Tag: Death

Rest in Peace

Today is the day. The day the American Experiment comes to a pathetic, self inflicted, fascist end.

I’m not going to watch the “inauguration”. Beyond the previous sentence, I plan to ignore it entirely and just try to pretend that it doesn’t happen even though that is just an old jerk being silly and deluding himself. There is an afternoon Bruins game today. It is Martin Luther King day and the B’s always play a day game. You would think that would make me feel a tiny bit better but the Bruins suck right now and MLK’s memory is being spit on by the other events.

Rest in peace, American democracy. 248 years was a good run, I guess. To the rest of the civilized world, I am so sorry.

Services

I am working in the office today. I’ve had a few meetings and I just wrapped up my lunch. I have another meeting booked for 45 minutes from now but I will be leaving for the day shortly after it starts. Today is my Uncle Jim’s wake. It’s actually a lot closer to my office building than it is to home so working from here actually makes getting there a ton easier. Otherwise I probably would have taken the whole day off. I took tomorrow off as I will be going to the funeral in the morning.

It’s so sad the way my mother’s family has fallen apart over the last year. Three of the four siblings passed away within nine months of each other. Only the baby in the family is left and she has some health concerns of her own. It’s been a tough year for the extended family. I am one of 22 first cousins and most of us are on a facebook messenger chat together. Anytime I get a notification of an update to that chat I get scared. It shouldn’t be like that, but it is. Hopefully we can all find a way to generate some happy news in the next year. I don’t know how, but maybe we can figure it out.

Speaking of happier news, Harry is coming home tonight. He needs to have some work done on his car and he is taking it to a shop near us because he couldn’t find a shop near Burlington, VT that could schedule him any time soon. We’re not sure how long he’ll be home. It will be at least as long as the car fix takes. Hopefully he’ll watch a Doctor Who or two with me. I bet I can talk him into it.

Okay, lunch break is over. Time to go back to work for the shortened afternoon.

More Bad Extended Family News

It never rains, it pours. My mother, Ellen, had two sisters and a brother. Her older sister, Joan, passed away in November after an illness that was alarmingly similar to what my mother went through. My mother passed away six days ago. Her brother, Jim, has been ill for a while and has been in and out of the hospital over the last three weeks or so. We are not sure, but we got some news today that makes it look like things may be turning for the worse for him.

I feel so bad for my Aunt Nancy. She lost both of her sisters in a three month span and now her brother’s health may be failing as well. As painful as it is for us, it must be so much worse for her.

Sad Day

One of my father’s friends, who also used to be my boss (twice), passed away this morning. I haven’t had a chance to talk to my father yet. His friend (my former boss… twice) had been ill for a while. This isn’t a surprise. It sucks though.

It’s also sad that Queen Elizabeth II has passed away as well. It doesn’t effect me at all, but to all in the United Kingdom, my sympathies. 96 years old and 70 years on the job? I think that qualifies as a “good run.”

I am 51 years old and I have never lived in a world where England had a King. Is the correct saying now the Queen is dead, long live the King? I’ve never heard it said that way, but it makes logical sense.

Rest in peace, Charlie. Rest in peace, Elizabeth.

ADDENDUM: I should clarify that my father’s friend’s name is Charlie. Saying rest in peace Charlie was not a political commentary on the future of King Charles III.

Now I Have to Worry About This Too?

Climate Change. You hate it. You actually hate it more than you hate the people who pretend it isn’t happening, but only by a little.

As we watch the west coast burn, and the Northeast drown, and last month the Northwest melt, and all of the awful things they warned us about 10-20 years ago start happening… it’s scary, right?

Well now there’s this.

Back story, earlier today I took a shower. Also this morning, Harry left after a brief stop over (long enough to watch the Loki finale). He’s spending the weekend visiting Bellana in Vermont. I hope it doesn’t rain as much for him as it did for us. Anyway. I took a shower before he left, and after he left I asked Jen for a hug cause I was feeling sad about him leaving and once the hug started I told her it wasn’t going to stop. She laughed at me and told me I was too sweaty. Yup. It’s summer, it’s humid, I’m fat, I sweat a lot.

Fast forward about an hour and a half and I am wrapping up my morning car music. The sports radio station I was listening to was starting a segment talking about MMA. Once I stopped vomiting I plugged in my iPhone and picked the podcast episode at the top of my latest episodes list. It was a podcast called Cyber from a podcast network called Vice. It’s in my subscriptions list (Apple’s podcast doesn’t use the word subscribe anymore. It uses follow instead. I guess it’s because subscribe is too complicated a word to understand) but I don’t think I’ve listened to a whole hell of a lot of their content. I listened to this one though.

The episode was called “It’s Not The Heat, It’s The Humidity That’s Killing Us”. Sounds like fun.

The topic dealt with something called “wet bulb conditions“. Never heard of it. Apparently it’s a point where the temperature and humidity levels combine TO KILL YOU. You sweat in order to cool down your body. Apparently there is a point where there is too much moisture in the air for your sweat to evaporate so your body doesn’t cool and you spontaneously die.

LOVELY.

Now, as a fat guy who sweats a lot I have this shit to worry about too? Wonderful.

Merry christmas, everyone.

Positive Covid-19 Milestone

Holy shit, folks! Massachusetts hit a magical milestone in the saga of Covid-19!

According to the Massachusetts Department of Public Health Covid-19 Dashboard, the number of Confirmed Covid-19 deaths yesterday was exactly zero. The number of deaths due to probable Covid-19 cases was also zero.

In other words, NO ONE IN MASSACHUSETTS DIED FROM COVID-19 YESTERDAY!

None
Zero
Zilch
Nada

How awesome is that?? According to my spreadsheet there were three dates since March 2020 where there were no deaths. All of those dates correspond to points where the state changed their reporting/counting/whatever method/definition/whatever and two of those dates actually had negative numbers for the daily count. At least according to my spreadsheet, that is. The last date that had a zero death count without any reporting shenanigans involved was March 20, 2020.

Happy nobody died in Massachusetts day!

WOOHOO!

The Second Wave?

I just read an article about a high school kid in Massachusetts who went in to school AFTER receiving a positive Covid-19 test. It hurts to find out that all of the work you’re doing to keep everyone safe is the exception rather than the rule. You would think that all of us would be working to keep everyone safe, but apparently that’s not even close to the case.

Jen was just telling me she read stories about what looks like a second wave starting to hit Europe. It’s only a matter of time before the second wave hits the US too. The difference is, in the US case the first wave hasn’t ended yet. It’s not even close to ending. We’re just ignoring it. When the second wave hits here it’s going to merge with the first wave and turn into a tsunami of death… and kids with positive tests are still going to go to school.

Sure, Lets All Go Back to School

The United States of America topped the 160,000 COVID-19 death mark today. Aren’t you proud of us? We topped the 4,000,000 infections mark 16 days ago, on July 23rd. At the current rate we should hit 5,000,000 on Sunday or Monday. That will be one million new cases in 18 or 19 days. One million cases in less than three weeks.

But sure, we should be fine letting all of the kids in the country go back to school. There’s nothing to worry about.

As the immortal Frank Derbin used to say…

Nothing to see here.

Distract Me

I want to be able to set up my guitar rig to run two amplifiers at once.  I need an A/B/Y switch with a phase inverter and a ground loop lift.  This looks perfect.

I want to be able to record one of the band’s upcoming shows.  I had a method in place to record rehearsals on two tracks for stereo.  One mic on the bass amp, one on the guitar amp, two on the drums.  We already had three vocal mics, but at practice I was just taking the mono out of the PA head to cover all three voices.  I don’t want to record a gig that way.  I want to record each mic onto it’s own track so that I can mix it later.  That means I need to find a way to get seven separate audio tracks into GarageBand (or maybe Logic?) simultaneously.  That means I need a new USB interface that can handle more than two inputs.  This looks perfect.

I want to learn a new programming language.  My wife and I are thinking that Ruby would be a lot of fun to learn.  I am going to set up Ruby school a couple of nights a week and we are going to learn it together.  Before we start though, we need a text book to work through.  O’Reilly usually publishes great programming books.  This might be perfect.

There are good, healthy reasons for me to want to do all of these things, as well as many more.  I want to better myself.  I want to learn new things.  All good reasons.

There’s one other reason though…

If I am working on projects like this, I won’t be thinking about how our fascist president has attacked two countries during his three months in office, and now he’s threatening to attack a third, and moving troops to face off with a fourth.

If I’m mixing a recording of the band, I won’t be thinking about how the world is about to end.

Greg Lake

Out of the three members of Emerson Lake and Palmer, only Carl Palmer remains.

I woke up this morning to find out that Greg Lake, vocalist, bassist, guitarist, all around great musician, had passed away after a battle with cancer. It was yet another musical kick in the teeth from the hell beast we call 2016.

I spent much of my day listening to ELP and the first King Crimson record. All of Mr Lake’s finest moments.

This year is an asshole.

Rest in peace, Greg Lake.