Must stay awake….

Less than two hours to New Year.

Patches is excited.

Caution: this post will contain a product endorsement.

We have a Sonos speaker in our bedroom.  We have another one in our office.  We have a slew of them in the living room.  When I came home from work tonight the White Album was streaming through all of them.  The Beatles have taken over nearly every room in the house…

…and it’s pretty blissful.

I’m a little surprised by how many of these suckers I have, given that for the longest time I never made a resolution.  Here goes.

First: Lose weight.  I did such a good job shedding weight at the start of 2018.  I was so proud of myself.  Then I fell off the wagon and put all the weight back and then some.  If you take an overweight person and multiply them by two, then you have me.  I need to lose weight and I need to keep losing weight and I need to not put it back.  This yo-yo crap has to stop.  I don’t want to die of a heart attack triggered by trying to push my ass off of the couch.  That’s where we are heading and it’s time to stop it.  I am even considering surgical options, though I have to get through my next resolution before I go there.

Second: Sleep apnea.  Is that what I have?  Is it a deviated septum?  Are they the same thing or just different sides of the same coin?  I don’t know.  What I do know is that I don’t sleep much, but when I do I make so much noise that no one around me can sleep.  I have a doctors appointment booked for a couple of weeks from now.  We’ll see how it goes.  Do I need surgery?  Will my weight allow me to have surgery?  Is there a non-surgical remedy?  I don’t know.  I’ll find out and get back to you.

Third: Fix the cellar.  Our cellar is a mess.  It was a mess before we turned our garage into a bedroom, but when that process started all of the stuff stored in the garage made it’s way to the cellar.  A bad situation got much, much worse.  I used to have a second living room setup in the cellar but it was rarely used.  As a result, it never got cleaned.  Now we have inches deep layers of dust over everything (that’s an exaggeration) and just piles of stuff on every available surface.  Worse than all of that are the bugs.  Our house is in the woods.  Insects are to be expected.  We know that, but the spiders basically run the joint now.  They stay down in the basement because there’s so much to keep them down there.  I need to get a shed for the stuff that used to be in the garage, then I need to fix the overhead lighting (which might require an electrician, but I hope not), then I need to find places for all of the stuff being stored down there that doesn’t go to the hypothetical shed, then I need to clean every surface including the floors and the furniture, then I need to talk to an exterminator and see if we can rid ourselves of the creepy crawlies, then I need to arrange the space in such a way that it is useful.  Fix the living room area, make a board game area, make a music area.   When I started talking to Jen about this she mentioned carpets, so that might happen too.  This one just keeps getting worse and worse the more I think about it.

Now we have a bunch of little ones…

Fourth: Bitch less.  Come on Rob, you’re turning into an asshole in middle age.  Cut the crap.

Fifth: Practice more.  I’m tired of being the guy who shows up to rehearsals unprepared.  Again, cut the crap.

Sixth: Work harder.  Be more proactive.  Take more initiative.  Be better with deadlines.  Be better at your job.

Seventh: Finally get off your ass and learn how to code in Ruby.  Do people still code in Ruby?  For some reason I’ve had that language as a goal for years and years and I’ve never gotten very far with it.  Get it done.

Eighth: Be in better shape.  This one goes along with number two.  We’re going back to Disney World this summer.  Get yourself into a state where walking a few miles a day around the parks is not a death sentence.

Ninth: Be a better person.  How about a little optimism for a change?  Be the opposite of the fascist pigs that are sprouting up everywhere we look in this age of trump.  Be the decent human that they fear.

Nine resolutions.  What the hell am I thinking?  Wish me luck.

Last night my beloved and I watched a documentary on Lenny Bruce and we think we solved one of comedy’s fundamental equations:

Lenny Bruce + shit loads of cocaine = Robin Williams

December 28, 2018.  After today there are only three more days left in 2018.  How the crappola did that happen?  It seriously freaks me out how fast we are burning through the pages of the calendar.  2019… what the hell?  That adorable little six year old girl I met at Chuck-e-Cheese that night in September of 2007 is going to graduate effing high school in 2019.  That adorable little four year old boy I met on the same night is going to have his drivers license!  This is intolerable!

Okay, calm down moron.  It’s just the inevitable passage of time that is slowly robbing you of your life precious.  Nothing to worry about.  Nothing to get hung about, as the song says.  Just roll with it and see where it takes you.  It’s been okay so far, hasn’t it?  Yes.  Yes it has.

So what’s on the agenda for me for 2019?  What personal goals am I setting for myself?  What events am I planning that will be looked back on by a future me as life highlights, and what stupid passtimey shit am I thinking about.

Well for starters, we’re going back to Disney World this summer.  One last hurrah for the four of us before college rears it’s wonderful yet also ugly head.  College is going to be the big monkey wrench thrown into the machinery that is our schedule.  Damn… is that the coolest, yet still cliched metaphor I’ve ever come up with?  Damn, I should write this drivel more often!  As for Disney World, plans are mostly in place and everything is mostly paid for already so nothing short of the a-bomb dropping onto Mickey’s Florida digs is going to stop us from going.  The four of us went last summer and it was a good trip.  I am hoping for more of the same.

We just bought a car a couple of months ago, and in another 5-6 weeks we will need to buy another one.  Yikes!  When my step daughter got her license almost two years ago, she inherited a car from her Dad.  When my step son gets his license, likely in February or so, he’ll inherit a car from us.  Of course, we have to replace that car before the inheriting happens and that means we’re going car shopping again.  We talked about it a little last night.  What kind of car do we want?  We’re actually leaning toward getting another of the same make and model that we bought a few months ago.  I suggested we need to get a different color so that we can tell them apart.  If not that, then maybe a 1969 Dodge Charger with the number 01 painted on the doors?

2019 is a huge year for my step daughter.  Senior year… graduation… college… The stress point right now is college.  She’s applying to every school under the sun and they are all literally overwhelmed with sweat for the chance to enroll her.  She’s worried about money, and frankly we all are, but we have to get over that.  We will get her to the school of her choice no matter what it takes.  Even if I have to start selling internal organs on the black market.  It also just dawned on me that, per the agreement I made with my wife when I started my first public blog in 2008 or so, once she turns 18 I can refer to her by name and show her face in pictures I post.  I probably still won’t because over protectiveness is something I am actually good at, but I could if I wanted to.

What about music stuff?  That’s a big deal for me.  What’s in store for 2019?  I have to confess that back in November I almost quit the band.  In fact, in my own head I did quit the band.  I just didn’t fess up to anyone.  It felt like such a weight off my shoulders.  I was very much at peace with the decision… for about 24 hours.  Then I started missing it.  I mean, literally nothing happened during those 24 hours, I just went from being out to wanting to be back in.  I had told my wife and the other guys in the band that I needed November and December off, and that I was thinking about quitting.  That was all.  In my mind I was already gone, but that was all I shared.  Then I heard one of the songs we cover on the radio… then another… then another.  Seriously, I was getting my haircut and the radio station playing at Supercuts played three of our songs in a row.  My heart sank and I though to myself… shit, this is going to be tough.  I chewed over it for a couple of weeks before deciding to stay.  That was like a huge weight off my shoulders too.  How is that possible?  How can leaving and not leaving evoke the exact same response?  Am I mentally defective somehow?  Am I just an idiot?  Probably.

Anyway, the band only has one thing on it’s schedule right now and it doesn’t happen until November.  What is it?  It’s silly.  It’s going to be embarrassing.  I’m already regretting agreeing to it (sort of).  It is… my 30th high school reunion.  Shocking.  30 years ago this coming Spring, Mike the bass player and I both graduated from Tewksbury Memorial High School along with the rest of the class of 1989.  We had reunions at 5, 10, 20, and 25 years (and maybe 15 too?  I can’t recall).  I did not attend any of them.  I was not going to attend #30 either until someone approached Mike about having The Lizardfish play.  We agreed.  We’re going to have to load up on 80’s music, of course, but that shouldn’t be too hard.  I already hate most of the music we play, so adding some awful 80’s garbage won’t make a difference.  (Is Robert kidding?  We may never know.)

RPM is coming in February.  I’m going to do that again, as always.  I’ve even got a new twist for this year.  Normally I don’t do any work ahead of time.  That means I end up working out new ideas on a keyboard with headphones on late at night so I won’t disturb anyone.  This year I am going to write on guitar while playing through an amp.  Sort of.  I have decided to allow myself to create a backlog of riffs and ideas.  I have already started a little bit.  I’m going to plug in and just hack out the first things that come to me.  I’ll record them on my phone and then come February I will start working them into songs.  This will ruin FAWM for me, but maybe I can still come up with 14 additional songs the old fashioned way too.  We’ll see.  I also don’t want to record any guitars direct.  I want a mic on an amp for everything.  That is going to be really difficult, but I’m going to try.  I might have to take a few days off from work to make it happen, but its a goal for the moment.

As for Gear Acquisition Syndrome… What do I have my eye on right now?  I see myself at my 30th reunion playing a 2019 Gibson Les Paul gold top through a Fender tweed Deluxe with a Klon KTR as the only pedal.  A boy can dream, right?

There is also something monumental coming up in May.  It’s not my birthday.  It’s not my step daughter’s birthday, although her 18th birthday is going to be monumental as well.  No, I’m talking about our 10th wedding anniversary.  10 years since I became Jen’s husband and her kids’ step father.  The 10 best years of my life.  It’s been such a rewarding time for me that I want to do something special to honor it.  I don’t know what yet.  Maybe something simple.  Maybe something at Disney.  I don’t know.  I just want my wife and her kids to know how much these years together have meant to me.

2019 is going to be a good year.  I can already tell.

Except they’re really pissed off.

Last week the turkey flock headcount was 19. Today its 21. They are multiplying!