Author: robertjames1971

I'm wicked tall.

2026 50/90 Challenge Day 47/90

Nothing. Nada.

I didn’t have time for music before work and after I got home from work I just wanted to hang out in the living room with my wife. I didn’t have time or energy for anything else.

Day 48 (today) will likely be better, but probably not much better.

Conflicted

I am conflicted and I always get into this state when the kids are involved.

When my step daughter moved away to college in 2019 I was conflicted. On the one hand, I wanted her to go away to school and have a fantastic experience and learn a ton and make new friends and start her life and have everything be amazing. On the other hand I wanted her to stay home with us forever.

Two years later when my step son went away to college it was the same thing. I wanted him to go to school and have the time of his life and learn incredible things and have adventures and excitement and make memories that would last a lifetime while also not wanting him to leave us, ever.

In May of 2025 my step daughter moved home. She graduated and worked a two year contract at the University. When the contract ended she came home to live with us while she figured out her next move. The next move was grad school, but she had to work out the details. It took a little more than a year, but next month she is going to start school in California. 

I am so excited for her I could burst… again… just like 2019. Just like my step son in 2021. I fear I might spontaneously combust out of excitement for her future. She’s going to finish grad school with a PHD and then every time I see her I will ask her, “what’s up, doc?” and it will be epic and no one will ever get tired of that stupid Bugs Bunny joke and we will always laugh and it will be perfect.

Also, I don’t want her to move. I mean, I thought moving from Massachusetts to Vermont was bad… California? No way!

She’ll still be here for a few more weeks, but the next milestone in the moving process happened today…

It’s time to start packing. I’m excited and sad at the same time, but what else is new?

2026 50/90 Challenge Day 46/90

I suspect that progress is going to be much slower over the next couple of weeks. I’m going to be working in the office a lot and these days my most musical times of day have been directly before and after work. Those times will be spent driving for the next little while.

On day 46 I managed to get to the office early enough so that I could spend a few minutes noodling bass riffs in GarageBand on my iPhone while sitting in the car in the parking lot. I came up with one song’s worth of stuff. Let’s call it song number 43.

After work I managed to mix one song, bringing my total number of complete songs up to 35. The most interesting, and unusual, thing about this newly completed song is that I don’t hate it. I think I almost actually like it. That feels so weird.

So I am working in the office the rest of this week and most of next week, and this coming weekend has a bunch of things on the agenda already as well. I don’t see a lot of time being available for the 50 songs in 90 days challenge, but I’ll do my best to sneak in progress where I can.

Office Stuff

I worked in the office today. It was the first time in over three weeks. That’s crazy. I went on vacation for the last week of July, and then I had the tooth pain nightmare complete with antibiotics that made me feel sick all the time, and then I had the two teeth extracted and couldn’t really brush my teeth for nearly a week along with another round of antibiotics that made me feel sick all the time.

I just didn’t feel up to working around other people. I felt well enough to work, but not well enough to feel like I could be out in public.

My company wants us in the office 40% of the time but the technical end of it is actually 40% of the month. So this month I’m doing all of it at the end of the month. I generally try to do it by the week but this time I’m going by the book and doing it for the month. What does that mean? That means I’m in the office four days this week. That’s what I used to do pre-pandemic. It used to be normal. Now? Now it’s suck.

2026 50/90 Challenge Day 45/90

Yesterday was day 45. We have reached the mid-way point of the 50 songs in 90 days challenge. In the handful of times I have completed this particular nut job of a project, I have never been this far along at the half way point. This year has been a little crazy.

What did I do to honor the mid point? Not much. Some good stuff, but just not too much of it. I mixed one song. That puts me at 34 songs complete. If you split the project into three one-month deals you need to divide 50 songs by three in order to set the pace for each month. 50/3=16.67. Round up to the nearest integer puts us at 17 songs each month. That means I have to have 34 songs complete by the end of August… and I am at 34 songs complete on August 17th. That is nuts.

After work I added another song. That’s idea number 41. I had some time so I wandered downstairs to the music nook in the cellar and added guitars to this new song. When that was done I still had some time on my hands so I added another idea. 42. Insert Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy jokes here. 41 has the full structure and the full rhythm section of guitars, fake bass, and fake drums. 42 has the structure worked out, guitars, and fake drums. I still need to add a fake bass part.

So, halfway through the project I have 34 songs complete, four songs ready to mix, three songs ready for lyrics, and one song that is a bass line away from being ready for lyrics. That adds up to 42. That’s the state of the world right now.

Doctor Teeth

I’ve written about tooth aches and teeth extractions and dental psychosis a lot lately. That didn’t stop me from going to the Dentist yet again today. 

After a lifetime of not being able to have dental x-rays without puking all over the place, I must have set a personal record today by having a shit load of them. I lost count but it was six? Seven? Eight? Something like that. I am literally glowing in the dark right now. The poor tech kept snapping pics and I kept sitting on the very edge of yacking only to have the image not be usable so we had to take it again. That happened a lot, but the tech thought we had enough… only for the dentist to ask for two more… which became three more because one of them didn’t come out. It was simultaneously an absolute nightmare but also weirdly pleasing because we managed to take so many of them. I am serious, I had more dental x-rays today than in the rest of my life combined.

What did it amount to? Let’s put it this way… I now have a solid plan for dental work for the rest of 2026 and an outline of a plan for all of 2027.

Yeah… things are that bad. At one point the dentist said she was going to set up a consult with her implant guy. She actually used the words “implant guy” and somehow that made me happy. I’ve always assumed I had implants in my future but I never had the courage to endure the dental visits that would be needed to get that actual work done. Also, they are fucking expensive. I figured I’d get one this year then another next year and then by the time I was 70 years old I’d have a full set of teeth, or something like that. Turns out I now have a doctor who agrees with that plan. 

We start implementing the new plan two weeks from today. It’s going to suck in epic fashion but hopefully the end results will be worth it. I’m sick and tired of pain and I really don’t want to lose anymore teeth. Let’s do this thing.

2026 50/90 Challenge Day 44/90

I got a nice chunk of work done on day 44. Maybe not quite as much as I had hoped, but good progress none the less.

I started the day with seven songs needing work. Three were ready for vocals and four were ready for lyrics. I ended up working on five of them. First I recorded the three songs worth of vocals. Next I wrote the lyrics and the melodies and recorded the vocals for two others. See my previous post for a hint at maybe why I didn’t get into the sixth or seventh songs (the unofficial term for gastric bypass folks is “the foamies” and I gave it to myself pretty bad because I was less than careful while eating lunch).

Later on I revisited all five of those songs by adding lead guitars to all of them. I now still have two songs waiting for lyrics, but five songs ready to mix and declare officially complete. Like I said, good progress.

For Future Reference

If you are a musician working on a home recording project and you are also someone who has had gastric bypass surgery I have a little item of note that I learned today.

Don’t try to eat lunch while putting vocals onto some of your demos. The idea was take a bite, record a verse, take a bite, record a chorus, repeat until both lunch and the demos are done.

Nope. Just pay attention to what you’re eating. If you focus on just one thing instead of both things it will save you time in the end as you won’t have to keep pausing the recording to go to the bathroom and vomit. 

For the probably tiny percentage of musicians in the world who have had gastric bypass and also record a lot of home demos… please learn from my experience. I did some suffering today so that you don’t have to suffer tomorrow.

2026 50/90 Challenge Day 43/90

On day 43 I mixed three songs. One, two, and three. None of them are particularly interesting though the third one is the first and so far only 12-bar blues for this year’s 50 songs in 90 Days Challenge. I usually can’t stop myself from doing a few of them.

This brings my completed songs count up to 33. I still have seven more in progress. Three are ready for vocals and four are ready for a melody and some lyrics. We’re not even halfway through the project yet and I already have 66% of the songs completed. What is this crazy mixed up world we’re living in these days?