I saw the cats sitting together on top of the cat tree so I grabbed the camera.
I took this with the mirrorless christmas camera, the Nikon Z5. I also took one with dad’s film camera. The two new cats have made their first appearance on film. Let me tell you, they almost jumped through the roof when the mechanical shutter clicked. What was that, kitties?
It is 44 degrees outside, which almost feels like Spring. It’s 66 degrees at my desk in the cellar. It feels like 22 degrees. I’m freezing. No one warned me that losing 200 pounds would result in me being ice cold 24/7. Brr.
I have nothing really to write about. It’s almost 2:00pm and I am super late for starting lunch. I had to turn off the space heater while I was on a conference call and it feels like the temperature dropped 180 degrees. I’m cold!
I am doing a lunch time experiment. I am air frying some frozen french fries. The plan being to use french fries as a salt-delivery -system. Salt is supposed to help with whatever causes my occasional bouts of light headedness. Over the last few weeks I have honestly felt myself craving french fries. That might be the weirdest thing that’s ever happened to me, dietarily speaking. I’m craving salted peanuts too. It’s so weird. Peanuts and fries for lunch, babie.
Change of subject. Did I mention last night’s episode of The Last of Us yet? Season one, episode eight of nine. I’m still pretty screwed up over it. It was good, but it was dark. Like, super dark. Like, disturbingly dark. I almost watched it again this morning during my jogging (yogging) but I couldn’t bring myself to and switched to a Deep Space Nine episode. The one where we meet The Grand Nagus for the first time and thus usher in the annual Ferengi comic relief episode.
Back to the french fries thing, I suck at estimating small amounts of weight. We are supposed to track our food intake by weight, but we are supposed to weigh everything after it’s cooked. I shook what I thought was just a couple of ounces of frozen fries into the air fryer basket only to find that when they came out of the air fryer there were 5.5 ounces. That’s WAY too much for me today. I’ll eat as much as I can handle and see what happens.
Okay, I have to get back to the grindstone now. I really don’t have anything to write about anyway. Consider the bottom of this particular barrel scraped. We did dodge a bullet at work today. I won’t give details, but it made me happy. Okay, that’s good enough for now. Go eat yer lunch, Robert.
I was trying to get the helicopter, but I got the huge flare instead. Nice job, JJ Abrams.
I just ordered a new pair of sneakers from New Balance. I always order from New Balance because my feet require a shoe size that you cannot get in regular stores (14 extra-wide). You can get my size online from New Balance without a special order. That’s not the point of this post though.
The point of this post is that when I went to the site and started searching I went to the running shoes section. Yeah, I did that. If you’ve known me at any point between birth in May of 1971 and weight loss surgery in May of 2022 then you know how absolutely ridiculous the idea of me buying running shoes is. Run? Why run when not chased?*
Now? In 2023? Post gastric bypass Rob? Running for real might be on the table. Jen thinks I should try for next year’s Run Disney 5k. I mean, it’s preposterous, but… who knows.
*Oft quoted line from the film Real Genius. If you haven’t seen that movie, go find it. It’s a moral imperative.
Sorry for the barrage of cat pics tonight. It’s just one of those nights.
34 minutes until The Last of Us airs.
The RPM Challenge is over, but I still managed to play some guitar today. I’m up to three new song ideas. I was thinking of trying to do two songs per month for the rest of the year, but I just had to keep going today. I don’t think I am going to do 10 songs in March, but will I? Who knows. It’s just good to play.
Why didn’t anyone tell me that NESN has an AppleTV app?
I just installed it and now I am watching spring training Red Sox baseball on my AppleTV! Will regular season games be blacked out by MLB? Will regular season Bruins games be blacked out? I have the account I’m using for the app tied to our Verizon cable account and NESN is in that package, so I don’t think so.
The next B’s game is Thursday. Fingers crossed until then.
Random cat moment…
I learned the jist of slide guitar technique very early on in my playing days. Keep the slide parallel to the fretboard, don’t put it behind the fret like you would with your finger, put it directly over the fret and don’t push down into the fretboard. Use the fingers behind the slide to slightly mute the strings so they don’t buzz like nuts. Pick with your fingers and try to sit on the strings you’re not playing, again to keep them from ringing and buzzing in ways you don’t want to hear.
I was never that much of a fan of playing slide though for two reasons. One, because it sort of felt like I was wearing handcuffs. I mean having four fingers to fret with is struggle enough, now I want to play with effectively one? I think that’s a legit reason to not enjoy playing slide, but the bigger reason has always bothered me and frankly it pisses me off.
The second reason is intonation. For some reason my eyes looking at the slide’s position over the frets and my ears hearing whether I am in tune or not just cannot for the life of me get together and agree. The result is that when I try to play slide I end up horribly out of tune. It’s infuriating to me. Why? I bend strings constantly and my ear is always always always able to tell my fingers when to stop bending. I’ve always been able to do it. No one ever taught me how to bend and stay in tune, I have just always done it. If you hear me bend a string and it goes out of tune, 99% of the time it is because there is something wrong with my fingers and I am unable to put the string where it needs to be. I am able to stay in tune when I bend without any extra thinking or effort on my part. Why then can I not do it with a slide? What’s the difference? Come on, ears. Do your friggin’ job.
Over the last couple of days I’ve been thinking about trying to learn some new techniques on the guitar. Push myself a little, you know? Last night I started looking at slide tutorials on the youtubes. I figured I could learn some Elmore James tunes and see what happens.
Now I am not saying this is going to happen. It’s just a thought. More like just a fantasy. Failing to stay in tune with a slide pisses me off, and it pisses me off quickly which means I am unwilling (mentally unable?) to practice and thus get better. Playing in alternate tunings also tends to get under my skin and make me want to stop and do something else. So slide in an alternate tuning might be a double whammy that sends me packing right fast.
I don’t know. Maybe we’ll see what happens.
