Tag: Writing

Reading/Writing Nooks

Daily writing prompt
You get to build your perfect space for reading and writing. What’s it like?
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Wow… did the B-team write this one? Are the daily prompt writers on break this week? Did they just ask ChatGPT for a list of dumb questions? Today’s daily writing prompt thingie is just… bad. Really bad. Utterly bad.

I guess here it goes. My response today is a photography response. I took some pictures of my favorite writing and reading nooks in our house. Why? Because I’ve already built my perfect reading and writing spaces. The writing space is a desk with a laptop and the reading spaces are comfy chairs with lights. Perfect. So detailed and worthy of a writing prompt. Ugh.

Writing nook, which also doubles as a music recording nook. My home computer desk in the cellar:

As for reading nooks, I will share three. This one is my main go-to, even though it is not in the usual place due to the xmas tree. It is also missing it’s usual reading light and end table, but it still works. I just open the curtain and use the bay window for both end table needs and lots of extra light:

118/365

Reading nook number two is on the other side of the living room. I don’t use this one very often, but it works perfectly:

The fourth and final image for today’s masterpiece of a blog post is the reading nook in the bedroom. Sorry that the lights were off when I took this with the Hipstamatic app so it’s pretty dark. I don’t use this one often, but I love that it’s there. I often sack out here while I am cooking dinner in the kitchen, which is the room next door. Fascinating, I know:

There. A pointless, shitty response to a pointless, shitty daily writing prompt. Yippee. 

Favorite Physical Activities

Daily writing prompt
What are your favorite physical activities or exercises?
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You know there is one physical activity… the real, honest answer for nearly all of us… you know… when a mommy and a daddy love each other very much…

Now that that is out of the way, what is my second choice? There are two that come to mind. One is going to seem obvious if you read the previous post. The other is a little bit of out of the box thinking.

First, I like to go for walks. Imagine driving into the city with my beloved wife and a camera or two, then just picking a neighborhood and walking around while enjoying the company and the sights, and snapping off a ton of pictures that I can post to this page after we get home. That’s a quality piece of physical activity right there. The setting can be swapped out for other places. For example, instead of walking around Boston we could walk around a Disney World theme park. Perfect.

My second, less conventional idea for a favorite physical activity? Band practice. Yeah, you read that right. There’s no running around or anything like that, but band practice generally results in a bumped up heart rate and working up a serious sweat. You heard it here first. Band practice is cardio, babie. Rock and Roll.

Both of those are much more fun than the exercise I did just before I wrote this post. I ran in place for 45 minutes. My legs feel like rubber. I’m toast. I literally sit down and post something after my morning faux jog (pronounced “yog”, with a soft “j”) just to give myself some time to recover. That’s what I do for exercise every day, but it sure as hell ain’t my fav.

Vacation Day

I took the day off from work today to get my shit together for tomorrow night’s gig. The plan was to make a few changes to my pedal board, and then practice practice practice.

What did I actually do?

I watched a ton of Luke Cage on Netflix. Like, five or six episodes. I bought some new clothes for work (and maybe a black t-shirt for tomorrow night). I got my hair cut (finally!).

When I got home I fixed up the pedal board and played the guitar. I didn’t practice any of the songs that I needed to work on, but I did run through a bunch of exercises.

After that, I went out to dinner with my wife because she’s amazing and I am crazy in love with her.

It’s been a good day. Tomorrow’s going to be nuts. Sunday and Monday are going to be sent home with the love of my life. It’s going to be a good holiday weekend.

…Where the 80’s Live Forever!

I consider the first “real” band I ever played in to be Tempest Fero.  Horrible name.  Fun band.  It was Mike on bass, Jeff on drums, Jim on keyboards, and some fat doofus on guitar.

We had a number of “songs” that we’d come up with that were just instrumental riffs that were fun to jam on.  Goldfish, Toilet Water from Hell, Guppies from Mars and Beyond.  Yeah, we were 16 and 17 year old nerds.  I remember toward the end of my junior year in high school we had decided to stop looking for a singer and start just doing it ourselves.  Jim was good.  Jeff was better.  I wasn’t so hot.  Mike only sang when it was funny.  I thought that if we were becoming a real band we should probably write lyrics to our instrumental songs.  My first attempt was really bad, but I fudged it into a melody that went over Goldfish.  Time for a Change was born.  It was the first song I’d ever written or cowritten that was really complete.  My simple melody got trashed in favor of a better one that Jim came up with.  They were sort of similar, but Jim’s blew mine out of the water.

All of that happened about 25 years ago.  Now, after all of this time, I give to you, oh internets, a sloppy little GarageBand demo recording of Time for a Change, 2013.  Gasp in wonder at how lame it is…

But wait, there’s more!

I had to dig through a box full of old cassette tapes to find the arrangement and the lyrics, but I eventually found a tape that was in awful shape, with the worst wow and flutter in the history of magnetism.  It also didn’t have Mike playing bass. That made me sad.  Still, there were four other songs on the tape.  One of them was a song that Mike and I wrote in his basement while playing with his 4-track recorder.  This was probably either late ’88 or early ’89.  I really can’t recall.  Jeff took over the melody this time and made my simple, feeble attempt a billion times better.

The lyrics came from two places. I bought a copy of Steve Hackett’s Till We Have Faces album and the opening track was called Duel.  It was based on a Spielberg movie of the same name about a commuter who is stalked by a psycho driving a truck.  That idea, combined with nearly getting in a head on collision while driving home from work late one night made up the basis of what was sadly probably my best lyric effort with Tempest Fero.  Not to imply my lyrics ever got much better, but this was the best I had come up with at the time.  Jeff had started writing lyrics for T.F. too and his squashed mine like the proverbial grape.  Anyway, in the hopes of not making Time for a Change feel all lonely and stuff, I also made a new GarageBand demo of One on One Duel…

Enjoy these two flashbacks to Rob’s early days of writing music, way back in the 80’s!

Finished

The 2013 RPM Challenge album is finished.  Or at least as finished as it will ever be.  I’m done, I’m toast, I’m fried.

I was debating on whether or not to drop one of the 14 songs.  I came close.  Last year I actually dropped two.  This year… ah screw it, I’ll keep ’em all.

I kinda think its kinda cute that you have to wait until track three to hear 4/4 time.  Neat, huh?

Here’s the soundcloud.com playlist:

Here’s a link to what I consider the “official” home of all of my stuff, alonetone.com.  Unfortunately the WordPress.com police won’t let me embed alonetone’s playlist.  If they did, you’d never see a soundcloud playlist ever.

(just for snitzengiggle’s let’s try embedding it and see what happens…  Nothing, just as I expected)

I need to head out tonight and get a disc in a jewel case and a padded envelope so I can mail this sucker into headquarters tomorrow.  I also need to find the design a CD cover website I used last year and then print it out at work tomorrow (when no one is looking).  Then if I can drop it in a mailbox tomorrow it will be on its way.