Category: Generic

Weekend: Imminent

Less than two hours from now the work week will come to a merciful end and the weekend will finally begin. Oh, happy day.

There is a huge, gargantuan, bummer this weekend. We had Rush tickets for the Mohegan Sun arena show on Sunday. Note I used past tense. We sold the tickets. We didn’t want to, but something came up for work and we couldn’t be at risk of being on the road, two hours from home, and work saying they desperately needed something done right now now now. This is the downside of having a job that occasionally requires you to be on call. It happens to all of us now and then. It used to happen to me all the time, but not so much anymore. Now when it comes up it’s always due to something major and that’s the case this weekend.

I am very sad to miss Rush but I’ve seen them twice on this tour and those two shows followed 11 whole years where I was convinced I would never see them live again. I’m good. I am Rush-Musically satisfied with the state of the world right now. The two shows we saw were amazing and I am so happy that we were a part of them. A small part, of course. In the Cleveland case we were a small part way off in the distance, but a part nonetheless. I am sad about Sunday night, but in the wider scope I am overjoyed with what 2026 has given us.

What else is going on? Tomorrow is Halloween. I have a great big pumpkin sitting on the sideboard in the dining room just waiting to be carved into a jack-o-lantern. We also have a great big bag of candy that is patiently waiting for trick or treaters to come by and claim it all. I’m not one of those grown ups who likes getting dressed up and partying on Halloween, but I do like working the door for the trick or treaters and I do miss when our kids were little enough to take part. I always enjoyed hitting the streets with them trying to maximize their candy haul. Those were good days with little people. Now that our kids are adults it is my job to help a new batch of kids get the most candy they can get. I take that responsibility very seriously and do my job with a smile.

After spending the months of July, August, and September writing as many shitty songs as I possibly could (60 songs in 90 days) I took October off. Fortunately, October ends this weekend and I can start working on the next forgotten internet based song writing/recording challenge. National Solo Album Month. Write and record an album within the month of November all by yourself without any help from anyone else. I’m thinking I want to incorporate the saxophone this time around. I’m not sure how. I think we’ll have a bunch of songs in the key of Eb minor with melodies trading off between vocals and alto sax. Something like that at least. I might want to use acoustic guitars more often as well. I don’t know. We’ll see.

Daylight savings ends this weekend. Sunrise at the ocean on Saturday is something like 7:17am and sunrise at the ocean on Sunday is something like 6:17am. I might take the camera out somewhere on one of those days. If I wait until Sunday I can work on the Frugal Film Project rolls for November. Maybe I’ll go into Boston. I’m off work on Monday too. It was supposed to be because we were going to be driving home from the Rush show in Connecticut. Now it’s just a random day off. If the weather is nice, photos might be taken. I have to get this sort of thing in before the weather goes to hell and that’s going to happen any minute now.

I saw something on social media today about the anniversary of the release of R.E.M.’s New Adventures in Hi-Fi record. It occurred to me that I haven’t listened to that album in… in… in a really freakin’ long time. Maybe not since the 90’s. It came out in 1996 and I played the crap out of it upon its initial release but I don’t think I have spent much time spinning it since then. I listened to it today and I think it is better than I remembered it. Binky the Doormat is still my favorite cut. After it was finished I started moving backward through time through their catalog. I’m back to Green now. I remember California. What a ridiculously great band R.E.M. was. We need more bands like that in today’s shitty world.

Okay. That’s all the self reflection I’ve got in me today. If you’re going to one of the Rush shows at Mohegan Sun (tonight/Friday and Sunday) say hello to the gang for me. We’ll get them next time… assuming next time is the rumored residency at The Sphere in Las Vegas sometime next year because if that happens we are absolutely making the trip out west to see at least one but preferably more than one show. Bank on it, Rush fans.

Walter Koenig

The Star Trek universe lost another actor today. Walter Koenig passed away at age 90. Of course, he was not an original member of the cast. His character, Pavel Chekov, doesn’t show up on the Starship Enterprise until the second season. That of course lead to a famous continuity error. Chekov does not meet Kahn when Kahn first shows up in the season one episode titled Space Seed. In the movie The Wrath of Kahn though, Kahn says he recognizes him and that he never forgets a face. I read a social media post today explaining that Koenig told a story of how he solved that continuity puzzle. Chekov was there during Space Seed, he was just locked in the bathroom most of time. That makes perfect sense to me.

The only other story involving Walter Koenig that I know of doesn’t exactly involve him. It involved a party at his house. Harlan Ellison (who wrote the best episode of Star Trek, City on the Edge of Forever… well… he wrote it then someone else rewrote it and massively dumbed it down and hacked it to bits, but whatever) was a friend of Koenig’s and while at a party at the Koenig house he got an idea for one of his better stories. He over heard someone ask someone else how Jeff was doing and the response was, “Jeff is fine. He’s always fine.” Ellison misheard this (on purpose?) as “Jeff is five. He’s always five.” That lead to a story called Jefty is Five about a boy who stops aging at five years old. He also based the character of Jefty on Koenig’s son.

I heard one more great story today. It was actually on the post where I first heard that he passed. Fellow Star Trek actor George Takei posted that Koenig was gone. He mentioned that when Takei married his husband in 2008, Koenig stood as Best Man for both of them. I don’t know about the rest of you, but I found that wonderful. What does it say about you as a person when both of them wanted you to be their Best Man.

Rest in peace Walter Koenig. Our Ensign Chekov. Traveling at warp speed, looking for those nuclear wessles.

Friday?

Today is Thursday. This morning I was in a meeting. The host of the meeting said that she woke up convinced that it was Friday so she was just choosing to believe that it was in fact Friday and that tomorrow is Saturday. I decided to jump on this particular bandwagon and agree that it was Friday.

Man… it’s gonna suck when I wake up tomorrow and find it’s not really Saturday and I have to go to work. 

Review Week

I’m sitting up in bed killing 4-5 minutes so I can get to 9:00pm Eastern time when episode three of Vision Quest comes out. Until then…

This week is annual review week at work. I have to have review meetings for my five staff members as well as a review meeting for myself. I had two of them today, one for staff and one for me tomorrow, then one each on Thursday and Friday. The meetings are always quick and easy (my staff are all top notch people) but I still stress out like crazy.

Okay Vision Quest’s new episode should be out now. I’ll watch it and then sleeeeeeeep.

Long Day to Start a Long Week

Today wasn’t particularly stressful or painful but somehow it managed to feel long and stressful and painful. Why? I don’t know.

This week however… this week is going to be busy and tough. There’s a lot of stuff going on at work. Managerial stuff, not customer stuff. Lots and lots of stuff going on. It’s going to be nuts. I also have to go into the office three times this week, which is not fun, and two of the three are a zillion miles from home in Forborough. Crud.

In happier news, I shipped four rolls of film to the photo lab in California today. That’s a happy thought, right? New film photos! Now if Cleveland could just win game six over Tampa Bay. I don’t want the ALCS to end yet and I sure as hell don’t want the Devil Rays in the World Series. Oh well. I probably just jinxed Cleveland.

Momentous Occasion

Could today be the day?

Could today finally be the day?

Could today finally be the day where we stop having water drip from our tub onto the sub-floor, which rots a hole into the sub-floor and then drips down into the cellar and screws up the cellar floor and some unfortunately placed furniture?

We have a contractor here who took out a chunk of the wall next to the tub where the water pools up to inspect the damage and he thinks he found the source of the problem and even more important, he thinks he has a fix that does not include ripping out the tub and starting over. 

Oh please please please let today be the day that this ends and please please please let the fix not include ripping out our tub and starting over. I am crossing my fingers, my toes, my eyes, and even a couple of my teeth.

ADDENDUM: As I was typing this he found another possible source of the leak and he’s going to fix that too. Oh please please please let this end today.

Just Sleep

My stomach has been kind of a jerk the last couple of days. Fun with post-gastric bypass surgery and stuff. I’m uncomfortably full one minute and literally painfully hungry the next. 

I want to sleep through the night and my stomach won’t let me. Now I’m exhausted and I just want to watch an episode of Carrie but I’m too tired.

I Scared the Crap Out of a Huge Bird

We were sitting in the living room today when something weird happens. There was a loud bang coming from the side of the house. BOOM. What was that? We all asked at the same time.

It was not a cat. Both cats were in the room with us. I had a suspicion about what it was. Every now and then we’ll have birds come out of the woods behind our house and fly right into a window. That’s sort of what this was like except it was a lot louder.

I went to my wife’s office and opened up the curtain and looked outside. Sure enough there was a bird on the ground right there. Not just any bird. It was a huge bird. It was a freakin’ red tailed hawk! Well, I need a photo of this puppy, sure do!

I ran back into the living room and grabbed my point and shoot which just happened to be on the end table right inside the doorway. With the camera in hand I went back to the office. My gigantic bird friend was still there. Just hanging out. It didn’t look injured. It looked more… bored. 

I pulled the curtain open a little wider, raised the camera, and our new bird friend saw the movement, turned toward me, looked me straight in the eyes, said “oh shit!”* and then bolted into the woods at near the speed of sound.

Chances are, the hawk didn’t just crash into the house. It’s likely that it was hunting and it crashed into the house while slaughtering a small animal. Let’s call it a taking the good with the bad sort of thing.

*You think this is the part of the post where I say the bird didn’t really speak English it was more of a symbolic thing but no… our friend the hawk actually said, “oh shit” before flying away.

Lanterns

I had a million and one things on my to-do list for today and I didn’t Get to basically any of them. Now it’s 9:32pm and the only thing left is to watch the season finale of Lanterns. Let’s see if I can at least get that right. What do you say?