At the Grammy Awards last night (coughtotalbullshitcough) they did a wonderful tribute to the late Les Paul. Who did they get to play the guitar? Who Else? Jeff Beck.

There better be a better video clip at some point, but we’ll settle for this for now.

Well folks, it’s February. How much RPM did I accomplish on the first morning?

None, of course.

I did get up at about 5:20am, which is a only little bit later than I would like to wake up on an RPM morning. Unfortunately it was for different reasons. We only have one car right now due to the Blue Car Blues (is that the title of a future RPM song? Probably not, even I am not that lame) so I had to drive Jen to work AND drive the kids to their dad’s. We also had to stop at the garage to visit the blue car and make sure that they knew what the problem was.

Even with all of that to do, I still made it to work in plenty of time. It was nice to have all of us in the car on a cold Monday morning.

RPM day two is tomorrow. I think I am going to go out at lunch time and get me some new strings. Tomorrow is a new day, and hopefully it will result in a riff or two getting down to tape.

Happy February!

Moon over Methuen.

Quiet Sunday. After spending most of Saturday at my parents we went out to breakfast with my parents. I am very excited as my 15 month old niece said my name today!

I am one very proud Uncle Robbie right now.

For the rest of the day… probably snoozing. We’re all really tired this weekend. A nap will do me good.

Holy crap it’s cold out! I checked weather.com just before going outside and it said the temperature in Methuen was a whopping six degrees.

I went out to the blue car, planning on moving it out of the driveway so I could take the white car out for an oil change. The blue car wouldn’t start. There was juice in the battery, but no crank when I turned the key.

We have a remote starter for this car and sometimes when we use it the car won’t start and some how the ignition is locked out for 10-15 minutes or so. It doesn’t happen a lot, but it does happen. I decided to work on the assumption that the button on the remote starter had been pressed while the keys were in my pocket and I waited 15 minutes and went out again. Once again, nuttin’.

So we called AAA. They came after 25 minutes or so and the tow truck driver couldn’t get the car started either. So we had it towed to A&B Auto in Tewksbury. Our garage of choice since… since… at least the late 1970’s.

So now we have no blue car for a while. Hopefully it’s just a dead starter and we’ll get it fixed up quickly.

Best of luck, oh loyal blue car. Get well soon!

Now I remember what I was going to say two posts ago. I wish I still forgot though.

I have noticed something disturbing.

The mirror in the men’s room near my desk has a very bright light right above it. It has the ability to very clearly point out certain discolorations in my greater headial area.

In English: Robbie’s going gray.

I would say that about a year ago I first started clearly seeing a change. I was still probably 95% red hair to about 5% gray. Today, however, the change sort of hit me. I usually don’t notice things like this but for some reason it stood out today. Now I would say it’s probably more like 85% red… maybe closer to 80% red. I may still be overly optimistic here, but there sure does seem to be a whole boat load more gray these days.

I can’t imagine my life without red hair. It has defined me for so very long (no it hasn’t, I just like to pretend it has). I have to come to grips with the fact that there will come a day… soon by the look of things… when I will no longer be able to accurately describe myself as a red head.

How does that make me feel?

I’m okay with it. Why? Because I have 1,125 wedding pictures where I very clearly have red hair. Now that my wedding, and my wedding pictures, are behind me my hair can really do whatever it pleases.

Just so long as it doesn’t fall out.

Today is that magical day for people who work for the company I work for. Today is the annual bonus day. There are a lot of smiling co-workers this morning.

Of course mine is already gone. Our monstrous debt is being firmly kicked in the shins today. Well worth it. Take that you mountain of debt that is keeping us from buying a house! One big step closer to the big goals, but still many more steps to go.

I just did something I’ve never done. I unfriended a Facebook friend. Over the last two Rush tours in 2007-08 I met a lot of cool people by hanging around The Rush Forum site. After a while many of those people ended up on Facebook, and I still occasionally get a friend request either from one of the people I met, or some one who read something I posted (although I haven’t been on the forum in quite a while) or some one who knows some one I know… that sort of thing.

I got one of those friend requests the other day and I accepted it. Only to find that the person apparently sits at a computer all day (not a bad thing, I do it too) and posts snippets of Rush lyrics as status messages… every 5-10 minutes or so. As if this person is listening to Rush (nothing wrong with that) and transcribing the lyrics into status updates. The end result is that my newsfeed is filled with posts from one person and I either can’t find or just plain miss anything posted by anyone else. On top of that, this person has filled up a few photo albums with pictures of Rush, and changes their default picture to a different picture of Rush a few times a day.

Listen, no one is a more obsessive Rush fan than I am, but what you’re doing is beyond obnoxious. I know the lyrics to all of their songs. I know what the individual members look like so I don’t need to see their photos as your profile picture. Let them put those pictures as their own profile pictures. I will admit that I have a shite load of Rush pictures on my account, but they are pictures that I took myself not pictures that were published in a magazine in 1978. I don’t need you to continuously barrage my newsfeed with some one else’s words/thoughts/images. BAM! You have been unfriended.

I feel mean, but gimme a freakin’ break.

I was going to write something else but I went and got all distracted. What was I saying? I don’t know. If I remember I’ll post it later.

Today is another one of those nothing-interesting-in-my-head mornings.

Did you know that in C# strings are references, but they don’t behave like references? If you have a reference and give it a value, then set a second reference to equal the first, and then change the value of the second, the value of the first changes too. Not strings though. When you change the value of a string it doesn’t overwrite the string in memory, it creates a new one at a different location. So a second string referencing the one you changed will not change with it. They overloaded a method somewhere in the string class to keep it from acting like a normal reference. Nice of them, eh?

I remembered another dream. This makes three in the last week or so! This time I was at my 10th high school reunion, which is odd for two reasons. First, I didn’t go to my 10th reunion. Second, I just had my 20th reunion and didn’t go to that one either. Another odd thing was, in my dream, the 10th was held at some one’s house. I was telling everyone that I was a professional musician. (so this isn’t a dream per say, it’s a fantasy?) I was talking to the guy who had been my best friend during my early elementary school days. I told him I could play any instrument known to man. The only ones I wasn’t completely proficient at were double reed instruments like oboes and bassoons. I seemed to be nervous about that. I hinted that I was supposed to be recording a difficult oboe concerto and I wasn’t good enough to pull it off. My former elementary school friend said, “You can play wind instruments?” (obviously he’s a big fan of my guitar playing) and I responded by saying, “Dude, I’ve been playing saxophone since the 4th grade. That’s a wind instrument.” Then I woke up.

All this dream remembering is fascinating to me and, I can imagine, boring as sin to anyone who stumbles upon it. Oh well, sorry.

Jenny just re-registered our mini van. It’s legal for 2010! Now I have to get that damn break light fixed and get it inspected. Yippee, eh?

My company’s email server apparently has crashed. I am just a wealth of fascinating stuff today!

The Bruins play tomorrow. Please please please please please please please let the suckatude be over. Please!

The RPM Challenge begins in four days. I have no idea what to do. I need to hit a music store this weekend and get a few packs of guitar strings. I also need to put one of those packs of strings onto my ES335 (the guitar of choice this year. Last year it was the Les Paul Custom). I need to go into the cellar and organize my work space. It’s a total mess. That’s what happens when you don’t use your recording equipment for a year. I have to get all of my cables together, clean out a little room to sit while I work. I also need to plug stuff in and hope it’s still functioning.

I was going to try to use Apple’s Garageband on Jen’s MacBook, but now we are thinking of selling the MacBook and I don’t want to start this on it unless I can finish it. I am going to have to dig out a couple of SVHS tapes from my stash. Hopefully I have a couple that don’t have any must-be-saved recordings on them. I may end up recording over last year’s RPM project.

I have no idea what I want to do (who am I kidding, it’s going to sound exactly the same as last year’s. 7-8 cheesy rock riffs and a couple of 12-bar blues’) but I am getting excited for Monday morning. It’s going to be fun. Lame, of course, but fun.

The moon looked freaky tonight. I made it look freakier by not being able to keep the camera still and taking a seriously crappy photo.