Tag: iphoneography

Traffic Jam

I got stuck in a traffic jam on a back road in Salem, NH tonight. There was a flock of wild turkeys crossing the street… single file… yeah, we were stopped there for a long time. There were at least 20 of them, but I couldn’t count them because they kept hiding behind the other stopped cars.

The irony of getting stopped by turkeys on the day after Thanksgiving is… dare I say it… delicious?

No! Please, No!

It’s not that I hate xmas, I don’t really. It’s just that I want it to wait. I want the xmas season to last about at most 4-5 days. Hell, I will be generous and let it last a whole week. What I hate is that it’s not even December yet and we’re being hammered over the head with all things xmas and there is no escape.

I give in to everything because I know how happy it makes my family. I am a scrooge surrounded by xmas lovers. We bought the tree today because the kids will be here this weekend before going back to Vermont and this weekend is the only time we’ll all be home to decorate. Seriously, if it were just up to me I would put up the tree on xmas eve.

So there are two things that I hate. One is the over-commercialization of the holiday that results in the xmas season starting before Halloween. The other thing I hate is xmas music. I was 11 years old when I played my first school xmas concert. I was 20 when I played my last one. That is enough xmas music for a lifetime, I think. It can all go away now, thank you very much.

Ugh… I guess I am just a scrooge for a while. Come December 22 or 23 or so, I will be in merry-xmas mode and loving it, but for now? On November 29th?

I am exaggerating a little.

A little.

2024 NaSoAlMo Day 28/30

This will be the final NaSoAlMo post this year. The project is complete. Success!

I mixed the last two songs yesterday. I also came up with a final running order and took a cover photo with Hipstamatic. I tried putting text onto the photo but the app I normally use was acting buggy and I just gave up. Not a big deal.

Here’s a link to the final playlist on alonetone.

Here’s my not very imaginative cover pic:

Here are links to the songs, in the order they were finished which also happens to be the order they were started.

An “album” called Sevens and it is made up of seven songs in 7/8 time. The lyrics to all seven songs also deal with the same topic. I’m not going to say what but you can probably guess given current events. I guess this means that this is my first concept album.

I guess that concludes our internet music challenge projects for 2024. Up next will be the 2025 RPM Challenge in February. That’s the big one for me.

A Successful Turkey Day

Jen and I made a full, albeit small, turkey dinner for ourselves today and it was wonderful. Everything was delicious. Even better, almost all of the cleaning up is done and it’s only 3:30pm. There were a few dishes that I couldn’t fit into the dishwasher. They are soaking in the sink right now. Other than that, everything is done on the cleaning up after the turkey day dinner front.

Of course gastric bypass boy over here did have a minor issue. I ate too much, too fast and the last few bites sort of… came back for an encore… if’n yer know’n what I’ma meanin’. That had nothing to do with the food itself, just the way I ate it. I’ll be more careful next time.

Here’s hoping that you and yours are having a wonderful Thanksgiving Day. Now that the cooking and the eating and the cleaning are all done, I think I am going to take a four hour nap.

89/365

Almost There

It’s 2:15pm. Lunch is about to end (I started my break a little later than normal today). I have a vacation day booked for tomorrow, then the following two days are off for Thanksgiving, then the weekend. That’s right, folks. I have a five day weekend coming and it is just a bit more than three hours away. I have one more meeting on my schedule this afternoon and I have a few email threads that need updating. Other than that, we’re just riding out this fine Tuesday in the office.

87/365

So before Covid shut everything down I was a regular user of Audible, the audiobook subscription service. I forget how but at some point I came into a whole bunch of credits and blew them all on a number of books that I never got around to listening to. Back in March when my company upped our in-the-office requirement from once a week to twice a week I reopened my account and all of those unread books were still there. One was a biography of Syd Barrett. I’m listening to it now and while many of the events and facts the author describes are clearly incorrect, and many others are trying to show Barrett as some poetic legend on a level that is infinitely greater than his catalog demonstrates, it is a good read. I have been listening to a lot of his music over the last week.

The National Solo Album Month (nasoalmo) rules allow for one cover song. While adding another song does not fit my personal theme for this month’s project, I am wondering if I should record a cover of Dominoes. I’m thinking about it.