Category: Generic

Baseball Surprise

The Red Sox have been dreadful this year. A complete embarrassment. No one thought it would be this bad again.

Or so I thought.

I just looked at the standings. They are 73-80 right now. They have nine games remaining. If they could magically go 8-1 over those nine games they would finish the season at 81-81 for an even .500 record.

Prior to the season starting my thought was that they would not be very good this year, but they would be better than last year. I thought the upside would be a .500 record. That or something close to it.

By June I had changed my tune. Last place with a bullet! They suck to high heaven! They are going to lose 100 games!

Who knew that my original prediction was going to be so close to correct. They have a legitimate chance to finish only a few games shy of .500. I am totally shocked! It is amazing what can happen when you are out of contention before the all-star break!

I Hate Today

Today is one of the worst days of the year. It’s the first day of Autumn. That means Summer is officially over. It’s all down hill from here. Everything is going to die and turn ugly brown and then freeze. I hate this time of year. I mean, there are a lot of things to love. Leaf Peeping is great. Sleeping with the windows open and the blankets pulled up to your eye brows is sweet. Baseball playoffs. Hockey. There’s a lot to love. Still, I find the fall depressing. It’s not a season of it’s own, it’s just the ramp up to Winter. I loathe Winter.

This time of year the traffic is unbearable and you can’t get anything done without suffering through a mass of people who seem to have forgotten how to pay attention to what is going on around them. My 8.5 hour work day becomes 12 hours because it takes so damn long to get there and back.

The trees die, the flowers die, the grass dies. The only thing that doesn’t die is the effing garter snake I just found in the cellar. I was really hoping we were finished with those slithery little assholes. I didn’t have anything down there that I could kill it with. I tried squashing it with the cat’s old scratching post but it just lay there takin’ it like it was nothing. I actually heard it say, “That all you got, fat boy?” The little asshole. Hey, why don’t you use your arms and legs… oh… sorry. You don’t have any! BAM! Sick burn you little reptilian puke.

I guess what I’m trying to say is, here’s a big hearty double freedom rockets right up in your ugly face, Fall. Kiss my incredibly fat ass.

You too, snake. You suck.

The Same Old Frustrations

Every time I hear some one say how much they love Autumn I want to just scream at them.  “You wouldn’t love it so much if you needed an hour and 50 minutes to drive 30 miles!”

Maybe I should just relax.  Maybe I shouldn’t let it bother me.  I was actually doing okay with it until today.  Something changed this morning.  I don’t know what, but I went from passive resignation to teeth grinding frustration.  Damn you, traffic.  Damn you to hell!

The really pathetic thing is that it always feels like it’s as bad as it could possibly be.  “I’ve never seen it this bad” is a thought that runs through my noggin’ a few times each morning.  But when I stop and think clearly, I remember that I said the same thing over and over again last year.  I also begin to recall multiple days with two hour drives.  There was even a two hour and fifteen minute drive once last year.

So while it’s soul crushing to have to drive half way from New Hampshire to Rhode Island at an average speed of less than 20 miles per hour.  I cannot make myself feel better by thinking it’s as bad as at gets…

Because I’ve actually seen it worse.

Summer can’t get here fast enough.

I Live to Play Guitar Again

Whatever it was that I did this weekend, it worked. I had very little pain in my hands during last night’s band practice. Every now and then it would flare up just to remind me that it was there, but it was never bad and it didn’t last long.

So what was the cure this time? Increased practicing on my own? Starting to warm up an hour before rehearsal started? Stretching sooner? The double shot of Advil I took just as rehearsal was starting? Playing my Les Paul instead of my ES-335?

Or did I just relax and not tense up the way I usually do.

I don’t know. Some combination of all of them? I don’t know, but I’ll try the same routine next week. With the pain out of the equation, I was able to concentrate on what I was doing and I felt much better about the quality of my guitar playing. My singing too, although who cares about that, amiright?

We played a bunch of new songs, and for the first time since I started mic’ing the room the recording sounds half decent. The vocals still need to come up and maybe the guitar needs to back off a bit (fat chance of that happening, amiright?). I even did a tiny bit of mastering this time. It’s just a stereo track. I put a compresser on the whole track, added a little eq, and just the tiniest touch of reverb. I also unmuted the left side of the drums.

What do you think?

Haverhill is on Fire

When I pulled onto route 213 on the way to band practice last night, this was what I saw…
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When I pulled onto 495 it was still there.
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When I exited off of 495 it was still there, but getting closer and closer.

Youtube provides us with some better video than what I got from far away. It was a seven alarm fire in an abandoned warehouse. Some of the news reports look like a major inferno.