Author: robertjames1971

I'm wicked tall.

Favorite Album? No… Favorite Albums

Daily writing prompt
What’s your all-time favorite album?
View all responses

I cannot answer this question. Normal people can, but I cannot. I don’t have a favorite album. I have a nearly infinite number of favorite albums. They are all different. I react to them all uniquely. I can’t pick just one. I’ll give you a very short list of a subset of personal favorites that will likely appear very long but is honestly just a small portion of the overall total. You have been warned. In no particular order, here goes nuttin’……

  • Rush
    • Moving Pictures
    • Permanent Waves
    • Clockwork Angels
    • 2112
    • Hemispheres
    • Hold Your Fire
    • Counterparts
    • Vapor Trails
  • Throwing Muses
    • House Tornado
    • Untitled first album
    • University
  • The Beatles
    • Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band
    • Revolver
    • Abbey Road
    • Rubber Soul
  • Yes
    • Close to the Edge
    • Fragile
    • Going for the One
    • The Yes Album
  • Pink Floyd
    • Dark Side of the Moon
    • Meddle
    • The Piper at the Gates of Dawn
    • Wish You Were Here
    • The Wall
  • Genesis
    • Selling England by the Pound
    • Foxtrot
    • A Trick of the Tail
  • BB King
    • Live at the Regal
    • Live at the Cook County Jail
  • Cream
    • Disraeli Gears
    • Wheels of Fire
  • Crosby Stills Nash and Young
    • Deja Vu
  • Deep Purple
    • Machine Head
    • Made in Japan
    • Deep Purple in Rock
    • Fireball
    • Burn
  • Led Zeppelin
    • Houses of the Holy
    • Presence
    • Led Zeppelin II
    • Led Zeppelin IV
  • Jeff Beck/Jeff Beck Group
    • Blow By Blow
    • Wired
    • Truth
    • Rough and Ready
  • John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers
    • Bluesbreakers with Eric Clapton
  • Derek and the Dominoes
    • Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs
  • Emerson Lake and Palmer
    • Brain Salad Surgery
    • Trilogy
  • Fairport Convention
    • Unhalfbricking
    • Liege and Lief
  • Jefferson Airplane
    • After Bathing at Baxters
    • Volunteers
    • Crown of Creation
  • King Crimson
    • Red
    • Discipline
    • Starless and Bible Black
  • King’s X
    • Gretchen Goes to Nebraska
    • Dogman
    • Tape Head
  • Kristin Hersh
    • Hips and Makers
  • Mahavishnu Orchestra
    • Inner Mounting Flame
    • Between Nothingness and Eternity
  • Mission of Burma
    • Vs
    • The Obliterati
  • Nirvana
    • Bleach
    • Nevermind
  • Pearl Jam
    • Vitology
    • Vs
  • Peter Gabriel
    • III (Melt)
    • So
  • Procol Harum
    • Home
    • A Salty Dog
  • REM
    • Life’s Rich Pageant
    • Document
    • Reckoning
    • Fables of the Reconstruction
    • Green
    • Automatic for the People
  • Robin Trower
    • Bridge of Sighs
    • Twice Removed from Yesterday
  • Smashing Pumpkins
    • Gish
    • Siamese Dream
  • The Who
    • Who’s Next
    • Quadraphenia
    • Live at Leeds (Deluxe Edition)
  • Traffic
    • Traffic
    • John Barleycorn Must Die

I promise that is a microscopically small list. I basically ignored all of the Boston based bands that I obsessed over through the 90’s and early 2000’s and for bigger national/international artists I tried to only list the very top favorites, but I could easily have written a list 10 times this length.

So in summary… music is a pretty big deal for ol’ Robbie the Red Head.

8:04am on Day Six

Did I screw up counting the days? Is today day Six or should it be day five? I am confused, but I have a pretty good excuse for it, I guess. If I started counting days when the symptoms started then today is day Six. That must be what I did. If I started at the positive test then today would be day five. That must not be what I did. Okay. Whatever.

I had a decent nights sleep last night. I was out before midnight and only got up once before waking up at about 7:30am. I didn’t get a full eight hours, but I was close. That’s unusual for me under the best of circumstances so I am taking the win where I can get it.

I need to take care of the trash and the recycling today. The cats are fed and watered. Other than that, I don’t think there are any pressing chores to do. Oh, I need to finish the laundry today too. That should be all right. Outside of that I plan on vegging in front of the TV while hopefully doing a better job keeping on top of my daily food and water goals. It should not be a problem, unless I decide to nap all day, which is a distinct possibility.

I’m having some water and my morning vitamins right now. Once I top my hydration off a little I’ll do the chores and get them out of the way. We’re supposed to have rain all weekend so let’s get it done before that starts, shall we?

Hope you all have a good, healthy, covid-19-free morning.

Bed Time

I’m going to bed, but watching this first because it’s freakin’ amazing. As usual, Steve Hackett is criminally too low in the mix… as usual. Also interesting that Peter and Mrs Gabriel wore pretty much the same dress size.*

*The red dress Peter Gabriel used to wear during The Musical Box belonged to his wife. That’s the story that I heard at least.

10:24pm on Day Five

It took a couple of hours for my stomach to start acting like a team player again but I was able hit my liquid and protein goals for the day. Success, folks.

Now I can get back to the main goal of this weekend: Getting the hell over Covid. I am sort of successfully breathing through my nose tonight. It’s kind of amazing. I’m still exhausted and still a little stuffy and still coughing some, though the frequency of the coughing is way down from the last couple of days.

Here’s to being healthier as the weekend rolls on.

8:20pm on Day Five

I’m having a bad night and I can’t tell how much is due to stomach mismanagement and how much is due to Covid.

I stopped working at lunch today, as I mentioned before. Jen and I ordered some Five Guys. I ate a small burger and it went well. I had a few french fries and… stuck in the stomach. I think I ate too big of a bite and swallowed it too quickly. It was clearly an issue so as soon as I felt off I stopped eating. Instead, I went to sleep.

I slept straight through until dinner time. Whatever was wrong after lunch had cleared in the few hours I was out of it. That was a good thing. We ordered IHOP for dinner, breakfast for dinner again. I had some bacon and it seemed to go okay. I had some eggs and it was mostly okay but I stopped halfway through. I had two bites of hash browns and again it was okay, but something about the eggs just wasn’t sitting right. I didn’t think it was gastric bypass related, just eggs related.

At this point two things came to light. First, taking the nap after lunch screwed up my eating and drinking schedule. Specifically, I didn’t have anything to drink after lunch when I normally would have either hit my daily water goal (64 ounces) or I would have gotten really close to it. Instead, I am sitting at 40 ounces with 24 to go. The second thing was that despite having a really long nap, I was somehow more tired than I was before I fell asleep. I just sat on the comfy chair in the living room and stared at the wall. That was a combination of Covid and having worked through the morning and just wore my brain out. The stomach weirdness just piled on.

I was clear to start drinking water again at 7:02. I waited until 7:43. I had one sip and learned the hard way that the weirdness I was feeling was not so much eggs related as it was gastric bypass related. One sip and I was in the bathroom praying to the porcelain gods. Pardon the TMI. It was only a brief episode, and I am pretty sure it cleared up whatever was off with me tonight, but it’s been almost half an hour now and I haven’t had a second sip yet.

So it’s 8:18pm now and I still have 24 ounces of water to drink and 16 ounces of protein to eat in order to hit my goals. All while being totally wiped out from the Covid.

Yeah… I’m in for a long night tonight. I’ll hit all the goals though. No problem. I’m a pro at this now and today is my first day ever (as an adult) in onederland so it’s all good. Bring it on, Covid and Bypass. Even together you’re no match for me.

(Mostly) Daily (goofy) Haiku for You #35

I wrote this while I was still working this morning so it isn’t exactly relevant to my current work-day-is-over situation, but it still makes sense if you put yourself into the Rob from this morning’s shoes, know what I mean?

Back at work today.
It is not going to last.
More sick time for me.

1:12pm on Day Five

I give up.

I logged into work at 9:00 and started digging through over a week’s worth of emails. At 10:30 I had a meeting with my staff and my manager. My boss was the first one on the Google Meet. I was the second. He took one look at me and laughed. I said I wouldn’t say trying to work today was a mistake, but… and he laughed again.

I made it to 1:00, which was sort of my goal. I then put myself out sick for the rest of the day. Just those four hours of being “on” wore me out completely. I’m done for today.

The good news though is that when I came back to the living room the cats were adorable.

Onederland

Now I am not by any stretch trying to say that there is an upside to having Covid-19. Absolutely not. There is no upside.

However… I stepped on the scale again this morning and I am below 200 pounds.

QUEUE THE MARCHING BAND, BABIE! I HAVE REACHED THE MYTHICAL ONEDERLAND! MY WEIGHT IS BELOW 200 POUNDS FOR THE FIRST TIME IN (I think) MY ADULT LIFE! HOLY CRAP ON A STICK! I WEIGH LESS THAN 200 POUNDS! ONEDERLAND, BABIE! ONEDERLAND!

Now, having said all of that. I do expect that within a few days of beating Covid and having my body chemistry go back to normal, I will top 200 pounds again. I think my body has pretty clearly declared that it wants me somewhere between 205 and 215. I am not going to worry about that today. I am also not going to worry about the possibility of a sub-200 weight actually being too low for me to be healthy. I don’t think that’s the case, but it’s low enough that I should think about it as maybe being a thing.

No. Today we’re just going to let the marching band parade up and down the street in front of my house as a massive celebration of hitting a seemingly unattainable weight loss goal that only required me to gut myself, rewire my innards, and then catch the 21st century’s plague to achieve.

Welcome to Onederland, boys and girls. Enjoy the view!

Topics

Daily writing prompt
Which topics would you like to be more informed about?
View all responses

I want more information about literally every topic. Literally. I am not using the word literally ironically, I am using it literally. I would literally like to know more about everything.

How about a couple of specifics, just for discussion’s sake?

  • Programming. I would like to have more information on multiple programming languages, both syntactically and theoretically, not to mention architecturally. I want to be able to program efficiently and cleanly in more than just the one proprietary language I use for work. Java, C#, C++, Javascript, Ruby on Rails, all of those and more. How do they work, why do they work, how do I make them do what I want them to do? All of that would be groovy
  • Home improvement/carpentry/plumbing/general contracting skills. I know nothing… and I own a house… and it leads to financial expenditures and stress that if I had a decent skill set to use as a foundation neither would be as bad as they can be
  • Music theory. I know a ton about this topic, but the mountain of knowledge I have barely scratches the surface
  • American fascism. Why were so many of us so surprised by the bullshit that bubbled to the political surface in 2016 and has covered our nation in filth ever since? I would have really liked to have had more info about what was coming down the pike ahead of time
  • Photography. I wish I knew more and was better at it
  • Guitar playing. I wish I knew more and was better at it
  • Healthcare. I wish I knew more about it from a personal standpoint and from a knowing the options available to us standpoint. I felt so lost with my mother’s situation. I never want to feel like that again, but it’s already here. I thought I knew a lot about Covid, but now that I have it and I am helping my wife get through it, I don’t know jack. It’s stressful and I don’t like the way it feels, both in terms of my own health and in helping take care of someone else

Okay, there are just a handful of topics I would like to be more informed about, and they are just off the top of my head. Like I said, there are literally a zillion gagillion more topics to list. This will do for now though. Enjoy, I guess.