Here’s a haiku for you for the first time in three days. Daily haiku my ass.
Monday. Snow. Back pain.
Welcome to a new work week.
Same as the old week.
Author: robertjames1971
I'm wicked tall.
Picturesque Winter Crap
I hate snow. Even when we only get an inch or so like we did last night, I hate it. I even hate it when it makes everything look all pretty and picturesque and winter wonderlandy like this morning. I just hate snow!
Hey snow, I got your winter wonderland right here. Jerk.
My Favorite Sports
What are your favorite sports to watch and play?
There was a time…
There was a time when my social life more or less consisted of watching sports. I’d say 50-60% of what I did with my free time involved watching sports. There was a period in my life where I had a partial season ticket package (10 games) for the Boston Bruins of the National Hockey League, a full season ticket package (40 games) for the Lowell Lock Monsters of the American Hockey League, and then during the summer we split a full season ticket package for the Lowell Spinners of the New York Penn baseball league (I think it was about 50 games and we went to half of them). At the same time I used to follow the Lock Monsters on road games because there were six AHL teams in New England. I would go to road games in three of the other five locations. Along with all of that, there were playoff games for the Bruins and the Monsters. One AHL season saw me go to maybe 50-55 games. Crazy.
Now? I still follow hockey and baseball closely, but I rarely go to games in person, and I have a tough time fitting actually sitting and watching games on television, or listening on the radio, into my busy schedule. I still hang on every goal and every run, but I miss tons and tons of every season.
So the answer to the question, what are my favorite sports to watch? Hockey and Baseball. The Boston Bruins of the National Hockey League, and the Boston Red Sox of Major League Baseball. Those are my favorite teams. I also follow some NCAA hockey but my old school, UMass Lowell, is seriously crappy this year so they are tough to follow. There is a minor league baseball team in Manchester New Hampshire, the New Hampshire Fisher Cats who are in the Toronto Blue Jays system, but I haven’t been to a game there since 2007. This year I am hoping to get to a game and maybe follow them on the radio a little bit. We will see.
iOS Journal App: Post Number 31
335
I think this week the time will arrive. My second 1970’s guitar, my 1979 Gibson ES-335 Pro, may be ready for it’s trip to the shop. I am going to give them a call and see if they can help me bring this baby back to life.
I put my ’78 Les Paul Custom into the shop a few months ago to get the frets replaced. I was scared to have the work done, but I should not have been. The results were fantastic. I am so pleased. Now I need to have the 335 looked at. The frets are in better shape than they were on the Les Paul, but they are still pretty bad. I expect it’s time to have them replaced.
This time there is a second issue at play though. The electronics are in rough shape. The last time I used this guitar at a Lizardfish show the signal cut out and wouldn’t come back. That had happened off stage a few times in the past but once it happened in front of people? Yeah, that’s bad. If you can’t rely on the electronics, what good is the instrument? It may be time to replace the wiring harness. If they can salvage what’s there, meaning clean it up and maybe re-solder some of it, then that is fine. If they can’t save it, then I’ll need it replaced, and hopefully I can get a good 50’s style wiring schematic installed. I don’t want to change the pickups on this guitar. 335 Pros come stock with Gibson Dirty Fingers pickups which are the meanest, nastiest, dirtiest Gibson pickups ever. They are punk rock machines. The wiring and the pots though… we’ll see.
I am planning on calling the shop either tomorrow or Tuesday to see if we can schedule a slot for me to bring it in and see what they can do for me. I am still nervous about this, but given my last experience I am more excited than scared.
Out for a Drive
The Mrs and I are out for a drive before the weather goes bad. Too late.
Cat Hammock Thing
At last! We finally have a cat sitting in that pouch/hammock type thing on the new cat tree! Success!
She looks very uncomfortable, and she was wagging her tail in annoyance, but she’s in there!
Fantasizing About the Lottery
What would you do if you won the lottery?
We have all played this game, right? I mean all of us who live somewhere that holds money in high esteem, of course.
You hit a big lottery, what do you do with the winnings? Before my wife found her calling as a software engineering genius she was an accountant. My father was an accountant too. My brother is a CPA. Why are these things important? Because all of us would work together to come up with a plan for dealing with the money that would not involve blowing it all in the first few years the way a lot of big lottery winners do.
Here are a few things we would do……
- Pay off any outstanding loans including student loans, cars, and the mortgage
- Upgrades to the house and the cars and the general living situation
- Figure out a way to use the money to generate an income, either through an endowment or a trust or something that will let us live as well as we can off of just interest.
- Make sure my step kids are set financially including a home and some sort of endowment or trust fund so that they are in a position where they won’t have to worry about money ever again
- Make contributions to our extended family. Our parents and my brother and sister would get a chunk of the winnings to do with as they pleased, but the reasoning on our end would be for mortgages and college funds and healthcare and such. It’s doubtful we could set any of them up for life, but we can help as much as we can
- Make similar contributions to a few close friends. Again, mortgage and college funds being the hope, but it will be their money to do with as they please. The trick would be figuring out how many friends we can help. It probably won’t be many, but we will do what we can
- Research the hell out of charitable foundations and establish relationships with organizations working toward some of the things that are important to us. Diabetes research, cancer research, dementia research. Things like that. Find organizations that are doing good work and not screwing over their donors or their targets and donate as much as we can to them
- Buy a 1959 Gibson Les Paul Standard
That’s the gist of it. I’m sure if we did hit a honkin’ big lottery we would make significant changes to the plan based on the amounts in question and the general situation as it stands in the moment, but this feels like a good plan to start with at least.
New Location
Almost everything in the living room is in a new location, including the new cat tree. Ironically, the one thing that hasn’t moved is the old cat tree.
Balloon
Up, up and away in my beautiful balloon.
Okay, it’s not my balloon, but it was a hot air balloon over Salem, NH today.
Inside the Red Head's Head 