It is Friday. ‘Twas a short week, coming off of a long weekend, made a day longer than expected as I spent Tuesday at home caring for a couple of women who I care about who were both running fevers. I don’t mind playing nurse now and then. That’s the dad life.

I’ve spent considerable time already this week discussing the highlight of my week, the big debut of my open mic hosting side hustle, and since yesterday, I still feel pretty great about it overall, and am really looking forward to doing it again next month.

It was, actually, kind of a big deal when I think about it; I got paid to perform, under my own name, material that I wrote and/or arranged, in front of people, and I managed to not screw it up, and in fact, people liked it. I’ve performed a lot in my time, especially in the last five years or so, and even made a little money doing it, though this one was kind of special. I didn’t make all that much, considering, but it felt good to deposit that check made out to me yesterday afternoon, for particular services rendered. At this point in my life, I know I’ll never make the big time rock ‘n roll lifestyle (if that even exists anymore) that I dreamed about in my teens and twenties, but here in my harrumphmiddle ageharrumph, I get to do some pretty cool stuff in that world a couple of times a month, on a scale that’s bigger than a lot of people get to experience.

I’ll take it.

Of course, given the sickness and germs floating around in my household at the moment, I’m pretty sure I was running on stress, adrenalin and that interesting thing they call “stage health” on Wednesday night, because although I made it into the office on Thursday, spending six or seven hours on the phone being brought right back down off my rock and roll high horse, my general feeling of well-being went way downhill pretty quickly, to the point where I basically just went home, ate a little something, and crashed…hard.

This morning, I made into the office again through rain and unpleasant weather, and spent my morning concocting a rousing tale of bullshit and selective data presentation in the form of a five page memo documenting system test results and comparison of said results to vaguely-defined standards that nobody’s going to read, but is going to tick a bureaucratic box certifying that the bits of technology my team developed for this project shall here and evermore be considered certified before this whole fustercluck goes live, which, given chatter during one of those six or seven hours of meetings Thursday, is probably not going to happen on time, and be kicked to the right a few more weeks -again-; thanks to fallout from the shutdown.

As it stands right now, I have nothing on the agenda this weekend, other than to pay the bills I was way too zonked out yesterday evening to address. I kind of expect I’ll get pulled someplace if the family’s feeling better and there’s an interesting food truck out there, but right now, there’s nothing beyond the usual, and continuing to fight with the new Android update that got pushed to my phone Thursday that changed everything and made the dot go away…grrr.

Again, I’ll take it.

All that’s left here to do is bow to tradition and introduce the playlist, which is nice and interesting this week, in part because *none* of the usual suspects popped up in the ad-free hour of Pandora* I got after “watching” a video about some wonder drug or retirement plan or something…all I know is that there were rolling fields, blue skies, and pretty green trees framing people in pristine t-shirts jumping in slow motion. Yeah:

1. “New Slang” – The Shins
2. “Steady, As She Goes” – Raconteurs
3. “Red Skies” – The Fixx
4. “Seventeen” – Winger
5. “So Young” – Portugal, The Man
6. “Hero” – Family of the Year
7. “All In My Mind” – Love and Rockets
8. “Journeyman” – Jethro Tull
9. “Runaway” – Bon Jovi
10. “Electric Feel” – MGMT
11. “Riptide” – Vance Joy
12. “Call To Nothing” – The Coathangers
13. “Overkill” – Men at Work
14. “Jump” – Van Halen

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* – yes, we have a family subscription to spotify for our music needs, and it’s great for most things (it’s playing in the background of my office right now), but for this sort of random playlist, I like the “radio station”/shuffle model that Pandora uses that I’ve been sticking with for more than a decade. I’m an old man, and am becoming set in my ways, as you can also see above by my bitching about the damned Android dot.