Scenes from Today’s Errands

I ran a bunch of errands today and took a few pictures. I wanted to take a few more but got distracted while I was doing stuff and failed. Oh well.

Gas station food truck?
A Sugar Free Bakery… Robbie the gastric bypass patient says, “droooooool”
The clock, from a different direction than usual

Basket Cat

We didn’t think either cat would take to the little basket thing on the side of the new cat tree, but a few days ago Jen picked Lily up and put her in it and now Lily gets into it without any prompting from us. Success!

2024 RPM Challenge Day 2/29

What did I post on that dumb music project Tumblr account as a summary for day two of the RPM Challenge?

Day two was not as productive as day one, but I got some stuff done and I am pleased.

I put rhythm guitars onto one song and also gave that song a melody. Later in the day I added song idea number five and finished the MIDI bass and MIDI drums and gave the whole thing a complete song form.

Day three has already seen some progress, but you’ll read about that tomorrow.

Musical Meanderings

Yup. A decent haul on day two. One new song format, one song’s worth of rhythm guitars, and one vocal melody without lyrics.

Similar to yesterday, I wrote my summary of day two after I did some work on day three. I put rhythm guitars onto two songs this morning after breakfast. Hopefully I will have some more melodies and maybe a lyric or two or three at some point today. I won’t be able to do an early morning car vocals tomorrow, but I should be able to do it on Monday so I want to have a lot of stuff available to work on by then.

Pics!

156/365
156/365

Bertha Redux

Bellana has a plant that she named Burt. It grew from a clipping taken from her step mother’s mother’s plant. During the pandemic lockdown Burt ended up at our house for a short time. Bellana cut off a clipping and Jen and I grew a new plant with it. We named it Bertha.

Bertha was a frequent source of blog posts for a while, but I haven’t been sharing any updates lately. She’s still alive and kicking, but she’s definitely having a rough go these days. A bunch of her leaves have died, while new ones are still sprouting. If I keep her watered she does okay, but she’s so big now that we don’t really have any place to put her and I fear she’s close to the live/die tipping point.

With the goal of keeping some form of the original plant alive forever, I took two new clippings this morning. They are in Harry’s room in a glass of water sitting next to the window. Unfortunately the weather is so gloomy and awful there isn’t a lot of sunlight to be found. It should get better over the weekend. Here’s hoping the two clippings grow some new roots and I can pot them both and have two more chances of keeping the original plant alive for all time.

Wish Bertha’s kids luck.

2024 RPM Challenge Day 1/29

Every February I try to post daily RPM Challenge updates on a Tumblr page that I set up a thousand years ago and only ever use to try and track daily updates of music projects. Why? Why do I do this? Why do I even keep this Tumblr account? What the hell is wrong with me? 

I find that I post to that page for a week or two and then I fall off and eventually forget all about it. It’s lame. I am lame. You could probably tell that by all the lame posts though, so I don’t expect anyone to be surprised.

Anyway, I posted the day one summary this morning even though I have already done some work on day two today. Whatever. Since I am a content whore I will quote the Tumblr post here because… ya know… reasons. I guess.

The RPM Challenge is underway once again. Will I manage to post daily updates here? Probably not. Oh well.

Day one went really well. I managed to start four songs before I punched into work for the day. Three of them were multiple riffs/changes that I noodled out on guitar. The fourth was just a bass/drum groove that I worked out on my iPhone.

After work I added bass and drum parts (MIDI) and a song form to two of the three ideas that started on guitar. I started adding bass and drums to the third but was unable to finish.

And that is my wrap up for day one. I’ve already done a little work on day two.

Musical Meanderings

There you go. There is my day one summary. I mentioned the morning stuff here yesterday but the after work stuff should be new news.

As for today? I put rhythm guitars (two guitars through two amps each for a total of four tracks) onto song idea number one. I didn’t have time to add them to song idea number two too. Maybe this evening. We’ll see.

155/365
155/365 – The two amps are a Fender Bassbreaker 15 and a Vox MV50 Clean. Both are running direct into my USB audio interface.