Happy Friday.

You know it’s going to be thaty kind of day when the first thing you do in the office is, after checking a notification that a document’s been added to your personnel file (we’re reorganizing here, and the paperwork has finally caught up with the office code change), you start going down the rabbit hole of of estimating retirement and life insurance benefits.

The good news is that even after figuring a VERY conservative return on my 401k and not counting on any futher promotions (which I don’t really want anyway), the annuities and social security benefits and whatnot guarantee that I’ll be pretty comfortable if I manage to make it past retirement age in public service.

Of course, I gotta wait until 2031 at the very least to manage it, and 2036 if I want to actually maximize the benefits. At least ifteen more years of this crap, huh? Sure, why not.

If I for some reason don’t make it that long, my life insurance payout seems to be pretty nice as well; kids’ll get through college, debts will be paid. they can go out and find a replacement daddy who doesn’t have my issues and insecurities.

But, I really don’t wanna go there. Most of the time I like being around. This is just the kind of data dive you find yourself doing on a slow Friday morning knowing you’ve got to spend 9am to 11am listening to people you don’t really like drone on about a requirements document that you were sure got put to bed three months ago but that people just can’t let go of for some reason.

Okay, that last bit makes me not wanna be around so much, but it’s only on the phone and I can make snarky comments on mute and jerkoff jestures at them through the wires and they’ll never know.

But I have to stick around for at least another month – I got a couple of cool band gigs coming up, and have a ticket to see Willie Nelson (!) play in town in September, and I don’t want to miss that.

Pretty typical weekend coming up, apart from the waiting for the body shop to call about giving me the car back. We’re getting together with some friends we haven’t seen in a while to play board games and make each other laugh. I think we might have our other game group (Seventh Sea) set up to meet on Saturday, but I honestly can’t remember.

Oh, and we have a surprise for the youngest on Sunday, as she’s turning nine, though I have, for some reason, been describing her as nine for the last year. I don’t know why I do that, it’s not going to make retirement get here any faster.

whatever. Here’s some tunes. #8 is a definite memory grabber, causing me to actually kind of smell the chorine and the melting Charleston Chew candy bars at the Sunbury community swimming pool circa 1986-87. This tune, along with “Body Talk” by Kix and a couple of tracks off of Prince’s 1999 got pretty near continuous repeats over the crappy all-weather public address/siren speakers. I think they were the only half-dozen tracks on the ancient jukebox. It’s a good memory, though. I’ll take it.

1. “Don’t Get Me Busted” – The Donnas
2. “Fortunate Son” – CCR
3. “Ophelia” – The Lumineers
4. “Here Comes The Sun” – The Beatles
5. “Chasing the Brand New” – The Badlees
6. “Back in Black” – AC/DC
7. “Here Comes A Regular” – The Replacements
8. “White Wedding” – Billy Idol
9. “The End of the Tour” – TMBG
10. “Photograph” – Def Leppard