Tag: Writing

Substack

Right folks, what are our thoughts on Substack? I subscribe to a handful of them but I only ever actually read stuff from the guitar player who used to be in The Blake Babies (and I’m just thinking that it is really getting to be time for another Blake Babies reunion record, don’t we think?) and one film photographer from youtube who lives somewhere in the wilds of New Hampshire. Truthfully, I don’t read every post from those two users but I read some of them. Sorry.

My first thought when I learned about Substack was nope, I’m too old for that shit. The Blake Babies guy is older than I am though… he’s also 100 times cooler and a lawyer (yikes) and his cred level is 100000000 times mine… though any number that quantifies your credibility is higher than my complete and total lack of credibility, right?

My second thought was… it’s an email newsletter. Anyone who would be dumb enough to subscribe to mine would mark me as spam within a couple of days of my pointless brain droppings.

Still… am I thinking about it? No… but… yeah, no.

What else, what else… new camera coming soon. The USPS tracking number says it will arrive on Saturday. That doesn’t give me any time to shoot and develop a test roll before I go on vacation, but I had already decided not to bring a film camera on vacation this time. I’m going all digital on this trip.

Part of my initial film camera attraction was using fully manual, mechanical cameras. I didn’t want any automation at all. I didn’t want anything electronic. This time? The new camera has autofocus. Oh praise be, it has autofocus! I’m getting blinder by the minute and manually focusing is a bitch. Wearing bifocals (well, progressive lenses) makes it so much worse. Now I am going to be able to autofocus with film and oh how the heavens will sing in gleeful glee.

What else? This is traditionally the longest week of the working man’s life. The full work week before a vacation. One day down, four endlessly long and painful days to go. But hey, there’s a new camera and a vacation at the end of it! There’s two carrots on the end of this week’s stick. The best part? Both kids are coming on this trip. We’re going as a full family. How cool is that? Both kids are in their 20’s and we can still get them to come on vacation with us. Life is pretty fucking cool sometimes, don’t you think?

I should join Substack and write a big article about it.

Nothing

I have nothing to write about. Nothing.

It’s Tuesday morning. I did my exercise but I haven’t done anything else on the morning schedule. I took the trash to the street, but that’s it. I’m sitting at my desk in the cellar watching some film photography youtube posts and getting jealous of people who live in places where the weather in January isn’t ass and they can go outside and take pictures of stuff. I should be setting up my desk for the work day, but no. I’m sitting here typing this even though I have nothing to write about. Dumbass.

How am I supposed to feel about the near future? We’re going on vacation. Me and my wife and my mother in law and my step daughter. It’s going to be awesome. About a week before we leave though, the usa swears in a fascist as president even though he’s a convicted criminal who publicly stated he wanted to be a dictator. What the fuck? I say again, I don’t live in the united states anymore. I live in Massachusetts. Starting Monday there is a clear difference. I am trying very hard to focus on the upcoming trip and not the upcoming end of our society but the closer we get to January 20th the harder it gets to do that.

In news related to the upcoming end of the world as we know it, I am done with meta. Zuckerberg has dropped to his knees and taken the tiny little donald’s tiny little donald into his mouth and I am done with him and everything he touches. I was just starting to feel okay about using facebook again, and I have been using instagram pretty regularly for a while, and of late I was using the shit out of threads, but now? Now that zuckerberg has shown his true colors (which we all knew about already, let’s be honest with ourselves) I am done with everything he touches. Fuck him and fuck his company. Done. I am done with all of them. Unfortunately, I use a couple of his messenger functions to communicate with some of my friends and with my band and if I stop using them 100% I lose those connections. Fuck. Fuck meta. Fuck zuckerberg. Fuck trump. Fuck musk. Fuck fascism.

This is so depressing.

I am trying to revive my last music re-recording project. Quarantine tunes volume eight. I don’t think I can finish it before the RPM Challenge starts in February, but maybe I can pick off a couple of songs and finish them up. I ordered a couple of small cables and a headstock tuner in order to finish putting together the pedal board i want to use for February. QTunes Vol 8 will be the test bed for that board. The verdict after one test so far is that it sounds really good but it’s noisy. I am choosing to blame the cheap daisy chain power supply for the noise, but who knows.

Note: The music talk is another attempt to distract myself from Monday’s upcoming doom.

So… back to a previous topic. If threads is on the no fly list thanks to zuckerberg being a fucking slime, then I guess Bluesky wins the twitter replacement race by default. Everything I post here cross posts there. That’s nice. Images that I add here do not display. What about links? Does this show? Let’s click publish and find out. Safe money is no.

Until later, my fellow depressed friends. For the moment though, let’s start thinking about what song Massachusetts should use as its national anthem, m’kay? Think about it. We’ll talk later.

Snow on the Way

It’s going to snow tonight. Crap. I was going to see if Jen and Harry wanted to go for a drive to look at xmas lights, but now I just want to pull a blanket over my head and hide until the weather clears. I mean, winter officially starts at like 4:00am tomorrow morning. It’s bound to snow eventually. That doesn’t mean I have to like it.

I did a couple of goofy things with this little bloggie today. This post will serve as a bit of a test for one of them. I added a couple of new share buttons. Bluesky and Threads (and Mastodon? Did I add that one too?) are new, and Tumblr was re-added after being removed at least once. I removed twitter/x as well because fuck that musk prick. Fuck him right in his fucking eye. I tested the Bluesky and Threads buttons and they work. I also set new posts to automatically post to Bluesky. When I publish this literary tome I will see if it worked.

Another change, which is internal and should only be viewable by me, is that I think I hooked up to Google Analytics. I’ve had that option for ages now but I never did it. I am at heart a stats geek, so why didn’t I? It seems like I am too late as my engagement stats (the ones built into wordpress.com) are down something like 70% since they peaked back in February. Allow me to make the same caveat I make every time I mention this page’s stats… I really don’t care about the stats, I am just a numbers nerd and like to mess around with them. Also, and definitely most importantly, being down 70% from a very small, some might say microscopic, number is just another small, microscopic, number, dig it? This is not one of those blogs that sees a gajillion hits an hour. I consider myself lucky when I average one hit an hour and in my experience that would be a lot. In other words, I am in no way interested in drumming up business with insipid brain droppings, dig? Like I said twice before in this post, I just like playing with numbers. I have a Computer Science degree for cripes sake. Numbers are fun. Whatever, I am curious if linking up to Google Analytics a) worked, and b) will show me anything fun. I’ll probably write 100000 posts about it over the next few days (assuming it worked, of course).

All of these changes are internal but they might be a hint that a bloggie shake up is coming, and you know what that means… that means I am probably going to start messing with the theme and the layout. Sometimes Robert just cannot stop himself, you know?

What the hell was I talking about? I can’t remember. Oh yeah, it’s going to snow tonight. Doesn’t that suck? I think that sucks.

Oh well. I am going to click Publish now. Here’s hoping we cross post over to the ol’ Bluesky Social. Wish the bloggie luck……….

Write Something

I feel this almost overwhelming need to write something today, but I don’t have anything to write about. Usually I when the drive gets annoyingly persistent I can come up with something to prattle on about, but today I am drawing a blank.

The Bruins won. That’s two wins in a row on a road trip that started out awful. I think the last game of the trip is in Edmonton tomorrow night. Can they beat the Oilers? I would say probably not, but I didn’t expect them to beat Calgary last night either so what do I know.

I keep seeing the Boston Red Sox mentioned as potential destinations for big name free agent players. Unfortunately I heard the same thing over and over again during last year’s off season and we landed exactly zero big name free agents. We’ve made a big trade to get a potential ace starting pitcher. Will that be a sign of better things to come this winter? Who knows.

Harry is coming to stay with us this weekend. He was supposed to be coming over on Friday at some point but now he’s coming on Thursday! For those of you reading this at some future date allow me to clarify by stating that Thursday is tomorrow! Nice! I am working in the office tomorrow so I have to move some of my stuff out of his room before he comes over. When he’s home his room is… ya know… his room. When he’s not home, his room is my office. The only thing I need to move is a backpack and some camera stuff that is sitting on the day bed, and a table I have been using as a gift wrapping station. All of that needs to move down cellar to the space I use as an office when he’s home.

What else… what else… anything else? I don’t know. My lunch break is over. I have a meeting in about half an hour. I think I need to wrap this one up. Will it scratch today’s weird “write something, you dope” itch?

Probably not.

Unplanned Month 25 Weigh In

I thought about doing this yesterday but I didn’t, and then I did it today because why not?

Yesterday was the two year and one month monthiversary of my gastric bypass surgery. I said I wasn’t going to weigh in monthly anymore, and for the most part I haven’t. The last time I stepped on the scale was the day of my two year check up with the surgeon. That was May 16th (wasn’t it?). After spending a week between Disney World and the road I was pretty sure my weight would be down, so why not step on the scale and find out?

Yup, I was down. Way down. Six pounds, to be exact. I am now 203.4 pounds. That puts me below the magic BMI number of 205 which is the weight that puts my BMI at 25, which is the border between overweight and not overweight. My new BMI is 24.8. Welcome back to the healthy weight range, Robert. Pat yourself on the back, bro.

Total lost since surgery is 228 pounds. Total lost since the first weigh in at the clinic is 248.6. I am 100% positive that it will creep back up to the 215ish range soon enough, but let’s just enjoy this for now. Maybe if my head cold persists I might drop below 200 again. That happened after we came back from Disney with Covid-19 back in September. I’d like to be back in OneDerland again, but I sure as hell don’t want to catch Covid to make it happen. Screw that noise.

Stop Procrastinating

Daily writing prompt
What’s one small improvement you can make in your life?
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There is irony here. Big time. I just got to work. Thanks to insane traffic I was a couple of minutes late. I’m caught up now though. I have a lot of stuff I want to plow through this morning, but here I am writing a blog post. Foreshadowing? Oh yeah. Big time.

One small improvement. Hmmm. Just one? I can think of a few. How about doing something to tweak the ol’ work ethic? How about we try to cut down on the procrastination. Work now, flake later, rather than the normal vice versa. I feel like that would go a long way toward making me feel like a better human, in the purely professional sense. I haven’t been missing any deadlines lately or anything that demands changes, but I also feel like there have been times when the nose should have been squarely on the grindstone and it hasn’t. Case in point… I am writing this now while I should be doing some paperwork. Ugh.

I should be more attentive to my wife’s needs. I should be quicker to help out with anything my kids need. I should be more attentive to my father and really just be there for him more than I am. That’s a big source of guilt for me. Anything related to my father is a source of guilt. Ugh, again. I’m trying. I am failing often, but I am trying. I should initiate talk with the kids more than I do too. Just send them each a text saying little things like you rule and I hope you’re kicking ass today. You know, little things.

Okay, stop procrastinating. Get back to work, Mr. Red Head. Get some stuff done.

Topics?

Daily writing prompt
What topics do you like to discuss?
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Translating today’s prompt from Jetpack to Robert-speak it is asking me to write about what I like to write about in my personal blog/journal/brain dropping target. I thought I had an About Me page around here somewhere that served that purpose for me. Whatever, I feel a bullet list coming on…

What topics do I like to discuss?

  • My wife, Jen
  • My step kids, Bellana and Harry
  • All things family
  • Music
    • Playing music
    • Writing music
    • All things related to playing in a band
    • Listening to music
    • Arguing about music (I am a grade A music snob and I am always right)
    • Recording music
    • All things related to musical instruments and gear
    • Leaving the house to go and listen to live music (which doesn’t happen often anymore because I am old and go to bed early)
  • Sports
    • Hockey, both NHL and minor leagues and sometimes even NCAA
    • Baseball, both major and minor leagues
  • Travel
  • Stressing about money and how we don’t have enough for what we want to do with our lives but still try to find a way if we can
  • Weight loss surgery recovery and all the gross stomach issues that go along with it that are 100% worth the struggle
  • Working as a programmer for a software company that develops systems for hospitals
  • Photography
    • Digital photography
    • Film photography
    • Cell phone photography
  • Bad haiku that are likely viscously insulting to the actual artists who write real haiku
  • Technology
  • Being a total Apple fanboy
  • Social media and how it is both an obsession and infuriatingly awful
  • Politics
    • How the maga cult is the new nazi party and how that fascist pile of orange goo is literally evil
  • Cats

Yeah, that seems like a good, short list of topics I like to talk about on this cute little bloggie page. Hopefully you, dear readers, are into reading weird, middle aged people from New England who like to write insipid crap about some of these topics, and hopefully I don’t make you wait too long before hitting something you are particularly interested in.

Make Your Happy, Happy

Daily writing prompt
What are 5 everyday things that bring you happiness?
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Five things… I can do that. In fact, I will give you six because one of the things I want to include is no longer what you’d call an everyday thing. So five things and a bonus… and “everyday things” might be a bit of a gigantic understatement in one case, but I am including it anyway.

  1. Jen. When I say that the word, “everyday” might be an understatement, this is what I am referring to. Jen is not an “everyday thing”. Jen is more like a miracle that I get to experience every day. See the difference? I hope so, because it is massive. Jen makes my world go around. Jen is my universe. Jen is the love of my life. Basically Jen is the source of everything that matters. Happiness? You bet your ass she brings me happiness. She brings me all the happiness.
  2. Bellana and Harry. They don’t live with us anymore. I don’t hear from them everyday. Therefore we have to consider this one sort of a bonus entry on the list. They are my step kids and they bring me happiness everyday, I just don’t see them everyday. See the difference? I can’t write a list of things that make me happy without including them though, so while they are number two on the list, they are sort of a bonus. I love them completely and just knowing they are out there in the wilds of Vermont fills me to the bursting point with happiness.
  3. Music. Now we’re getting to actual everyday things. I listen to at least a little bit of music every day. Even if it’s just a song here and there, or maybe something that comes up on my YouTube suggestions and I give a quick listen to. It doesn’t have to be hours at a time listening to album after album or whatever, though I suspect we’ll get some of that today at work. Playing music, listening to music, writing music, recording music, talking about music, thinking about music… all of it.
  4. A good story. It could be a book, or a TV show, or a movie, or a website, or a news article, or a chat with a friend or family member. I just enjoy a good story.
  5. Going for a drive. I don’t do this one every day, and sometimes (like today in the pouring deluge of rain) it’s less enjoyable than others, but I do love going for a nice drive. The enjoyment level is often tied to the destination, but any drive is a good drive.
  6. Cats! Robin, Lily, the late great Miss Patches, the late great Fluffy Puffy P, the late great Floyd, Buddy, all of my friends cats, all of my family’s cats. Cats make me happy. You might be able to tell from all the cat pictures I post around here. I do enjoy a good cat.

And there you have it, folks. Five plus one things that make me happy. Hopefully you will have a few things make you happy today too. It is Friday, after all. Enjoy yourselves.

Positive Changes

Daily writing prompt
Describe one positive change you have made in your life.
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This is easy. The single most positive change I have made in my life was agreeing to meet Jen in person, back in April 2007. That meeting lead to us dating, which lead to us moving in together (the anniversary of which is next week), which lead to me popping the question and her (thankfully) saying yes, which lead to us getting married, which lead to every good thing that’s happened in my life since then. If that isn’t a positive change then I don’t know what is!

In second place behind Jen and all of the family positivity that came with falling madly in love and sharing my life with her… it’s a distant second, but still second, is my weight loss surgery. Here’s an example. Last night I had to carry a bunch of things from the dining room and the living room downstairs into the cellar storage space. I think I made two or three trips in total. Had I done that two years ago I would have been ruined for hours. One trip to the cellar and back would have left me short of breath with huge back and leg pain. Just carrying all of my massive weight around was painful and difficult and awful and I was constantly in a state of wondering whether or not the next step was going to kill me. It was a pretty bad way to live. I was useless. I couldn’t do anything without having to stop after a minute or so and rest to get my wind and my strength back.

Now, two years removed from the gastric bypass? If Jen needs me to do something, I can do it. Back pain and leg pain are still a thing, but I can do 100 times more before they start creeping up on me, and they are never as bad as they were before. As for shortness of breath? I have to really kick my own ass for that to ever happen now. Physically speaking, I am living in a new world. I can’t believe how different I feel. Sure it’s been a difficult process. Hell, I had all sorts of stomach issues over the last week alone. I have to be extra careful about what I eat and how I eat it and when I eat it and all of that. I have to keep track of everything that goes into my stomach (though I am starting to wonder if I still need to track it as closely as I do, though I do find that keeping tabs on everything is good from a mental well being stand point. Also, I am a lifelong stats geek so it works on that level too) and that stresses me out sometimes. It’s a difficult road, but the results can’t be denied. I feel so much better now. Healthcare wise, that’s the biggest positive change. It’s still a distant second behind meeting Jen though. A far distant second.

It’s Just a Phase

Daily writing prompt
Describe a phase in life that was difficult to say goodbye to.
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I’m having a tough time coming up with an answer to this question. I can’t think of any phase of my life that was difficult to say goodbye to. Every time some major life period ended, there was something better waiting in the wings to replace it.

High school was replaced with college and even though the first time around in college was a mess, it was so much better than high school.

College the first time ended long before I wanted it to and getting a full time job afterwards was anything but a positive experience, at that time though college was becoming a nightmare and it had to end. I couldn’t figure out how to move forward academically, apart from starting from scratch, so I put it aside for a few years… and then started from scratch.

Graduating from college and moving into a career… you’d think that would have been tough to say goodbye to, but really I was ready for it. I had been a student for a long time and I used to joke that I was really a career student. By the time I graduated though, I was ready for that phase to end and I welcomed what came next.

I was depressed when my 20’s ended and became my 30’s. I didn’t want them to end, but I was already so low that I wasn’t sad to see them go. I was, but at the same time, not really. You know? My 30’s started out bad but I was 36 when I met Jen and 38 when we got married. Once I had started a life with her I was ready for whatever the universe could throw at us. I looked forward to time passing and phases… phasing. I was sad to see my 40’s end, but only because I don’t want to be old. I accepted that I was already old though so it didn’t actually change anything.

So I guess the answer to this question is that I never really had a phase in my life end that I had a difficult time saying goodbye to. Sorry if that’s a lame answer. I guess I am just a super mature dude who is able to roll with the changes, as the song says. Maybe I should pat myself on the back for that.