Author: robertjames1971

I'm wicked tall.

If I Were a Carpenter

If I were a carpenter, and you were a lady…

I would be able to hang stuff on your office wall using drywall anchors without being TERRIFIED that I am going to somehow destroy the entire house in the process.

Nope. I just successfully hung stuff on my beloved bride’s office wall using drywall anchors and somehow, miraculously, the house is still standing. Amazing! What stunning carpentry skills I possess!*

*In case you didn’t get it from the context… that was sarcasm. Me stating I have carpentry skills will always be drenched to the point of dripping with sarcasm. I clearly have no such skills.

DIY Desk

The main focus of the IKEA project today was a huge new desk for my wife’s office. It isn’t an actual desk. Call it IKEA meets DIY.

There are a bunch of additional projects happening today, but the desk is the big one. It’s pretty much all setup now so Jen can work on it. It came out really nice.

I think we’re running out of gas for today. We’ll sneak in a little more work. A couple of things have been postponed to tomorrow so we will continue. This little home improvement day has been a good one.

RPM Challenge Day 21/28

It was hard to find time to work on RPM Challenge music on Day 21 but I got a few things in. More than I expected, actually.

I started my day by adding a new song to the pipeline. Song number 18 has a full song form, MIDI drums, and acoustic guitars. No MIDI bass yet, but I’ll get there soon enough. During my lunch break at work I added two more song ideas. Nothing solid yet, just a few bass riffs grouped together. That brings me up to 20 songs. That was my goal. 10 electric songs, 10 acoustic songs. Still very unsure if I will finish them all, but at least we’ve gotten this far.

Before I managed to fall asleep last night I mixed a song too. That’s two songs mixed and finished. I didn’t think I was going to have time for any mixing last night but I just couldn’t turn off my brain to fall asleep.

Today is day 22 and there is a strong chance I am going to get completely shut out and have no progress at all today. There is one week left (counting today) so… yeah. Get crackin’ red head.

Two Songs Down

I know I said I was going to sleep, but I just had to take some time to finish another mix. Two RPM Challenge songs down and anywhere between eight and 18 still to go.

There’s no electric guitar on this song. None at all. There’s acoustic guitar and saxophone, but no electric guitar. I originally saw this as sort of a throw away. Just a little blow off thing to pad my numbers. Somehow though I am finding I kinda dig it. Weird.

As Good as TV Gets

Man, television is just killing it these days.

This morning before work I watched today’s new episode of Severance. No spoilers, but holy shit! Tonight as I was sitting up in bed I watched today’s new episode of Yellowjackets. Again, no spoilers, but holy shit!

Who would have ever thought that so much TV could be this consistently spectacular. That’s not even the best of it.

There is a Star Wars television podcast that I listen to pretty regularly. A few weeks ago they started a rewatch of the first season of Andor. Season two is kicking off in April, I think. Not too far away. I was playing along with this rewatch, I’d watch an episode, listen to the podcast, wait a week and repeat. It worked for the first three episodes and then the podcast had a delay. It was over a week before they put out their coverage of Andor episode four and frankly I just got tired of waiting and started watching ahead.

I just watched One Way Out. Season one, episode nine. I don’t think I am alone in stating that it is one of the best episodes of television I’ve ever seen. The tension in the prison, the tension in the senate, the speech Luthen gives at the end. Fuck me, it’s as close to perfect as you can get. Stellan Skarsgård, Andy Serkis, and Genevieve O’Reilly all give career defining performances. It’s just unreal how good everything is during that slightly less than one hour program. Damn!

Okay. It’s almost midnight. I really need to get some sleep. I have so much to do tomorrow and I want to get through it as fast as humanly possible so that I can have some time to work on music and, totally unrelated, so that I can go to the store and buy a new belt. Not that you asked or anything.

Go watch Andor. Then watch Severance and Yellowjackets too. Throw in The Last of Us and The Leftovers while you’re at it. If they are going to make television that is this good, the least we can do is watch it all, right?