It was 10:30 at night. I still had 40% of my move goal left to do. Jen was asleep so I snuck down cellar and yogged for a while. Once my move goal was closed (stand and exercise goals had been closed for many hours by then) I took a little time to recover and then…
That’s right, kids, the guitar playing streak is alive. I only played for about 10 minutes but it counts, babie!
Ladies! You don’t both fit on there together anymore! Come on!
This one isn’t terrible. It’s not good, but it’s not terrible either.
I’m so jealous.
I had four songs ready for me to record vocals and I just got home from recording in the car. I picked off all four songs. Sweet.
Now I have four songs ready to mix, four ready for lead guitars, eight ready for lyrics, and one still waiting on rhythm guitars. How much of that pile of stuff will I get to today? Hopefully a good chunk of it all. It’s a music kinda day today, I think.
There were a number of possible titles for this post. Hills. Don’t Get Cocky. The App Crashed. The App Lied to Me. In the end I summarized them all by just going with That Sucked.
I tried to get a little creative with today’s couch to 5k thing. I varied my route a little. That was a mistake. That put my running times right onto the worst hilly spots in the neighborhood. Uphill, every time I was on a run. Yeah, that sucked. Way to be an arrogant ass, Robert. Add to that the app crashing twice as I was starting. That lead to my watch not tracking things, which lead to me trying to get the watch to work which lead to the phone not tracking anymore, though the voice over continued. That means the app doesn’t think I finished workout number three, and it doesn’t have about half of the workout’s stats, including my much varied map. Stupid app. Add to that the app telling me, as the voice over was finishing, that workout number three is the last free workout and now I have to subscribe. It didn’t tell me how much a subscription costs, but thanks a lot for the bait and switch, you lying asswipes.
I guess the upside is that I did workout number three, which is eight minutes longer than numbers one and two. Walk for three minutes, run for one, repeat eight times instead of six times. That means I closed my workout ring for the day. That’s nice. I have to do this workout again in order for it to track in the app, but I was thinking of doing that anyway because I had such a tough time with it.
Also, I visited the stone state line marker and took a picture with my phone. This thing is on the short list of things to shoot on film. Someday.
Back in the olden days of this here blog I used to regularly complain about having to be on call for work. There were a bunch of different varieties of on call-ness and I didn’t enjoy any of them. They all stressed me out. The good part though is that they usually come with some form of compensation. That was something I could get behind, and that was why I took the on call shifts when they were available to me.
When I was promoted, almost 10 years ago, I made the decision to make the on call shifts available to my staff whenever possible. I wanted them to receive the compensation and I pledged to myself that I would only take shifts when my entire staff were unavailable. As it turns out, I haven’t had to take many on call shifts since. There was one where I was covering a customer’s catastrophic system failure and I knew I was going to be working around the clock for a whole weekend. I took that one to protect my staff. That was a, “the buck stops here” kinda thing. It was awful, but I handled it. Every other on call shift, and the pay/comp time/whatever compensation was involved went to them. I feel pretty good about that track record.
Well… looks like I am on call this weekend. Sort of. Not exactly, but close. I’ve been the go to contact for the last couple of weeks anyway. It just seems easier to have me be the off hours contact too.
Yeah… I’m starting to remember why I didn’t like being on call. Memories, am I right?
This morning I Googled “5k races near Methuen, MA”.
There are a bunch. There’s a weekly free race in a park in Cambridge. There’s one in Londonderry in August that costs $35. I like the sound of free better, but Londonderry is closer to home.
I checked the couch to 5k app I’m using. Tomorrow is another walk three minutes then run three minutes plan, but it repeats eight times instead of just six.
I am getting so very far ahead of myself. Let’s actually run three miles at once before we start thinking of doing it with other people around, m’kay?
Magically, the streak of consecutive days where the guitar was played for at least a couple of minutes has reached 18. I put rhythm guitar tracks onto one of the final two songs from May. Only one more song to go. Last night I wrote lyrics for two of the June songs, and after I finished playing the gitter I wrote lyrics for a third. There will be car music tomorrow, though I am not sure how that schedule will work out.
I used the direct out from the Bassbreaker 15 amplifier. It calls it cabinet emulation, not simulation, but whatever. It sounds… okay. Not great. The little nutube Vox amp probably sounds better. I’ll stick with this for a while and see if it grows on me.
Pics:
As for tomorrow. Here’s the plan. I am going to get up at the ass crack of dawn and do the third Couch to 5k training. I expect I will die during that, but once it’s over I will go inside and eat breakfast and recover. Then after breakfast is done, and the one hour pause after eating before I can drink water again is also done, I’ll jump in the car, drive to a secluded place, and crank out some vocal tracks.
Hopefully. We’ll see if I can stick to that plan or not. Wish me luck.
Inside the Red Head's Head 