Month: July 2021

50/90 Update as July Ends

Harry is out of the house right now. I’m exhausted like you wouldn’t believe but I really want to be awake when he gets in so I am trying to do stuff to keep my brain functioning.

July is going to end in 90 minutes. That seems like a good time to give a quick summary of the 50/90 project. Today is day 27. How am I doing?

I have 13 songs finished and listed on my account page. There are another 12 songs in progress. Three are ready for vocal tracking, and I am hoping to do some car music in the morning. Of the other nine, the only recording that has been done so far is bass and drums, which are done on the computer. Based on that you could make the argument that no actual recording has been done at all. Whatever. Six of those nine songs do have lyrics and a melody already written out. I usually don’t start working on that until the rhythm guitars are down, but with all of the trips to my parents house, I haven’t had as much guitar time as I would like and I have had to do things out of the normal order.

50/3=16.66666667. Fifty songs, three calendar months, that means 16 and 2/3 songs per month, right? I like to break it down to 16 in July (because the challenge starts on July 4th so it misses out on three days and is therefore shorter than the other two months), 17 in August, and 17 in September. I’m at 25 right now. I would say that I am ahead of the pace.

Not bad, Robert. Not bad at all. The question is, can I keep it up? We shall see, Robert. We shall see.

Car music in the morning. It’s a moral imperative.

The First Wave Continues

I stopped logging COVID-19 numbers on June 20th. Things were improving rapidly and I just didn’t want to be bothered keeping to the schedule anymore. One month later I started keeping track again. I’ve heard people refer to the current spike in the numbers as a new wave. I don’t think it’s a second, or third, or anything wave. I think we have done such a colossally terrible job as a nation of respecting our neighbors that we’re still very much in the first wave. It looked better for a minute there, but it was a ruse.

Massachusetts doesn’t post numbers on the weekends anymore so I can only track the national counts.

In the last 24 hours there have been 164,776 new COVID-19 cases in the United States. The vaccine has been available for free for months and months and we had over 100,000 cases today.

Again, I say this to all Americans who have not yet taken the free and effective vaccine: Fuck You.

Still Won’t Install

I wonder what’s going on with the whole installing World of Warcraft thing? I try to install the battle.net client and it fails. I went to the support page on line and found a direct link to install Warcraft for Mac and downloaded that and it fails to install in exactly the same way.

I’ve never seen anything like this. I wonder if it has something to do with the network at my parents house. Is it just too slow for the servers to deal with? Did whomever set up the network put a firewall in place that is blocking me? I wonder if I try this at home will I have the same trouble? Did some setting somewhere on this machine get corrupted by the first try and now it’s always going to fail?

It’s just crazy.

Sad Sigh

My parents celebrated their 54th wedding anniversary this week. We made as big a deal as we could, given the circumstances. My sister brought my mother to the rehab hospital to visit my father and they were both over the moon happy.

My parents were on the phone with each other a few minutes ago. I overheard her ask him how long have they been married. She sounded surprised when he answered. Then she asked how much older she is than him.

Then she asked me if he was my father for the second time today and the third time since I got here last night.

I can’t take much more of this.

Please Install

I want to play World of Warcraft with Jen while I’m at my parents house but it just won’t install. I deleted the battle.net desktop app and I am trying to reinstall it… and that status bar hasn’t moved in ages. Why do I even bother?