Lounging
Category: Generic
(Mostly) Daily (goofy) Haiku for You #38
Today’s daily silly haiku is inspired by my covid symptoms faking me out and messing with me for their own amusement.
I said that coughing,
was no longer an issue,
then I coughed a lot.
Does This Count as Advice?
The best advice I’ve ever received… I’m not sure. Does it count as advice if it was something you were 100% going to do anyway?
Uncle Johnny was my father’s brother and my godfather. While the godfather part is technically meaningless to an atheist, it still has meaning from a family perspective. He was an alcoholic who lived a very hard life before getting sober and straightening himself out. He was an inspiration, and very likely the reason I have never really touched alcohol. He was a type two diabetic in his later years and his health went down the crapper in a major way at the end. He died in a horrible yet thankfully quick fashion and I miss him a lot.
When I first started dating Jen back in 2007 his diabetes was out of control and it cost him his lower leg. He was in and out of the hospital and various rehab and half way houses as he needed more and more surgeries and more and more physical therapy to deal with his new reality. Jen used to go with me to visit him.
In the short time that Uncle Johnny knew Jen, he was really taken with her. He was a huge fan of hers, and of our relationship. Sadly he never met the kids. Bellana was six and Harry was four and Jen and the kids’ father had an arrangement that said new relationships should last for six months before the kids become involved. We were still under that six month mark when this particular conversation happened.
Johnny was in a bed in a rehab place. I think Jen was with me for this particular visit but she was out of the room for some reason. He asked about the kids and I told him I still had not been introduced to them but the big day was coming soon. The advice he gave me was simple and while it is clearly the best advice I can remember receiving, I was absolutely going to do it anyway so does it still count? I don’t know. I don’t recall the exact words but the gist of it was, you make sure you do right by those kids, Rob.
By the time he said that to me it was already becoming a primary life goal. Still, I hope I’ve made my uncle proud.
On a lighter note, there was another, earlier piece of sage advice that Uncle Johnny gave me. I was a teenager at the time. He told me, again paraphrasing because I don’t recall the exact words, put off shaving as long as you can because once you start you can never stop. I wanted to follow that advice, but I looked really awful with a spotty, patchy beard and I just had to shave off what little there was as soon as it became visible. Here we are almost 40 years later and I still look terrible with facial hair. He was right though. As soon as I started shaving it became a regularly scheduled pain in the ass.
Thanks for the advice, Uncle Johnny.
Energy
Another vague and kinda pointless daily prompt. Oh well. They can’t all be bangers.
The literal answer is food and water, right? Biochemistry and all that? When you feed your cells they produce energy and you get to keep running without issue for a few hours or so. I took a biology class in high school. I took a chemistry class in high school too. I never took a biochem class. What I’ve learned in that regard comes from either learning about my step son’s type one diabetes, or just listening to my step daughter talk about her job.
The figurative energy sources are more interesting, but also pretty obvious and straight forward. What gives me energy? Being with my wife. Being with my step kids. Being with my niece and nephews, though that doesn’t happen often because I am a terrible uncle and likely just a terrible person all around.
Being creative gives me energy. For me that means music, both making music and just listening to music, or playing with the cameras and photos as if I knew what I was doing. Sometimes a good movie or TV show can be a source of energy on some weird level. A good book can do the same.
Traveling can do it. Driving on a road trip, visiting a new place, exploring something or somewhere. What does not give me energy, quite the opposite, is spending time with crowds of new people. That just sucks the life right out of me. I think that is the textbook definition of an introvert. Maybe?
Okay, there are a few vague thoughts on this vague question. I guess it got the job done in that it did prompt me to write more than a few words worth of a post. Success.
Fed Ex Fail
Before I go into this bitchy rant, know that I used to work for UPS and my shipping company loyalty lies squarely with them. In fact, once while I was working a temp job running a medical instrument company’s shipping office a competitor’s driver actually complained at how much business I was sending UPS’ way compared to everyone else. What he didn’t know was that I had no control over which shipping method each individual shipment used, but I didn’t tell him that.
Okay, that paragraph is going to be longer than the actual point of the post. Sorry. Anyway….
Fed Ex just delivered three packages to our front door. All three packages had different ship to addresses. One was for me, the other two were for two other houses.
The fuck, Fed Ex?
Favorite Album? No… Favorite Albums
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.
(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.
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
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.
No Room!
Why do they still insist they can sit on top of the cat tree together when there clearly isn’t enough room? They will be fighting in a few minutes, guaranteed.
Inside the Red Head's Head 