The Bruins beat the Senators 2-1 last night.  I missed it.  David Pastrnak did not score, but Brad Marchand did.

The Boston Bruins have played 25 games.
David Pastrnak has 23 goals.
(Brad Marchand has 18)

The next game is Friday at 1:00 PM against the Rangers.  I hate the Rangers.

Tomorrow is Thanksgiving which means today is the traditional busiest travel day of the year.  It is 4:45 PM.  I leave work at 5:30 PM.  I just looked outside to see how the traffic looks on route 128 (that’s interstate 95 for you non-locals).

Nothing.

No traffic at all.

Looks like everyone did their pre-Thanksgiving driving yesterday.  If it’s this clear all over then I should be making good time driving home tonight.

Fingers crossed.

I’m freaking out about my high school reunion, but this time it’s a music gear freak out not a philosophical freak out.  That will come back later, but for right now it’s just guitar stuff.

Two days ago I was planning on using my Gibson SG with the Wampler Tumnus and Fulltone OCD pedals for overdrive and my Fender Bassbreaker 18/30 as my amp.  Last night I had changed to planning on using my Gibson Les Paul with the Klon KTR and Fulltone OCD pedals for overdrive and my Fender Deluxe Reverb as my amp.  I’m even waffling on the OCD as I have both the version 1 (1.4, I think?) and the custom shop OCDge.  Maybe I could swap the custom shop for the standard too.

I literally cannot decide on anything.  Maybe I’ll bring both amps and go stereo (well, duel mono) and put out so much volume that my class of ’89 classmates run screaming for the exits in a futile attempt to save their ear drums from imminent destruction.

Yeah, maybe I’ll do that!

Here are today’s Pasta Watch numbers:

The Boston Bruins have played 24 games.
David Pastrnak has 23 goals.

(Brad Marchand has 17 goals)

Game #25 is against the Ottawa Senators in Ottawa tonight at 7:00 PM Eastern Time.  The Bruins are in first place in the Atlantic Division with a record of 16-3-5, and Ottawa is in second to last in the Atlantic Division with a record of 11-12-1.  The two teams last met in Boston on November 2nd and the Bruins won 5-2.  Pastrnak scored one goal (so did Marchand).

Not that I am implying anything with this post, of course.

We still have half a game to go tonight, but David Pastrnak already has three goals against the Canadiens.  The Bruins are up 6-1 with 8:51 to go in the second.

This is Glorious.

The Pasta Watch is still on!

I have one night’s worth of evidence that the amount of sleep you get isn’t as important as how you sleep.  Granted, this is all based on numbers pulled off my Apple Watch and who knows if any of it is even close to accurate.

I got seven hours and five minutes of sleep last night.  That’s so much sleep I don’t know what to do with myself.  I slept so late that I’m amazed I wasn’t late for work.  I was awake for about an hour from a little after 3:00am until a little after 4:00am.  That might skew the results somehow but I’m not sure.  Of the seven hours, the watch determined that four hours and fifty minutes was “restful sleep,” whatever that means.  That’s more than I usually get.  Most nights it is around four hours, but very rarely does it approach five hours.

Based on all of that (other than the hour I was awake) I would expect to be feeling nice and rested today.  Makes sense, does it?

One other number that the Apple Watch tracks is the heart rate.  According to the Sleep Watch app, the app I use to display all of this data, your heart rate is supposed to drop while you sleep.  A drop rate percentage in the teens is average, in the 20’s is good.  What was my heart rate drop percentage last night?

Negative One.

My heart rate actually went up while I was asleep.  The watch calls a rate change like that, “not optimal.”  I wonder if my rate was -10 would it be labeled “shitty”?  I wonder.

So given the numbers, the final piece of the puzzle is how do I feel?

Well, I feel shitty.  I feel like I barely slept at all last night.  This implies that the heart rate dip percentage is actually more indicative of sleep quality than the restful sleep number.  Interesting.

On a side note, my CPAP machine keeps some stats of it’s own and each night it gives me a grade where the top score is 100.  Last night it gave me a 100.  Whatever messed up last night had nothing to do with the CPAP machine.  That all went fine.

Isn’t all of this fascinating?  No?  Well it is to me so screw you!

I made Flickr’s explore again? Holy cow!

I’m starting to freak out over this reunion thing.

I have two work days, Thanksgiving, and a Friday full of Christmas decorating between now and the reunion on Friday evening.  I am starting to lose my shit.  I don’t want to be reminded of who I was 30 years ago.  The whole point of growing up was to be able to look back at that person, flip him the bird, and tell him to go piss up a rope.  Now I have to dedicate a night to putting myself back into that person’s shoes?  Hell no.

IDon’tWantToGoIDon’tWantToGoIDon’tWantToGoIDon’tWantToGoIDon’tWantToGo.

We had a pretty good band practice last night.  During the first half we blew through most of the songs we are hoping to play on Friday and they all went well.  I had a little pain in my left hand but nothing too bad.  I had some equipment issues too but (a lot) more on that later.

Normally when a gig is coming up Kevin will draw up a set list.  We play through it, suggest a tweak here and there, and then declare it final.  We then practice the crap out of it as a whole.  This time Kevin came up with a set list and we played it and decided we wanted to try again.  I think the issue is that we really don’t know what we want to do this time.  At first we thought that since it’s a high school reunion for the class of ’89 we should make everything from the 80’s (the horror).  Then we thought that since there is a DJ and a dance floor we should probably try and go for a set worth of songs that normally get people dancing.  Okay.  Some songs we dropped, other songs that had been dropped before we re-evaluated, questions were asked, suggestions were made, and in the end… we still don’t have a definite list.

I started getting a weird, awkward vibe from the room.  I’m pretty sure it mostly had to do with my personal hangups about this whole gig, but I was starting to worry that some of the guys were getting pissed off over it all.  I asked if everyone was okay and they all said they were.  I hope that’s the case because this is my high school reunion we’re talking about here and that in no way is worthy of any form of emotional discomfort.  Not in the least.  Except maybe for me, but that’s a different issue.  I just don’t feel good about this whole experience.

Okay, on to the equipment problems.  It started at the last practice, two weeks ago.  I started getting a lot of noise.  I was okay for the first half of so and then the ground hum started getting louder.  It kept getting worse as the night went on and it was really bad by the end.  Last night I expected to have problems right off the bat but it was nice and quiet at the start.  The same thing happened though.  After 30-40 minutes I started hearing that ground hum again and it got worse and worse.

When you have noise problems like that the gut reaction is to blame it on your dirt pedal.  I use an OCD for most of my distortion.  When that pedal was on there was noise.  When it was off there was much less noise.  That means the OCD is the problem, right?  No.  It means the problem lies somewhere in the signal path before the OCD, and kicking on all of that distortion just amplifies it.  I only have three pedals in the chain after the OCD, delay, reverb, and volume boost.  Before the OCD is a tuner, a wah, a uni-vibe, a phaser, a flanger, a pitch shifter, and another overdrive with the gain set low.  The issue was coming from somewhere in there.

I have the flanger on the board for one song and we didn’t play that song last night.  I sometimes throw it on just as a neat-o sound effect and I did that once.  After that song the noise was unbearable.  I bypassed everything before the first overdrive, a Tumnus, and the noise went away.  It’s likely that the problem is either the flanger, the pitch shifter or (most likely) one of the cables connecting them.  Both of those pedals are cheap Chinese brands and neither are known for their quality craftsmanship.  It could very well be one of the pedals.  The cables though… The flanger is on the top left side of the board (wiring goes from right to left) and the pitch shift is on the far right.  I have a cable that is probably a foot long connecting them.  That particular cable has been with me since the early 2000’s when I bought a bunch of short cables at a Radio Shack.  I know this because those cables were the only colored cables I’ve ever used.  I’m willing to bet myself a couple of bucks that that old, cheap-o cable is the culprit.

The plan for this week, along with practicing, is to change up the board.  That cable goes away just on principal.  Also I think the pitch shift will temporarily come off as we’re not doing the song I was hoping to use it on.  I might take the reverb pedal off too.  I am chemically addicted to reverb, but I have yet to find a pedal that sounds anywhere near as good as a spring reverb tank, and the amp I want to use Friday doesn’t have a tank.  I’m bordering on declaring that if I can’t have a spring I don’t want anything.  Having said that, there are a couple of songs where I keep the signal clean and a little bit of reverb sounds really ace.  I’m conflicted about that one.  The last question is do I replace the Tumnus with the KTR.  They are both modeled on the same circuit, and the KTR is closer to the original.  They are similar but not exact.  The KTR is going on the board eventually but I’m not sure if I want to switch to it without using it at a rehearsal first.  Yeah, the Tumnus should stay for now.

There was one other issue that I almost forgot about.  Early in the practice I was using the wah pedal and the signal seems to have cut out a little.  Only when the pedal was in the open (all bass no treble [isn’t that a song?]) position.  I unplugged it and plugged it back in and it was fine again.  It might need a little cleaning with some compressed air, but it is something to keep an eye on going forward.

So I am using the Fender Bassbreaker as my amp, and the Tumnus/OCD combo as my dirt, and I am bringing my little Vox MV50 Clean along with a 12 inch speaker cabinet as a backup amp and I’ll take the D&M Drive as a backup overdrive pedal.  The only question left is… which guitar?  I used the SG last night because the strings were fresher.  I planned on using the Les Paul as the #1 for the show and bringing the SG as the backup.  Last night though… the SG just felt good last night.  I don’t think I personally played all that well, but it felt good regardless.  I’ve never used the SG at a gig.  In fact, Friday is the first gig we’re doing since I bought it.  I’m not sure.  I might go with the SG as the #1.  We’ll see how I feel in a few days.

Anyway, here are the obligatory “we’re wrapping up for the night so take some gear pics for the ‘gram” pics.