If there is one thing I learned today it is that reheating taco shells is harder than it looks.
Lesson learned, I guess.
Today’s Lesson
Category: iphoneography
First of the Season
I looked out the window this morning not long after sunrise and saw this. There are actually two deer in this picture. The other one is on the other side of the bush that they were both sowing down on.
I took this through a window (obviously) using my iPhone. There was no noise at all but as soon as I snapped the pic both deer turned toward me and just stared at me. For a long time. It was like they were gazing into my soul, trying to decide if they were going to jump through the window and eat me.
I’ve had a super stressful week at work this week. Lots of shit going down. Nothing truly bad, just lots of stress. Knowing that I lost a staring contest to two super annoyed does at the very start of my day was just the kind of weirdness I needed to put it all into perspective.
Unrelated note: I think its 25 days until we see Rush again.
2026 50/90 Challenge Day 80/90
And just like that, we’re back babie!
After a few days of not making any progress at all, I finally got something done yesterday. Day 80 was spent getting back to work and dealing with a stomach bug (or something) that has been seriously kicking my fat ass. No clue, but it was not successful in stopping me from being silly, musically, though it was a close call.
I didn’t start thinking about 50 songs in 90 days stuff until after 10:00pm last night. At that point I sat up in bed with my laptop and my goofy little USB piano keyboard and I started another song… and then another song. Two new songs, numbers 58 and 59 if you’re keeping track.
One of them is in straight 4/4 time and isn’t very interesting. The other is a math problem. I’ve been messing with weird time signatures all throughout this challenge. I’ve done more work in 5/8 time than I had done in the previous 55 years combined. I also did one song in 9/8, which I treated like 4/4 with an extra eighth note. Last night I thought to myself what if I did 4/4 but only added an extra eighth note on every other bar? Next thing I know I’m trying to write riffs in 17/8 time. Yup. Song number 58 is in 17/8 time.
It’s not good. Not even close. It’s overly simple because I was afraid if I did anything even minutely complicated on top of the weird time signature then I would never, ever be able to play the guitar part. Nope. I kept it simple as well as rhythmically silly.
Oh, and spoiler alert for tomorrow:
2026 50/90 Challenge Day 51/90
I was hoping to have a lot of time to work on music, specifically vocals, on day 51 but I was also pretty sure I would not have time for anything. Turns out I didn’t have time for much. No vocalizing for me yesterday.
I did add two new songs to the list. No real instruments yet, but all of the music has been worked out including the melodies and lyrics. They are songs 46 and 47. I also managed to mix one song. Yet another song with really crappy vocals. Hooray.
I’m not sure how the time is going to work out this week. I have three days in the office coming up and there will be one late night when I will check seeing a band off of my I-have-to-see-them-before-I-(or-they-or-we)-die bucket list. I’ll try to get short bursts of musical work in whenever I can.
Oh yeah, and spoiler alert for tomorrow…
Conflicted
I am conflicted and I always get into this state when the kids are involved.
When my step daughter moved away to college in 2019 I was conflicted. On the one hand, I wanted her to go away to school and have a fantastic experience and learn a ton and make new friends and start her life and have everything be amazing. On the other hand I wanted her to stay home with us forever.
Two years later when my step son went away to college it was the same thing. I wanted him to go to school and have the time of his life and learn incredible things and have adventures and excitement and make memories that would last a lifetime while also not wanting him to leave us, ever.
In May of 2025 my step daughter moved home. She graduated and worked a two year contract at the University. When the contract ended she came home to live with us while she figured out her next move. The next move was grad school, but she had to work out the details. It took a little more than a year, but next month she is going to start school in California.
I am so excited for her I could burst… again… just like 2019. Just like my step son in 2021. I fear I might spontaneously combust out of excitement for her future. She’s going to finish grad school with a PHD and then every time I see her I will ask her, “what’s up, doc?” and it will be epic and no one will ever get tired of that stupid Bugs Bunny joke and we will always laugh and it will be perfect.
Also, I don’t want her to move. I mean, I thought moving from Massachusetts to Vermont was bad… California? No way!
She’ll still be here for a few more weeks, but the next milestone in the moving process happened today…
It’s time to start packing. I’m excited and sad at the same time, but what else is new?
What’s Going On?
The nazi fuck in the white house is going to give a speech tonight where he will say the 2020 presidential election was stolen even though it clearly was not stolen. There is zero credible evidence to say it was stolen, but the nazi pedophile rapist in the white house (which I legitimately just typo’d “shite house” and will probably forever call it that from now on) wants to pass the uber racist/sexist and utterly unnecessary save america act which will effectively remove voting rights from millions of americans including all married women who took their husbands name so he’s going to lie to our fucking faces again (which he does literally every time he opens his nazi fascist pedophile rapist racist mouth) and tell us how he has evidence that 2020 was stolen even though he will present no evidence because no evidence exists and his base will get down on their knees and swallow every word.
Okay… I need to calm down. I’ll change the subject.
On my personal laptop, I use Vivaldi as my web browser of choice. It has recently started being unable to connect to certain sites. Like, random sites that no browser should ever fail to connect to. Things like… wordl. Why? Why are you fucking with my word games, Vivaldi? I can connect using Chrome and Firefox. Why not Vivaldi? It’s not me, it’s clearly you. I don’t want to go back to Chrome, damn it. I’m not as pissed about this as I am the nazi fascist pedophile rapist racist in the shite house, but I am pretty pissed about it.
Ugh… what else. Music. Let’s talk about that. The 50 songs in 90 days Challenge. I have had three days in a row with little to no progress. Today I recorded some guitars. I feel a little better. Not much, but a little.
I had used my Les Paul Standard on everything I’d done since the project started on July 4th. Today I changed guitars. I was going to go to my Les Paul Custom but instead I went to my SG. I hereby declare that today is officially Gibson SG Standard day in my basement music nook. You heard it here first.
One of My Dumber Moments
Before we get to the main story, how about a couple of photos?
First, our house was painted! Doesn’t it look all clean and freshly painted? The doors getting a coat of white paint was… a surprise.
Second, there are wild fires in Canada that are spewing smoke into the atmosphere that are blocking out the sun and turning the sky in Massachusetts into a weird, hazy, orange/yellow kinda thing. It is making our sky look like a Mad Max movie.
Okay, now that that is out of the way I can tell you the story of how dumb I was yesterday.
I have two pairs of glasses. One is a set of progressive lenses. The top half of each lens is for distance and the bottom half is for up close and reading. I wear those glasses most of the time, especially when driving.
The second pair of glasses splits the difference between the two halves of the progressive lenses. They are middle distance glasses. They are perfect for sitting at a computer and working. I wear those glasses while I am working.
When I work in the office I take both pairs of glasses with me. I wear the main specs while driving in, then swap them for the computer glasses, then at the end of the day I swap back to drive home. I put the progressives into a case and put the case in my desk.
Sometimes, rarely, I forget to swap back at the end of the day and I leave my desk with my computer glasses on. Once I made it as far as the car before I realized my error and felt pretty dumb going back to the fourth floor to return to my desk.
Can you see where this is going?
Yesterday I made it all the way home before I realized I had the wrong glasses on. I have no idea how I managed to drive with the middle distance glasses on. I think the traffic was really bad so I never had to look further than the car in front of me and that car was close enough that it wasn’t blurry. I guess?
I felt like a total moron. I drove for an hour and 10 minutes without noticing. What a schmuck! I didn’t want to risk it a second time so I had to dig out my old pair of progressives, which I replaced a couple of years ago. They got the job done, but still… what an idiot.
I did not make the same mistake when I left work today. I am wearing the correct glasses. Moron.
2026 50/90 Challenge Day 6/90
Today is day seven so I need to write up yesterday’s progress. Day six. Unfortunately the days are sort of running together. What the hell did I do yesterday?
When I got up yesterday morning I had a riff buzzing in my head. It was in an awkward sort of time. I think it was trying to be in 10/8. I picked up my iPhone and played it into GarageBand for iOS in 4/4 with an absurdly fast tempo. The program doesn’t give you the ability to work in wacky time signatures so that was the best I could do. There wasn’t much to it, but let’s call it song number eight.
About an hour or so later there was this:
I put rhythm guitars on the simple little thing I had come up with the night before, song number seven, and onto song number two. That’s all I had time for. I had a meeting at 9:00am and it was getting a little late. Not too late though, I finished my morning routine and logged in to work on time.
Later still, while sitting up in bed shortly before falling asleep for the night, I added some new things to the song I started when I woke up. I tried changing the time signature to 10/8 but that made the GarageBand drummer go super weird and I couldn’t follow what it was doing. I kept losing “the one”… if you’re a musician you know what that means. I switched it back to 4/4 with the tempo set to double time and then set the drummer function to play in half time. It all came out in the end.
When that was done and I was just about ready to fall asleep… I wrote a melody and lyrics for song number one. The first lyrics of the project. I’m hoping to get a couple more done tonight so that I can record some vocals early tomorrow morning. We’ll have to see about that though.
And that is what I accomplished on day six. I fear things are going to be light today and day seven’s update will be uneventful. I’ll let you know tomorrow.
Something I Did Today
I feel like I owe the universe a detailed post discussing all of the things I did today. Things like picking my step daughter up at the train station after she traveled home from Baltimore.
Instead, I will share a clue as to something that took up a little less than 1/24th of my calendar day:
Cool, eh?
My Fingers Really Hurt
I am probably going to get my two songs finished for the month of June. File it under the RPM Challenge’s Record Every Month challenge. Yesterday I wasn’t sure if I would be able to finish a song or two, but I had a decent day music wise and now I am in good shape.
Last night before bed I wrote lyrics and melodies for the two songs that got guitar tracks earlier in the day (see the previous post). This morning I cut my exercise short and used the time to record vocals. Both songs were cranked out quickly and poorly. Tonight after dinner I was able to sneak back into the cellar and record lead guitars for both songs. I did so on a guitar with old and dead strings and with a left hand that is 100% free from calluses because I don’t play enough these days.
Oh my goodness, do my finger tips hurt right now. Oh the pain. Oh the horrible icky pain. Ouch-town, population: Me, bro.
I’ll mix the two songs tomorrow night after work. Probably while sitting up in bed wishing I was asleep. You know how it is.
Enjoy tonight’s crappy photos that are basically the same as the crappy photos on last night’s post except I am wearing a work-appropriate collared shirt today where I was wearing an awesome Rush Snakes and Arrows Live t-shirt yesterday.
