Yesterday and the day before saw temperatures in the mid to high 50’s and tons and tons of rain.  Almost all of the two feet of snow we got last week was gone gone and gone.  It was great.

When I got home from work last night it was 7:30 pm and the temperature was in the 50’s.  When my bladder woke me up at 2:30 am (TMI, sorry) it was 30 degrees out and snowing like mad.  If you’ve ever wondered what it was like living in New England, that’s as good a description as you’re going to get.

We got less than an inch of snow, but it was wet and heavy and really sticky.

Fulltone keeps making toys that I really want to play with.

I have nothing to talk about today.  Nothing at all.

Work is fine.  I’ve got a little project that I am chewing on, but nothing spectacular.  The band is off until January.  The Christmas decorations are (mostly) up and the shopping is moving along nicely.  The Bruins have sucked in their last couple of games but that’s just a blip on the radar (I hope).  Bellana is in the middle of her first finals week at UVM which means she’s coming home this weekend for semester break.  That is awesome, but still a few days away.  Harry’s school Christmas concert is tomorrow and that should be fun.  There are two articles of impeachment that will be voted on in committee soon, on Thursday I think?  While I hate the orange fascist piece of shit with all that I am, I know our vichy senate will acquit him so why get excited.  It is raining and the temperature is in the high 50s for the second day in a row.  The good side of that is that our two feet of snow is going bye bye.  The downside is our yard is now a swamp.  I’ll take the good side of that.  The rain gutter on the front of our house has a little hole in it and the combination of rain and snow melting off the roof means the water is bombing through that hole like a high pressure hose.  I have a pic that doesn’t really show anything except that I take pics of things:

Apple just put the new MacPro desktop computer onto their website for ordering.  If you max out all of the customizable specs they have available the price tag is something like $52,000.  That’s Fifty-two THOUSAND dollars.  I so want one.  Imagine how much faster I’d be able to process my horrid GarageBand files.  My current Apple computer is a MacBook Pro from 2016.  It was the first model with the touch bar in place of the F-function keys.  No escape button for Robbie!  We’re coming up on four years and it hasn’t really had any problems, but I’m starting to get nervous that the inevitable collapse is coming.  I might be in the market for a new MacBook soon.  I just got a new iPhone though, an iPhone 11 Pro Max which is a really, really long name.  I am in smart phone heaven right now.  I’ll wait until after the New Year to start thinking about a new Mac.  I’m good until then.  I have a book on my bookshelf at home that I have been trying to push my way through for years but will probably never finish.  It is a personal journal written by a doctor who fought for the colonists during the American Revolution.  The writing style is extremely 18th century and very hard to wrap your brain around.  One aspect of the style that is tough to deal with are the paragraph lengths.  Single paragraphs can stretch on for multiple pages.  Reading it is like trying to run a mile while holding your breath.  There’s just no opportunity to take a break.  This post has become my tribute to that doctor’s journal as I am trying to set my personal record for the longest paragraph ever.  I suppose I blew it with the picture in the middle.  Oh well.  I guess I’ll click Publish now.  Thank you.  Good night and have a pleasant tomorrow.

My step son and I did this yesterday.

I’m not sure why I looked this up yesterday, but it turns out that my family is mostly doing very poorly in the Hockey East standings.  I haven’t followed college hockey since the UMass Lowell athletic department fucked the UMass Lowell radio station, WUML.  I don’t think there is anything the university can do to win me back.  It’s been 15-16 years and I am still furious.

Having said that, I really miss having a minor league hockey team to root for.  There are still teams around, but the AHL teams are too far away, and the lower tier teams are too low to grab my interest.  There is still AHL in Providence, RI and Portland, ME, and I think in Springfield, MA.  I think there are ECHL teams in Worcester, MA and… Manchester, NH?  I’m not sure.

College hockey has always been an option to fill that hockey fan gap for me, I just haven’t taken the leap yet.  Hockey East is a phenomenal US college hockey conference and all 11 teams are in New England.  There are lots of family ties too.  My wife and I both went to UMass Lowell, but fuck them, my wife also went to UNH, my brother went to Merrimack, and now my step daughter goes to Vermont.

Unfortunately it’s a bad year to be following those teams.  My old school is doing okay.  They are in 4th place with an in-conference record of 5-2-3 and overall they are 10-4-4.  Unfortunately after that it’s crap.  Out of 11 teams, UNH is in 9th at 4-5-0, Merrimack is in 10th at 2-5-2, and poor poor pitiful Vermont is in dead last at 0-8-1.  Yikes.

If only Lowell’s athletic director hadn’t told the radio station’s student managers that he would not make any changes without consulting them and then sold us to the shitty local newspaper while we were all on summer break, and too bad he did this even though I was giving the hockey team 30 minutes of my two hour show, and the men’s basketball team an additional 30 minutes, meaning that the athletic director didn’t just fuck the radio station, he fucked me personally.  If only.

Addendum 1: There was an ECHL team in Manchester but they folded after the 2018-19 season.  Oh well.  They would have been the closest minor league team to us, and Merrimack is still the closest Hockey East team.  Maybe I’ll try and go to a game some day.  I went to their rink for a UMass Lowell game before the fucking happened.

Addendum 2: I said fuck a lot in this post.  I usually don’t like to say fuck in posts.  I am so filled with hate for my old school that fuck is the only appropriate word.  Fuck.

We are watching Elf and Patches isn’t buying it. Not even a little bit.