That Was a Day

I’m down to the last few minutes of the work day on this screwy Thursday. I was out the last two days and figured I’d spend the first hour or so today sifting through the hundreds of emails in my inbox. It didn’t take long for that plan to go down the crapper. One customer with a critical issue lead to three of us from my group spending the day on the phone along with a bunch of other co-workers. We hashed it out and fixed it but woah was that a grind.

I actually feel pretty good about the state of the universe from a work perspective. From every other perspective? Yeah, right.

I am too tired and fried to think of anything else to write. I’m hoping for an easy commute tonight but yeah, right. What else? I don’t know. It’s May 1st. Happy May. This month will see my birthday, mother’s day, my step son’s college graduation, my step daughter’s birthday, Memorial Day, and our wedding anniversary. That’s what I call busy. May is a good month. Here’s hoping we get spectacular weather and not dreary, rainy gloom like we’ve been getting the last few months. The sun only comes out during the work week now. Weekends are gross, weather wise. I need that trend to stop and do a full 180.

Okay. It is now 5:30pm and I am clear to punch out and go home. Wish me luck on my commute.

Busiest Day Ever

I can’t even tell you how busy this work day has been. I haven’t had a minute over the last four hours where I haven’t been on a conference call. It’s nuts. I have to go pee, and I need to eat lunch, and neither is an option right now and won’t be for a while.

Here’s a cat. I hope it helps.

No Spoilers

It’s frustrating. I watched last night’s three episodes of Star Wars Andor and I want to write a 100,000 word essay on how incredible the show is right now but I don’t want someone who hasn’t watch the new episodes yet to accidentally come to this page and read what I wrote and get spoiled.

I want to talk about what’s happening on Ghorman. I want to share what I was thinking about Bix’s future and how wrong I was (for now at least). I want to rave about the Krennic/Mon scene and how fantastic it was. I want to praise Disney for the Vel/Cinta scene and Vel’s rant at the end. I want to mention how weirdly relieved I was when Syril went home to Coruscant. I want to admit that I had to fight back the urge to literally cheer out loud when Bix and Cassian completed their mission at the end of episode six.

I suppose I could go to reddit and find their Andor sub and write it all out there, but there has been so much shit posted on the other Star Wars shows from people who hated the show based on things that had nothing to do with the show (looking at you, assholes who spewed bile at Acolyte). I just don’t want to be any place that would draw people like that. I am sure I could find other forums somewhere but I don’t know.

I am listening to a two hour podcast episode recapping episodes four, five, and six (Children of the Watch). Once that’s finished (about 25 minutes from now) I might just start watching the three episodes again. I am that invested in this show right now. I just don’t want it to end.

Boss

When I was a kid and starting to become obsessed with guitar gear, there weren’t a lot of options around. My local music stores carried pedals from DoD and Boss for the most part. You could find occasional Ibanez, MXR, or Electro Harmonix pedals, but for the most part it was DoD and Boss. The few pedals I owned were DoD. Every time I took a Boss pedal for a test drive I was massively underwhelmed. Those music store visits back in the late 1980’s lead to a lifetime of not liking Boss gear. To this day I have never owned a Boss pedal because I have never played through one that I liked. The closest I’ve come is a Keeley pedal (the Super Phat Mod) which is a modified version of a Boss Blues Driver pedal. I like the Keeley pedal, but I don’t love it (unlike my Keeley D&M Drive which I absolutely adore).

I have never consciously boycotted Boss, I just never wanted anything they sold…

Until now.

A few years ago a couple of companies released super sophisticated amp load boxes. Universal Audio put out the Ox, which seems like the greatest thing since sliced bread. Unfortunately you can almost buy a car with the amount of money you need to shell out for an Ox.* Boss released a similar item called the Tube Amp Expander. The reviews I watched made the thing look pretty amazing, though maybe not quite as amazing as the Ox. The price was similar though and I never gave it a second thought.

Not long ago Boss released a new product. It’s a smaller version of the Tube Amp Expander. It’s called the Tube Amp Expander Core. It has all of the functionality I would want but at a much lower price. Granted, $700 is a ton of money for something like this (in my book, at least) and I don’t know if that price is before or after the orange shit clown’s Japanese tariffs. It is a low enough cost to make me consider it, but probably still too high to actually pull the trigger. It would be really cool to be able to run a direct signal out of my Fender Deluxe Reverb and into my Audio Interface, or even directly into my Macintosh.

…….it’s Boss though…. if I tried one out, history dictates that I would be disappointed. Still…….. oh the places I could go with a box like that. We’ll have to see how the economy holds up in the near future. There’s a really good chance the orange shit clown could collapse the whole country which would take the decision to blow $700 on a reactive load box out of my hands, you know?

Anyway, here’s a video that I can drool over as I watch it over and over again.

*Slight exaggeration

Mouse Hunt

I mentioned in a post yesterday that the cats were on a mouse hunt. They were going all kinds of crazy from room to room. Stalking for a while, chasing for a while, pouncing for a while. It was distracting and entertaining. I told Robin the Cat that if she caught the mouse I would give her treats.

Last night before bed I found that their endeavors were successful. There was a very small little mouse on our bedroom floor, dead as a door nail, and two cats up high on the furniture guarding over it. I scooped up the fallen rodent soldier and took it outside. Then I went to the top of the refrigerator and took down the bag of cat treats and gave our mouse hunters their reward. Good work, cats. Thank you for protecting our home. Guard cats.

If I had caught the mouse I would have taken it outside alive, but I knew there was slim chance of that. I was busy working and getting ready for today’s medical thing and I knew the cats were going to get it. This is the first time they have killed a mouse (that I know of) but it was just a matter of time. We live in the woods. Critters are a thing.

Thank you, mousers. Congratulations on a job well done. Also, thank you for leaving it where I could find it and for not offering it up like a present in the middle of the night or anything. Most appreciated. Maybe I’ll give you more treats today.

This Blows

It is 3:20am. I have been up for an hour now. I had to take a pre-medical appointment dose of awful meds last night after work, and I had to take a second dose in the middle of the night. It took me a long time to get through it and now I have to be sick for a couple of hours. Are any of my current problems gastric bypass related, or is it just the prep-meds? I don’t know. Hooray. This sucks.

My appointment is at 7:30 so I still have four hours to go until the actual start of this garbage. Hopefully a few hours later I will be back home and able to eat food and able to sleep the last of this thing off.

Hooray.

This sucks.

Seven Hours Later

My last post was published seven hours ago. I’m hanging in there but really can’t wait for this crap to be over. I’m fasting ahead of a medical test and I am hungry. I barely have a stomach left after gastric bypass surgery, but what I have is really jonzin’ for a snack, know what I mean? No hunger pains yet, which is odd given that I get hunger pains all the time. Maybe my brain is trying to protect my stomach? Who knows.

I can’t eat today, but the birds can.

240/365

That is today’s photo a day challenge pic. Blurry backgrounds are fun. Bokeh.

The cats are in a state of hyper vigilance right now. There is a mouse in the house. It was in my home office earlier but it got away. In was later seen in our bedroom but I think it got away again. Both cats are on the hunt so it’s days are numbered. I will catch it and bring it outside if I can, but the feline avengers might not give me the opportunity.

Here’s a picture of Robin from before the mouse presented itself.

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Here’s one of Lily. Robin was already stalking the rodent invader at this point, but Lily wasn’t in on it yet. She was blissfully unaware.

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