We Did Not Win

You can tell by the fact that I signed in to work this morning that we did not win a billion gajillion dollars in the Powerball lottery last night. We didn’t even win a free ticket. Oh well.

On the upside though, I think I got a little raise today. Just a little one. There isn’t a lot to go around for raises right now so anything is welcome. The usual process is that someone tells me a raise is coming and then I get a document spelling it out. Today I got the document without anyone telling me it was coming. It works for me though. It’s not much but it’s enough to keep me in sea salt and vinegar peanuts for a couple of months at least.

The 1.5 billion gajillion dollar lottery would have been preferred, but I’ll take what I can get, with a smile.

Favorite Artists

Daily writing prompt
Who are your favorite artists?
View all responses

My favorite artists are all musicians. I’ll give you a short list, okay? I think the word “art” is probably a little too pretentious given the type of music all of these folks make/made. That’s okay. I like what I like, you know? You know it when you see it and all that.

  • Rush. I was a kid in 5th grade the first time I heard Rush and they had a monumental effect on me. They rewrote my future, musically and pretty much socially. They set me on a path as it were. It was odd how as their musical directions changed over the years it always lined up perfectly with how my own musical tastes were changing. They were always right where I needed them to be.
  • Throwing Muses. Rush changed my musical outlook when I was a kid and then continuously adjusted it again and again throughout the rest of my life. Throwing Muses did the same thing to me when I was in high school. Like most high school kids I was sure that I had the world figured out, musically speaking at least, and hearing The Muses for the first time turned that entire outlook upside down and backwards and inside out. It was a monumental change. I owe this band so much.
  • Eric Clapton. I share this one with a frustrated sigh. His career has been long and varied and huge swaths of it are totally uninteresting. Also, he’s demonstrated on a couple of occasions that he is a bit of a schmuck, and that is upsetting to me. Really, he’s just a spoiled child who seems to believe everything he reads even when what he reads is idiotic and clearly untrue. Putz. Still, from the start of his professional career through his first drug fueled semi-retirement in 1971 or so his guitar playing inspired me to play guitar in a way that no one else ever did. Before I heard Cream I was curious about learning the guitar. After I heard Cream I was obsessed with the idea and HAD to learn to play guitar. Clapton did that to me.

Those are the big ones. If art is meant to inspire then those three are the biggest sources of inspiration for me. It seems too short a list though, so let’s add a few honorable mentions for luck.

  • Jeff Beck
  • Yes
  • Pink Floyd
  • Genesis
  • BB King
  • Jimmy Page
  • Albert King
  • The Pixies
  • Nirvana
  • Pearl Jam

Just to name a few.

Powerball

We’re not lottery playing people in this house. Jen and I will splurge for a ticket or two when a jackpot gets insanely huge.

Powerball is insanely huge.

We bought a couple of tickets.

We had to drive to a store tonight (a drive through, social distance like a boss) and on the ride over we planned out what we will do with our winnings. Our boat load of winnings.

I plan on calling Kirk Hammett and asking him how much he wants for Peter Green’s Les Paul.

Be Careful Out On Those Internets, Kids

I am not going to share any details because a: it’s not my info to share and, b: it’s none of your damn business.

Having said that, be careful out in the wilderness that is the internets, kiddos. It’s dangerous out there. You click the wrong link and someone scoops up your login credentials and BOOM, you’re private info is public. Worse, it happens at work and your company’s private info is public. Worse, worse, it happens to your customer and your customer’s private info is public and then you have to dive in and try to clean up the mess.

No one I know or work with was involved in such a thing, but the clean up when it happens to other people around you can be super stressful.

So be careful out there. You don’t want to go through any of this crap, and you don’t want to accidentally put your friendly neighborhood support staff through it in your place either. Yikes, bro.

Today’s Photo a Day

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I only played for a few minutes this morning. I noodled on a song idea. It’s not much of anything and I don’t know if I will even do anything with it. I’m feeling a little creatively brain fried right now. Not sure why.

I’m about to punch in to work. We’re going to be at half strength today. Hopefully being Columbus Day means that most people will have the day off and we won’t have a lot of issues to deal with. There were a few things going on over the weekend that some of my staff may have been pulled into. I will get a status update on all of that shortly. Hopefully it stays quiet.

Okay then, let’s get this Monday started. Duck and cover, folks… here we go!

Favorite Hobbies

Daily writing prompt
What is your favorite hobby or pastime?
View all responses

It’s been a while since the daily writing prompt was so blatantly a repeat. They’ve already asked us about our hobbies, and recently. Oh well, once more into the breech?

My Number One hobby is music. Playing it, listening to it, writing it, recording it, thinking about it, everything. Guitar and saxophone, analog and digital, if it’s musical I’m into it. Except country music. Hell no on that front.

Honorably mention go to photography, I’m not good at it but putting a camera (digital or film) into manual mode and getting an exposure right is pretty cool. Another would be writing this silly little blog. I sure do it enough, right? Being a hockey and baseball fan is another, though my 21st century attention span keeps getting shorter and shorter and it makes it tough to watch games. I like good TV and I love a good movie. I used to list reading near the top of my hobbies list but ever since I started wearing bifocals it’s just become more difficult to focus my eyes than I ever thought it would, and they get really tired really fast.

So there you go, probably the same list of hobbies as the last time they asked about hobbies.

Back Home

We’re back home. We were out for about five hours. The trip was a bit of a bust from the leaf peeping and photo taking point of view. From the perspective of Jen and me jumping in the car and road trippin’ for the hell of it, it was a total success.

We didn’t stop anywhere. As soon as we got North of Concord, NH the clouds moved in and everything looked gloomy and bad. We dipped our toes into the White Mountain region and then turned around and took the long way home.

I took exactly one photograph:

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Leaf Peeping

The weather forecast was kinda crummy today but the reality isn’t too terrible. Jen and I are going to give leaf peeping a shot. That will let us go out in the world while still being paranoid about spreading any last vestiges of the Covid… even though that is literally not a thing.

I have my Nikons in the camera bag. The Z5 mirrorless with the new 28mm lens, and the FG-20 film camera with the 35-70mm zoom. I even turned on the SnapBridge app connection so that I can possibly post Z5 shots to the blog while we’re out. There was only one shot on the memory card and it crossed to my phone and it’s Robin, of course.

Lets see how it goes today. Fingers crossed for some cool views and decent shots.