No Word Yet

No word from the guitar shop today. The guitar looked finished in the pics he put on the bookfayce yesterday but I couldn’t really tell. There was likely some finishing work that needed to happen (file down, polish, adjust the new frets maybe?) that I don’t know anything about. Hopefully I will hear something tomorrow. I can’t pick it up on Wednesday as I’ll be in the office. I don’t even know if he opens his doors on any other days. His website books appointments on Wednesdays and Saturdays. Let’s see what happens, okay?

Two things that I need to do today. One, call a plumber to look at a leak in the old bathroom. Two, I have a doctors appointment after work. I also have 3.5 hours left in my work day. I am just wrapping up lunch now.

Harry is coming home this weekend. How awesome is that? Looking forward to having him around. Also really looking forward to Thanksgiving. The actual holiday we will travel to my sisters’. The following Saturday we will have Thanksgiving Part II (electric turkey boogaloo) with the kids and Jen’s folks. I am really excited about both. Not that I can eat like I used to, but I’ll still love every minute of both days.

When are we going to go Christmas tree shopping? We usually try to do that while the kids are home for Thanksgiving, but I don’t know how the schedules will work out this year. We’ll have to figure that out too.

Have I mentioned that I am absolutely freezing today? Stupid cold. Stupid winter (even though we’re still over a month away from the first day of winter, it’s basically winter already).

Okay. Lunch break is over. Get back to work, Robert. You have some custom code to deliver. Get to it.

Thirsty Tree

When we decorated the tree last week, Harry put a tree skirt around the base that covered the entire stand. We were no longer able to see into the stand to see the water level. Jen and I were just filling up a quart measuring cup with water and pouring it into the little funnel thing and forgetting about it.

Well, today I opened up the tree skirt to see the actual level and… I couldn’t see any water at all. Granted the angle is bad and so is the lighting so I couldn’t actually see all the way to the bottom, but there was nothing within my field of vision. It took a whole gallon before it looked full again. Fingers crossed we didn’t let the tree die over the last week with our measly quarts. Also, fingers crossed I didn’t just drown the poor bastard.

HoHoHo.

Don’t Forget the Water

I was listening to a hockey podcast this morning. It was three hockey writers shootin’ the breeze. They veered off topic and started talking about the pros and cons of real vs fake christmas trees.

Shit, thought I, I forgot to water the christmas tree yesterday.

The downside of putting up a real tree right after Thanksgiving is you have to be extra careful about maintenance. If you want to have a green tree on christmas morning then you better keep it watered. Otherwise Santa will be putting presents under some dead, ugly, brown thing with needles all over the floor.

I’ve also listened to a couple of amateur musician podcasts today and the topic of discussion in each one is the Get Back documentary. They all agree with me. Despite being 800 hours long, that movie is absolutely magnificent. It’s just an utter delight. Where else do you get to see the creative process where Paul McCartney literally wills the song Get Back into existence? That song didn’t exist at all until Paul sat there, strumming on his bass, forcing it out of his head. It’s just magic. It was genius at work. Literally.

One little item that I didn’t really catch had to do with Paul. For huge swaths of the movie the band is playing like shit. There’s so much noodling and farting around, whether it be all of them together, or just one or two, or whatever. The question was posed… in all of that mountain of playing… do you ever hear Paul play a bad note? I need to watch the whole thing again, but right now I can’t recall anything. So not only was he pulling super classic music out of his ass, over and over again, he is also playing so well he seems incapable of doing anything that doesn’t sound right. Hell, he’s even playing his Rickenbacker bass at one point and one of the strings pops out of the nut and lays against another string, and he’s still playing great. How is that possible?

Okay. Back to work. I had a deadline moved up on me and the pile of stuff I thought I had two days to do suddenly has to be done today. Enough of my yakkin’, let’s boogie!

Owl

The annual Owl post.

The Owl needs to be the second highest ornament on the tree, after the star. I had to wrap it around a branch to get it as high up as possible. A few minutes ago it unwrapped itself and fell a little, which made the Jawa the second highest. I fixed it.

More Progress

I started at noon and got interrupted at about 1:45. Guitars, babie. Guitars. I did rhythm and leads on three songs. Well… one song still needs one little eight bar solo, but I’ll get to that after the christmas tree is done. The kids should be here any minute. After that I’ve got two more songs ready for leads and one song that needs rhythm and leads. After that… I don’t know. Maybe add up the total time for the eight songs currently part of the project and if it hits 30 minutes declare myself done, otherwise try to add another one. I still have two days after today, but there is also a lot of mixing to do.

I’m sure I’ll snap a guitar pic or two when I get back to it later tonight. It is GibSunday after all. As for now, the plan is to decorate, maybe watch a TV show for a bit, maybe eat some dinner, and then back to it! I think the Walking Dead spin offs are going to have to wait until tomorrow (it is Sunday, after all).

Now, where did I put that owl ornament?