Category: Uncategorized

Friday the 13th

Somehow I failed to realize when I woke up today that it was Friday the 13th. I knew it was Friday. I am pretty sure I knew it was the 13th. Amazingly enough though, my idiot brain failed to put those two facts together.

Lately almost every day has felt like one of those, “I shoulda stayed in bed” days. Friday the 13th? It’s only 9:00am and I haven’t even started my work day yet… and I know that the day and the date together have no bearing on anything that will happen. They are just arbitrary names after all. Today just as easily could have been called Flumeday the Flibbtytenth. Still though…

I’ve got a bad feeling about this.

That Song is Stuck in My Head

I’m thinking about keeping track of all the songs that get stuck in my head over the course of a day. Here’s a list of a few recent examples.

The opening theme from Billy on the Street (great show!)
Cause We’ve Ended as Lovers by Jeff Beck
The music from Super Mario Bros. that plays when you get a star and are invincible. 
Billie Jean by Michael Jackson, as interpreted by Lizardfish.

Just to name a few.

I think I might need therapy.

Lots and lots of therapy.

Game On

We took a big step backwards today and I am fine with it.

I was feeling really crappy when I woke up this morning. Over the last few months I’ve been feeling crappy most mornings, but this morning was bad enough to call in sick. It was a lucky break. Not feeling sick, that sucks. But this other thing worked out. We had plans to switch from Xfinity to FiOS, again. Jen was planning on staying home today for the Verizon guy, but she had a work emergency and had to go in. Because I was home, we got to keep the appointment. I got out of bed when the appointment window opened and waited. About an hour later the door bell rang. It was the Verizon guy. The Verizon guy turned out to be someone I know going all the way back to elementary school. We played little league together. My dad was our manager and his dad was one of the coaches. We were in the same high school class and everything. An hour or so later we had a new internet provider and I went back to sleep.

It’s a little after 9:00pm now and I feel a little better. Good enough that I will be going to work tomorrow, for sure. At this point you might be thinking, what was the step backwards?

Well, I am watching the Bruins game. They are up 4–1 over The Blues in the second period. We can no longer say that we have cut the cable TV chord. In a few weeks when the Orange Pile of Fascist Goo is impeached, as we can pretty much guarantee he will be, I will be able to watch the coverage on any TV news network. More importantly, I can watch NESN again so I will be watching the Bruins and the Red Sox as often as I can, even though the Bruins are sucking up a storm for the third year in a row.

I’m also going to be able to watch The Walking Dead using the FiOS app on my iPad again. The downside is I have to suffer through commercials. The upside is I don’t have to wait until 3:00am for the iTunes file to be available.

Go Bruins.

Best Guitar Solo Ever

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=89OTZV-NHkU

This song was in my head for most of the afternoon. Written by Stevie Wonder, Produced by Sir George Martin, Performed by Jeff Beck. For my money, this song might have the best guitar solo in recorded history.

I just had to get that off my chest.

Why am I not Practicing?

This morning I got up and went outside and shoveled yesterday’s snow. There wasn’t a lot, but it still needed to be done. That was pretty much the end of me, energy wise, for this quiet Sunday at home.

I have all of my guitar gear here at home and it’s going to stay here until March. During the February RPM Challenge bonanza, I am going to bring my Marshall and one fuzz box to the band’s rehearsal space. All of the main gear, the Fender amp and the pedal board, are staying home for use during RPM. I’m not guaranteeing that it will be used, but it will be here if I have the opportunity.

So it’s all sitting around the house, and I’m sitting around the house, and the guitars are not being played, and the guitar player is sitting in a comfy chair not playing, and I don’t know why. I mean, I want to play. All weekend long I’ve been thinking, you know what? I want to go down stairs and just plug the Strat into the Deluxe Reverb and just strum some bluesy chord changes for a while. You know, not really practice anything specific, or try to write anything new… just play for the sake of playing.

But the snow, damn it. I just haven’t had the energy. I haven’t been able to peel myself off of this chair. I am seriously disappointed in myself. I have to get out of this mindset before February arrives.

Urgh.

RPM 2017

I just signed up for the 2017 RPM Challenge. I’ve been playing the game since 2007, and playing it successfully since 2012.

Given the political climate in the United States these days, I think we can safely assume there will be a lot of songs about hating fascism. I can’t say for sure that will be the case (last year most of the songs were about how the Earth is not flat…really) but if you are a betting man/woman…

I have already decided that my Fender amp and my pedal board are staying at home until March. If I’m going to do this, I want to do it right.

The musical chaos begins on February 1st.

Upping the Nerd Level

I’ve always been a nerd. Going all the way back to 1977 when Star Wars came out, my nerddom was well established. Two things have happened in the last few days that have actually upped the ante on my nerdishness.

This one is a little hard to see. It actually demonstrates nerd level alpha for me, but brilliant level alpha for my wife. I use a Windows machine when I work from home, but a Mac for everything else. I had a Windows laptop, but it’s kinda a P.O.S. I thought that maybe I would like to get a Windows desktop and set it up to share the same monitor I use with my Mac. My brilliant wife sketched out a way that we could plug everything into a switch and make it happen. Also, she just built a new Windows box and could therefore let me inherit her last machine! She set it all up yesterday, and I just set up the VPN so I can connect to my desk at work. Success! WOOHOO! My wife is a total genius who is more brilliant than any of you reading this, and I am a complete nerd!

Now for the really, really, super, uber nerd admission…

So, you know how when you watch an episode of The Walking Dead premier on AMC it is followed by the after show/talk show The Talking Dead? Well, when you’re not watching on cable you don’t get that hour long decompression discussion show and sometimes you kinda need that. Talking Dead is available on AMC.com, but not until later in the day on Monday, so if I watch the main show on iTunes when I wake up Monday morning, I can’t watch the Talking Dead until I get home from work. That doesn’t work nearly as well. So what to do?

Podcasts. I got this idea to see if there were any post-show podcasts that I could listen to on the way to work. Turns out there are a shit load of them. Most are recorded on Monday or Tuesday, but there are one or two that are already out on the ‘net by the time I leave for work. For the eight weeks the first half of season 7 was airing, I was listening to tons and tons of post show podcasts. Most of them are somewhere between annoying and okay. A few are enjoyable listens. All, even the bad ones, are worth a listen. When the show went into its mid-season break though I started to miss it. I decided to start watching the show from season one episode one and pick one podcast that’s been running since the beginning and listen to the episode corresponding to each episode I watched. Yes, Virginia… I am the biggest effin’ nerd who has ever lived. I found a podcast that is a discussion as opposed to just a recap, and everything I listened to from season 7 had a positive vibe, even when it was being critical of the show. Most of the podcasts were really, really negative, but this one was upbeat even when the episode was weak. I appreciated that. I finished season two yesterday and right now I am listening to the last two episode’s podcast episodes.

If that doesn’t win me the Biggest Nerd Alive award, then nothing will. Nothing.