All quiet on the bloggy front for the last week; as I said, I was in work training last week, and other than a few social media updates, I was kind of out of the writng brainspace, what with all the note-taking and getting up to speed on program management training.

The good news to report is that I passed my training course with flying colors, and knocked out another level of certification (application for that cert level pending, as in I haven’t filled out the paperwork just yet); just one more to go, and those classes are either completed or scheduled…the next one on the docket for December; three days on Earned Value Management (go ahead, read that wiki link if you need an insomnia cure). Oh joy. The only thing I have to look forward to there is the fact that it’s the last thing I do for the work calendar year before my Christmas break.

Had a few interesting events happen over the course of the week nonetheless, though. Wecaught Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson‘s “An Astrophysicist Goes to the Movies” lecture/presentation at one the theaters downtown, which was a lot of fun, with Dr. Tyson, one of the true heirs to Carl Sagan’s “abassador of science to the masses” title (along with, arguably, the Mythbusters guys and Astronaut Chris Hadfield), applying scientific principles to movies and entertainment in general, to highlight “movies that spent a lot of time on science and got it wrong, and movies that didn’t think about it at all and got most of it right”. Look up his decade-long crusade the get the sky right in Titanic sometime; it’s a nice way to kill half an hour.

Also, along with heading out to SBC to grab the kid for Thanksgiving break (after being out there last week for the fall dance concert), we finally caught a screening of Thor: Ragnarok on Saturday, which was a ton of fun, and I highly recommend it (along with pretty much everything directed by Taki Waititi, especially What We Do in The Shadows).

Finally, I won some tickets via WNRN to an in-studio session on Sunday at In Your Ear studios in the city; where the lovely spouse and I got to sit in on an acoustic performance and interview with Katie Crutchfield, aka Waxahatchee, recorded for broadcast. Waxahatchee was playing in town that night, and I was terribly excited to catch this opportunity, as I’ve been digging her record Out in The Storm (seriously, go check it out – like at the previous link to bandcamp, right now) for the last couple of months, and a Sunday night show was just too late for me, especially on a week where I’d been away from the office. Instead of a big music hall rock show, I got an intimate performance of a couple of songs and some interview (via deejay Melissa Goode, the music director at WNRN, and possessor of an FM radio voice so perfect it’s no wonder she went into broadcasting) with an audience of maybe fifteen people, and I got a chance to scope out a pro recording studio where a couple of Grammy-winning recordings have been produced. It was cool.

While I was doing all that stuff, the rest of Dimensional Riffs played a couple of sets at Atomacon in Charleston, SC (I had all the work and kid stuff, plus I have a hard time driving seven hours each way for an unpaid gig), with vocalist Drew filling in on guitar duties (and by all rights doing a decent job, as evidenced here) while I was out of pocket. I look forward to having the flexibility of two guitars in future gigs, so we can try some fancier stuff…

…maybe even this weekend, as the ‘Riffs are booked to play Chessiecon in MD this coming weekend (yeah, thanksgiving weekend…oh well), and I’ll be back sitting in. Also, being a bit out of my usual con zone, I’m hoping to maybe try out some newish material in the filk circles to see how things shake out (if it sucks, I likely won’t see these people again for a while). Still a bit of a haul, though what the hell.

That’s the big update, really. Not much else besides the usual Thanksgiving stuff (I’ve been laying in provisions a bit this weekend), and a three day week, that looks reasonably quiet overall. I’ll take it.