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.

DSC_3810

Today is Going to Absolutely Suck

I have something scheduled for tomorrow. It’s a medical thing. A test. It requires some heavy duty prep-work over the 24 hour period before the test.

The side effect of the preparations is going to be me having one seriously awful day today. Like, grade A suck. Its the sort of thing that would suck for a normal human, but the stomach is involved so people like me who have had gastric bypass surgery (three years ago this coming weekend)… I wonder if it will be worse for me. Probably not, but maybe? We’ll have to wait and see.

Clearly I am not going to share what’s going on until it’s over, if then. 24 hours from now (it is 7:15am) I will be at the clinic, hopefully getting ready to get it over with. I just have to deal with some awful today and a small chunk of tomorrow.

Shit.

Practice: Complete

Just got home from band practice. Lucy did not pull the football away from Charlie Brown.

My finger tips ARE KILLING ME. The last two songs we did I could barely play. My fingers just said, “yeah we’re done for the day” and that was it. Outside of that, things went pretty well. There probably won’t be a practice next week as our drummer is traveling, but after that I hope we can get onto something like a regular schedule.

238/365