit weather. I was also feeling too lazy. I sort of made up for it, in the creativity department, on Monday though. I wrote two songs. The demos aren’t finished, but everything is written for both of them. My finger tips are still burning from recording the rhythm guitars. The strings on my ES-335 felt like rusty razor blades. It was fun.

We found out today we’re going to have a little bit of work done on the house that is going to require me to do a HUGE amount of work in the cellar to prepare for it. It’s not for a couple of weeks but I am already feeling overwhelmed by the very thought of it. It’s an important project that will lead to an even more important project a few months down the road, but for now… fuck me.

I’m going to a concert next week. Expect me to be super psyched about it in the coming days. That’s a little blog spoiler for you.

Nothing much else to write about today. I had to commute to the office today and I’m about 20 minutes away from my commute home. I’m in the office again tomorrow. Hopefully the commute is better tomorrow, but I doubt it. Whatever.

Okay, I’m clicking publish now.

Noodles

The electric guitar was noodled upon today. I worked out two new song ideas on my laptop and decided that even though I was grossly rusty and have no calluses at all on my finger tips, I put rhythm guitar tracks onto both songs. Four tracks on one song and two on the other.

My playing was absolute garbage but I enjoyed every second of it. Well… not counting the burning agony in the tips of the fingers on my left hand. That’s a kick in the nards, but other than that… Fun.

Cook In

It’s raining so our Memorial Day cookout is a cook in. Sorry.

The Frugal Film Project Lives Again

I bet you’ve been seeing this coming for a while now… or not because no one actually reads this, but that’s not the point. I’m trying to connect here folks, gimme a break, m’kay?

The Frugal Film Project, Buy a cheap film camera, buy some relatively cheap film (there is no such thing as cheap film in 2026), shoot one roll each month for a year. I can do that, right? Hell yes, I can. Except of course that I tried it last year and failed. I started in May and made it through four months. In September I did not get a single shot in, never mind a whole roll. Oh well.

Now, one year later, let’s try again. There’s a twist this time though. Last year I decided to use my little Soviet TLR, a Lomo Lubitel 166 Universal that I bought for a little less than $50 on eBay and much to my surprise it actually worked. I also decided to use Kentmere 400 film only to realize as I was packing up to shoot the first roll that I didn’t actually have any of that film so I changed my mind and went with Kodak Gold 200. How’s that for thinking on my feet, eh?

The twist this year is that I am actually going to try and do this twice. I am going to follow last year’s plan of the Lubitel and Gold, but I am also going to try to follow last year’s original plan of the Lubitel and Kentmere, though I don’t have any Kentmere 400 right now (deja-vu all over again) so we’re going with Kentmere 100. Let’s call the Gold roll Frugal Film Project 2A, and the Kentmere roll Frugal Film Project 2B. I have a roll of project 2A from May 1st and project 2B from May 5th. Both rolls have been developed and all 12 shots from each roll came out okay. We’re off to a good start. Two of them, actually!

Here’s the first roll. These were taken at the ocean.

We start at a little spot off the road where you can see some fishing and charter boats. This is not actually the ocean, of course. Is it a bay? A little harbor? I’m not nautical enough to know the proper term. Also, dig that friggin weird line through the photo. My first roll or two that I shot in this camera last year had that on a few shots but then it went away. Now it’s back. Hooray.

Next we go to Hampton Beach and we see my biggest issue with this camera. Not only is it almost impossible to focus on the little focusing screen, but for some reason I cannot keep the friggin’ images level. I don’t think I lean this much when I stand still but who knows. Do I have one leg significantly longer than the other? What is the actual deal?

On the road to Plum Island, stopping to look at planes. Some day I am going to hang out here and shoot some planes actually taking off. Someday.

Check out the amateur’s shadow. Friggin’ hack.

Next we have Plum Island itself. This is the mouth of the Merrimack River, where it dumps into the ocean, and the Plum Island Lighthouse.

And there you have it. The Frugal Film Project take two, roll A. I am such a nerd.

Now we move on to take two, roll B. We leave color film behind and move on to the magical mystery tour that is black and white. We also travel from the ocean to Boston, where I sort of expect to take most of these pics in the future. This was a walk along Newbury Street, a little stretch of Mass Ave near Berklee College of Music, and then on Comm Ave.

So maybe I finished the roll before I made it over to Comm Ave. Sorry about that.

Right then, two rolls of medium format, 120 film shot on a cheap camera by a cheap, talentless red head. Two instances of month one of the Frugal Film Project. I haven’t figured out where I will go for June’s pics. I’d guess that at least one of the rolls will be in Boston again. We will all just have to wait and see together.

Three Day Weekend

Memorial Day Weekend has arrived. It’s a three day weekend. We are in New England though so it is likely to be rainy and cold the whole time. Yippee.

We are having a cookout on Sunday. Well… a cookin, I think. It’s supposed to rain. What can you do, right?

Other than that… I don’t think I have any any plans at all. I have to get some blood work done. I could do that.

It’s the unofficial start of summer. I hope the temperatures stay above freezing.

Almost Baby Yoda Time

I’ve had a ball buster of a day today. It started shortly after I got out of bed and it just kicked my ass over and over again all day long. The biggest insult was the 30–40 minutes or so when our whole neighborhood lost power. It was right before lunch so it didn’t screw up anything for anyone other than me, but still… thanks.

Hopefully it will all seem worth it shortly after I leave work tonight. That’s because my wife and my step daughter and I are all going to the movies to see Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu.

That’s right, folks. Tonight we’re getting us some quality Baby Yoda time and I gotta say, I really need it.

Don’t ask me to review the movie though. I cannot be objective about anything Star Wars related. As soon as the flick starts playing in the theater I am going to revert to my six year old self, watching the original movie in the theater in 1977 and I am going to love it just as much as I loved that first movie, and every movie and TV series and book and comic and video game that has come since. It’s part of who I am. My very DNA includes that Galaxy Far, Far Away.

A new Star Wars movie… tonight… it makes my crappy day worthwhile. I can’t wait.

It Works

Check it out, folks. My new/old/used camera works!

My first Digital SLR camera was a Nikon D90. This is a Nikon N90… no relation. Though if I am honest, once I found out that the camera with almost the same name as my first camera could autofocus and do all of the stuff I was looking for, it made it seem like a no brainer that I would eventually get one… because I am a nerd, through and through.

The first roll used a AF Nikkor 70–210mm 1:4–5.6 lens and Kodak ColorPlus 200 film. I took some pics at home in the back yard, in Lowell along the Merrimack River, and then downtown in Methuen. At first I thought they were a little overexposed, but on second view I think they are pretty much okay. Here’s a random sample (of the pics that suck the least).

The second roll was through a AF Nikkor 50mm 1:1.8 (2) lens. I added the (2) to the name because I already had a lens with the same name, but this one is a little different. Is it better? Well who knows. I do know that it fogged up on me a little. At some point I’ll do a side by side comparission and see which one I prefer. For now, I think this 50mm prime might be the better of the two lenses that came with the camera. The film in this round was Kentmere 400. Also known as cheap black and white film. I went to Walnut Grove Cemetery in Methuen and then walked across the street to the Methuen Rail Trail which includes the Mighty Spicket River.