Last night: Venus over Chelmsford.

It’s Sunday.

I was out of bed at 5:21.

Emergency? You ask? Bad dreams? Had to piss wicked bad?

Nope.

I had to play bass guitar.

What am I, nuts?

Yesterday was supposed to be 10 bass guitar parts recorded day. I didn’t make it into the cellar at all. Today became 10 bass guitar parts recorded day. I got up at 5:20ish and worked until 7:15ish and only got six of them done. Still, six is impressive seeing as I haven’t played a bass in something like two years.

I consistently forget just how badly those humongous strings hurt my fingers. Fricken’ Ouch babie!

Today is Patrick’s Christening. No more bass playing tonight. I now officially expect to fail the RPM challenge, but I won’t stop working on these crappy songs until they’re done.

Really? 5:20am on a Sunday? To play bass? But I don’t play bass.

Almost forgot to post this one.

Are you curious to know when Jen and I are getting married? (and the counter on the bottom of this page isn’t clue enough?)

Click here to see how much longer we have to wait before we get hitched.

Now you can carry on with your regularly scheduled ‘net surfin’.

Ever visit NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day site?

I saw this one recently. Check it out…

The original post is here. It’s not fair. It takes less than half a second for the International Space Station to cross the face of the moon, and some jerk who isn’t me nailed this.

Just thought I’d share my jealousy.

Carry on.

First… screw you mother nature. There, I said it. I friggin hate winter. I have had it. I am done. I am packing up my family and moving some place hot. I’m thinking really hot. No more of this Florida talk, or the Caribbean, or any crap like that. I’m talking Northern Africa hot. I’m thinking Ethiopia. Somewhere we can go to never ever ever never ever ever never ever see snow and ice again.

All of the mountains of snow we got in December and January were pretty much gone. Only the snowbanks remained. We had a full week of temps in the 40’s and higher. It felt like the end of the horror was upon us.

Then we got a little on Wednesday. That sucked but it was all right. It was only a little and it was gone quick (lots of Thursday rain helped). Yesterday I checked weather.com to see what the next 10 days worth of temps were. I saw one day with a high of 32, everything else was well above freezing.

What I didn’t look at was the actual forecasts themselves. Jen mentioned a chance of snow on Sunday. Noooo says I. Then just before bed I looked out the window and everything was covered in snow. Noooo says I again.

I opened the door to go outside this morning and there was only about an inch of snow. It looked much the same as the last accumulation, that is to say, nuttin. Then I got to the car and grabbed the snow brush and tried to clean the car.

The inch of snow came off easy… but it revealed about a quarter inch of ice. It took me almost 20 minutes to scrape the ice off of the two cars, and even then it was a piss poor job. Noooo says I yet again. It sucked. Cars were sliding all over the place. Traffic on route 93 South was nightmarish. The only upside of this friggin’ commute was that the storm stayed up North. Once I got into Lincoln it was fine.

Screw you mother nature. I hate you and your winter.

Now, what the hell was I going to talk about again? Oh yeah, RPM…

The RPM Challenge is to record 10 songs or 35 minutes worth of music during the month of February. There used to be a push to write your 10 songs during February too. I have always put my focus there over a high quality recording.

This morning I put together the bare bones of song number 10. I went into this thinking I would try to write quick and easy songs, including some that would just be a guitar/vocal kinda thing. I found myself this morning with nine songs, all of which will end up with at least two tracks of percussion (drum machine cop out style), a bass, at least two tracks of guitar, and anywhere from one to three vocal parts. So today for the 10th and final song I went with a simple quiet 12-bar (a cop out, yes, but I had planned to throw a couple of those in this time for speed’s sake and this one makes two) that probably will end up with a bass, one guitar, and one vocal. Simple. There. I might use the little tiny bongo drums type thing I bought at the Moroccan Pavilion at Epcot center too. As for now the percussion consists of a click track. Watch, it’ll end up being the best song of the bunch.

Now I have to figure out 10 bass guitar parts (again, quick and easy is the key), rerecord 10 rhythm guitar parts, ad-lib 10 lead guitar parts, write 10 lyrics, and write and record 10 melodies… and I only have eight more days. Yeah, I’m gonna finish this thing.

Wish me luck.

This is why…

Can you say “Best Player on Earth?” I can.

Never mind the scoring-a-goal-while-sliding-on-your-ass finish, how about that spin-o-rama pass off the boards to himself?

Proof that aliens are among us? Quite possibly, yes.

Noteflight lets you write music scores and plays back what you wrote. I’m just messing around, music theory 1 style.

Three months ago today I launched this useless blog. If my math is correct this will be post number 263. That’s approximately 2.86 posts per day. I am up to 873 hits. If I were an egotist I would calculate the number of hits per day, but way too many of them are actually me so that number isn’t a good representation. Still, when I check where the hits come from there are a lot that aren’t me. That’s kinda nice, even if there are only two or three people hitting regularly, including me. It warms the cockles of my heart, so to speak. Leave a comment. Share the love. If you have a google account you could always follow me too. If you use twitter you can follow robertjames1971, and if you use tumblr, all of my posts here and all of the crap I post to twitter are RSS’d to my account here http://robertjames1971.tumblr.com/ so you can follow that too.

When did I become a content whore? Have I always been this way? Well… I did get 10,000 hits on the myspace blog I don’t use anymore… maybe I have always been a content whore. Who knew?

Enough shameless self promotion… on to the shameless self promotion!

I got up early to work on the RPM project, but not quite as early as I wanted. 5:20 instead of 5:00. I still managed to work out Lame Song #9. I am running into difficulties or two sorts.

First, yesterday the tape I am using errored at about 35:40. I was about 10 seconds into a take and didn’t notice for about three minutes. I hate when that happens. I rolled the tape about 10 seconds past that point and tried again and all worked well. Today I was at about the 38:40 mark when one of the tracks somehow printed all sorts of weird extraneous noise. It sounded like digital distortion, but the input levels had been really low. It almost sounds like the track was out of sync with itself. Because I failed to get out of bed at 5:00 I didn’t have enough time to do another take. So tomorrow the first thing I will do is dig out another tape and re-track today’s Lame Song. Not a big deal. I just can’t hit snooze twice again.

The other difficulty is that the well felt pretty dry today. I make no bones about the fact that everything I have written during this challenge has been crap of the highest order. I am working through multiple time constraints and running with whatever musical drivel comes out of my head. For Lame Songs #1-8 I came up with something usable… awful, but usable… very quickly. Not only that, but I have been coming up with (usually) three separate ideas that I have been working into these horribly lame songs. Today, not so much. I was noodling for a while without hitting on anything that was awful but usable. Everything was just awful. I ended up going the gimmick route and messing around with drop D tuning. It worked, I got something out of my pea-brain, but I am a little worried about tomorrow.

Furthermore, RPM is just one February music challenge and I was trying to nail another one too. FAWM (can’t forget about that one) challenges you to write 14 songs in 28 days. All along I have been trying to get 10 new songs recorded, but aspiring to actually get 14. I’m worried about pulling that off now. 10 would be outstanding, but suddenly it would also be a little disappointing.

Still, optimism abounds! I will be back at it tomorrow!

Yesterday was just awesome.

After cranking out two RPM ideas and taking the kids to their father’s Jen and I spent the rest of the day just flaking out and being together and recharging our batteries.

We went to Breakfast at Sammy J’s in Salem, Nh. It’s a typical little greasy spoon/ice cream store on route 97. It’s cheap and it’s not bad, so on the rare occasions we go out for breakfast we try to go there. The downside is that it has a small parking lot that fills up very fast. It was a good day to go though as we got a spot right in front of the door.

After breakfast it was pretty much a watch movies and flake day. We had started watching Zoolander Sunday night but didn’t get very far so we went home and rolled it back a little (so that we could get back into the groove) and watched the rest. We then, obviously, spent pretty much the rest of the day talking only in Zoolander quotes.

I’m pretty sure there’s a lot more to life than being really, really, ridiculously good looking. And I plan on finding out what that is.

A eugoogoolizer… one who speaks at funerals

So join now, ’cause at the Derek Zoolander Center For Kids Who Can’t Read Good And Wanna Learn To Do Other Stuff Good Too, we teach you that there’s more to life than just being really, really, really good looking

I feel like I’m taking crazy pills!

You can read minds?

Male models don’t think for themselves.
That’s not true!
Yes it is, Derek.
Okay.

Obey my dog!

How can we be expected to teach children to learn how to read if they can’t even fit inside the building?

Listen to your friend Billy Zane, he’s a cool dude!

There was a moment last night, when she was sandwiched between the two Finnish dwarves and the Maori tribesmen, where I thought, “Wow, I could really spend the rest of my life with this woman”.

If there is anything that this horrible tragedy can teach us, it’s that a male model’s life is a precious, precious commodity. Just because we have chiseled abs and stunning features, it doesn’t mean that we too can’t not die in a freak gasoline fight accident.

Dallas. 1963. John F. Kennedy.
Lee Harvey Oswald wasn’t a male model.
You’re goddamn right he wasn’t, but the two lookers who capped Kennedy from the Grassy Knoll sure as shit were!

(this is my favorite) I’m a hand model, mama. A finger jockey. We don’t think like the face and body boys… we’re a different breed.

…just to name a few.

From there it was off to lunch (I sense a food/movie trend here) at Harrison’s Roast Beef in… in… Andover? North Andover? Where the hell is that place? Any way, it’s a little roast beef sandwich shop near Jen’s office, which is also near Merrimack College. We go there on weekdays when it’s possible to have lunch together. ie: When I take a vacation day and she doesn’t. We even have our own table. Sort of.

Then it was back home where I finally put the universe back in order. Everything on the planet has been slightly off kilter for the last few months. The reason is simple. There existed a Kevin Smith film that I had not seen. Now I have seen it. All is right again.

Zach and Miri Make a Porno is not Kevin Smith’s best movie. It is however one funny flick. We were laughing our asses off from start to finish. It is also possibly the only movie ever made that successfully manages to bridge the gap between chick flick (which it is) and hardcore porn (which it is about).

Two words: Freakin’ Brilliant.

Of course when you watch a Kevin Smith DVD you can’t just budget yourself 90 minutes to two hours to watch the movie. You also have to spend a couple of hours watching the extras. Cut scenes, outtakes, and random other wicked funny stuff. I think we spent something like four hours on it.

After that it was time to order out dinner from Oakland Ave Pizza in Methuen, (this has turned into quite the commercial post. I should get kick backs from all three restaurants) some Family Guy and South Park, then a little quiet reading before bed.

It was just a great day.

This morning started off setting a personal record. I am up to crappy song #8 for the 2009 RPM Challenge. That’s my best showing in three tries, and there are still 11 days left. I’m also still not anywhere near being done and I haven’t even thought about the hard part yet. But progress is good and this is still very much a fun thing. Onward and Upward.

This morning we had a practical demonstration of the magic of Massachusetts February School Vacation week. We have two cars. We also have two key rings. We have two keys to the van, one on each ring. What we don’t have is two keys to the Saturn. One key ring has one, the other key ring does not. This morning at 7:00am Jen took the van to work. I was ready to leave about 10 minutes later. I grabbed my key ring and froze… the Saturn key was on Jen’s ring and Jen’s ring had probably made it all the way to North Andover by then. Crud.

I called Jen’s cell phone… went to voice mail. I sent her a text, no response. I went on my computer and checked google talk (another commercial right there) and she wasn’t logged in.

I figured she just hadn’t gotten to work yet and I’d give her a few more minutes. I answered an email and then called her again. I got the voice mail again but she beeped in while I was leaving it. She didn’t call back when I called the first time because her phone was acting weird and needed to be rebooted a couple of times. She was on her way home.

She got to the house, we traded key rings, I got a couple of extra bonus kisses goodbye (which made the whole thing totally worthwhile… we should take the wrong keys more often!), and I headed off to work. I knew all along that the Saturn was almost out of gas so I had to stop on Pelham Street to fill up. I started the car to leave the gas station at 8:01am. About 45-50 minutes later than I would have liked to have left for work. I got on the highway, drove a tad on the fast side. (cough cough, just a tad) and decided to play the percentages.

I have long given up on taking the highway to work. I drive on the interstates for about 10 miles and then go back roads for about 25 more. Today, however, is the day after a three day weekend… which hopefully means a noticeable chunk of morning commuters would take today off to make it a four day weekend. Also, in Massachusetts, it is school vacation week… which hopefully means a noticeable chunk of morning commuters would take the whole week off to stay at home with the kids. It was a risk, but I decided to go all highway.

It worked. Normally that route would have taken 80-90 minutes to get me to work. Today I was sitting at my desk, punched in, at 8:45.

I love school vacation week.

My very messy RPM workstation. Six songs underway.