Month: June 2021

Candle Race Winner

The great candle race of 2021 is over. The winner, by approximately an astronomical unit* is the red candle. You knew this because I bet on the blue candle.

*An astronomical unit is the average distance between the Earth and the Sun.

Lunch Break

Lunch break on a Wednesday. We’ve been talking about the desks in our new building today. March 13, 2020 was the last day at our desks in the Waltham building. Two months ago the Waltham building was sold. Now we have desks in another building but prior to this morning none of us had gone to check it out. One guy went today and reported back that none of our stuff from Waltham has made it to the new desks yet. Uh oh. The upside is that some of us might be getting new monitors out of the deal. I had two when we left. They were both old and less than good. This could work out for me.

Wait… didn’t I write something about not talking about work?

The AC folks have come and gone. The window for their arrival was between 7:00 and 11:00. They knocked on the door at 10:50. His first question was, would you like me to wear a mask? Yes, yes I would. Thanks. It was just a routine cleaning and the AC in the wall in the bedroom clearly benefitted from it because it’s working like crazy now. It’s actually cold in here. I haven’t spent much time in the rest of the house yet so I don’t have any news from that front yet.

The tech said the wall unit in the bedroom was pretty old. Huh? It was installed three years ago. How is that old? Was it sitting on some warehouse shelf for a decade before it was installed in our house? Worse… was it used?

My father is in the hospital again. Day two. My brother is with him. The idea is to move him back into a rehab so that he can get back to a point where he can take care of himself better than he can now… which he can’t. He asked to have some of his more common aches and pains looked at while he was in there. Good idea. No real news on any front yet. Hopefully he’ll be in a new rehab quickly and he can get back to working on getting better. I am scared and worried and stressed and wracked with guilt and I am just overwhelmed with it all… and I’m not the one in the hospital bed. I can’t even begin to imagine how he feels. I hate this. I want my dad to be better again.

So Covid is over, right? The world is opened up again, right? People are still getting sick and people are still dying, but it’s all over, right? I’m thinking about things that I can do that were put on hold. Vacations would be first on that list but we have two college kids now and we are out of money. I already had a haircut, but I need another one because my hair grows faster than light. I need to get my eyes checked. Jen has done that already but see the previous sentence regarding money. I may have to ride out my old glasses for a little while longer. There is a guitar and an amplifier that I’d like to trade in. It depends on how much I can get for each item, but if I can get a used ’68 Deluxe Reverb or a used Les Paul Junior in exchange, I might. I don’t know how that will go.

Okay, time to clean up my lunch and get back to work. The hope is we will be watching episode two of Loki by 6:00pm. Four hours or so from now. Fingers crossed.

Wish my dad good luck, okay? Thanks.

Stuff Going On

We made an appointment with an air conditioning maintenance company a few months ago as part of the still unshared cellar disaster story. They had to cancel the first appointment and today is the day they rescheduled too. They didn’t give us a window of time until early this morning. At 6:30 I was still in bed and Jen let me know the window was opening at 7:00. Yikes! It’s 7:30 and they aren’t here yet. Now I am just hoping that they don’t ring the doorbell while both Jen and I are in meetings. That would suck. Also, there’s an AC built into the bedroom wall. I am going to get kicked out of my bedroom/office for a while. That hasn’t happened in about a year.

I have a few short meetings today and it’s possible one might line up with the visit. I was thinking, I have mentioned things at work a couple of times recently and I think I am going to stop doing that. Like the cellar shit show, work should be exempt from the oversharing. Good.

There’s a new Loki today. Episode one was kind of a clip show but it did a great job of setting up the story. It was excellent. I am really interested to see where it goes. We need to figure out how we’re going to get everyone into the same room to watch it. There’s also the season finale of The Handmaids Tale. This show is so good it’s hard to explain. I haven’t a clue how they are going to wrap it up without having our hero just take a machine gun and go all Mikey Corleone on all of her enemies. We’ll see.

It’s 7:45. Still no sign of the AC folks. I’ve got my mask at the ready for whenever they get here.

More Les Paul Fun

We’ve seen a lot of this before. In this video, Joe Bonamassa is going to get a bunch of different sounds out of a Les Paul without stepping on pedals or messing with his amp.

I know all of this. When I was in high school I had this super loud, solid state Peavey 2×12 with a built in chorus (that I never used). It had a clean channel and a drive channel and a foot switch to swap back and forth. I didn’t use a lot of pedals, apart from a wah wah, and that amp foot switch did all of my clean/dirty work for me.

Then in 1988 or ‘89 or so, we did a gig in a parking lot. I put that huge Peavey into the back of the mini van along with the rest of the band’s gear. The foot switch was plugged into the back of the amp and in the process of squeezing everything in the plug got squashed and was unusable.

I had a ton of switching channels to do, but now I didn’t have a switch to switch with. My work around was to use the drive channel, but set my neck pickup volume way down low so that it sounded nice and clean. Then instead of using the foot switch, I just flipped the pick up switch.

These days I have pedals for all of that so I generally keep all four knobs on the guitar up full. It bothers me a little though when I see people refer to cleaning up with the volume knob as a trick. It’s just the most obvious thing there is, right? Anyone whose messed with an electric guitar through a distorted amp figures out that lowering the volume on the guitar cleans the signal… don’t they? Why does Mr Bonamassa (and countless other YouTube guitar players) make it sound like it’s news to us? I don’t get it.

I have nothing but respect for Joe Bonamassa and I would literally kill to have his chops. I actually have his signature Cry Baby Wah on the band pedal board right now. Someday I’d like to try out his signature Fuzz Face too. Joe may tell us to use the guitar instead of pedals, but I’ll be okay using pedals with his name on them for now.

This post seems to have rambled a smidge. Sorry, I’m really tired.

Have a good night, friends.

Superstore

We started watching the first season of Superstore. Is it Superstore or Super Store? Whatever. It has Mark McKinney from The Kids in the Hall so it’s worth a watch for that alone.

The downside is that every time he’s on the screen I waffle between Chicken Lady jokes, the immigrant cabbie from Brian Candy, and wanting to crush everyone’s head.

It’s the pickle, eh?