Can you picture a turkey on this table? A Thanksgiving turkey with lots of stuffing?

I just bought tickets to my 30 year high school reunion.

The horror…

The horror…

That’s me in a parking lot somewhere near the Lowell Memorial Auditorium on graduation day, June of 1989.

Same day, same parking lot, with my music department trophy (I assume) and white pants.  Woah, no memory of that.  Look at how skinny I was.  I musta just come back from a liposuction treatment.  Also, I still have the same haircut.  Well, I did before my head was butchered yesterday.  Note the lack of post-haircut photos.  There’s a reason for that.

The band is going to play for an hour at the reunion.  We had an all 80’s set all ready to go.  We played through the whole thing yesterday and then today decided it was too boring.  Yeah, screw you, 80’s!  I want to replace it with all of Tommy by The Who but I don’t think the other guys will go for that.

I forget exactly when it was, but at some point earlier in the year (or was it last year?) Jen and I went to a furniture store and ordered a crap ton of new stuff.  I can’t remember exactly what it was, but I think it was a new living room, dining room, and maybe a new master bedroom?  The next day we came to our senses and realized it was way too much money to spend all at once.  We cancelled the whole thing.  Not long after that we brought the kids into the discussion and ended up redoing the living room.  Most of it at least.  I still want to get another comfy chair for the back of the room, but otherwise it’s all new and improved.

Fast forward to two weeks ago (I might have mentioned this one already but I can’t remember and I’m too lazy to check).  Jen casually mentions that our washer and dryer are really old and we should probably look into replacing them before they die on us.  No way, says me.  They are clunky and less than 100% reliable, but they work all right and we shouldn’t spend the money to upgrade until we have to.  Then the dryer died on literally the next load of laundry.  Muthapussbucket!  Well, we could get it fixed, but it was already old and feeble, so I guess the time has come.

We bought a new washer and dryer this weekend.  They will be delivered next weekend.  I need to go downstairs during the week and clean everything out so that the new stuff can come in.  The spider population is going to be pissed.  Oh well.  It sucks to be you, you bunch of awful eight legged freaks (though you are still infinitely preferable to House Centipedes… those bastards are beyond evil).

Thanksgiving is approaching and we’re going to host this year.  That plus the washer/dryer shopping plus having already made an attempt at a new dining room set equals us talking about going furniture shopping again.  We do need a new dining room, the chairs are in particularly rough shape due to having my enormous ass crushing them over and over again since I started dating Jen in 2007, but we don’t really need a new bedroom set.  Still… we have more than enough room in the new bedroom/former garage to fit a king sized bed.  Maybe it’s time… Maybe.

We’ll see… we’ll see.

I did something to my back yesterday morning and it’s been hurting like hell ever since. I played my SG at practice tonight because it’s 10000000 times lighter than my Les Paul.

I bought my first Les Paul in 1988. In all that time since then I’ve been hearing people bitch about how heavy they are. The body is a great big thick chunk of solid wood and they weigh a ton compared to most other guitars. Since ’88 I’ve been hearing people complain about how bad they are for your back. Since the coming of the internet the number of bitching voices has increased a zillion fold. I never bought it though. Yeah my Custom is a heavy sucker but it sounds amazing and it plays amazing and suck it up, wuss. Then two weeks ago I was at band practice and I thought to myself, for the first time in 31 years, “damn this gitter is heavy. I wish I had something lighter tonight.”

That, plus whatever I did to my back yesterday morning, meant I took the lighter guitar tonight. The strings on it are old and rusty and dead. I wanted to change them before practice but didn’t have time. I was too busy getting the single worst haircut I’ve ever had to suffer through, so I played the dead strings.

Despite the back pain and the lifeless strings there were one or two moments that I did something in a guitar solo that made me think to myself, “you’re kinda shredding tonight.” An overstatement, of course, but still. Did I do that? I’m the only guitar player in the band so it musta been me.

For most of the practice though I was thinking… we’ve got a gig in a few weeks and I am playing super sloppy.

Practice, Robert. You need to practice. Get off your ass and practice the damn songs.

We’ll see if things improve for next Sunday.

That’s Lake Champlain in the distance.

May 30, 2009. Our wedding day.

Earlier today.

I wish I could link to Apple Music here.  (ahem, talking to you wordpress.com because the HTML code Apple gives us works in your editor, but stops working when you hit publish.  coughwtfcough)

Note: this album is twisted and weird and can be hard to listen to.  I bought it on cassette back in the early 90’s (I think) and later found out that it was different than the original vinyl release.  I am not familiar enough with it to notice any obvious differences yet, but there are two versions of the album available to stream now so maybe something will jump out at me when I get to the second version (which Apple actually notes is version three… so there’s more history to this than I know).  I also heard that Darryl Hall sings the title song on the alternate version.  I wonder how that stacks up to the first version, or the Peter Gabriel version.

One guitar nerd note… I’m listening to a lot of Robert Fripp these days and it’s making me want to buy a looper.  The horror!

 

I’m sad.  I had started digging around in ancient posts to see if I could find and fix any broken image links.  At first I was very successful, but more recently?  Not so much.

I have no memory of this, but in 2009-10 at least, there seem to have been a lot of pictures that I took and posted on the blog but didn’t upload to Flickr.  I don’t know when I started viewing Flickr as the be all end all photography repository, but it wasn’t until well after the blogging blitz began.

Oh well.

It’s Halloween.  Did you have a happy Halloween?  I have a shit ton of candy but no trick or treat.  It is going to suck having all that candy temptation there for me to fatten up on.  Oh well.

On a related note, I bought a pair of sweat pants to wear to the gym.  I haven’t worn sweats since probably the Reagan administration… maybe Bush the First, but I’m wearing sweats at this very moment.  It feels weird.  Weirdly weird.

Tomorrow is November 1st which means NaSoAlMo yet again.  I added my name to the list of participants today.  I’m in… though I’m likely destined to crash and burn, as usual.  Why is it that I can get super excited for February but not for November?  What’s the difference?  I don’t know.

I’m so tired right now that I can’t see clearly, even with my glasses.  I need a nap.  An eight or nine hour nap.  Or a 12 or 13 hour nap.