If you’ve been regularly reading this space for the last, um, two years or so, I’ve been stressed as hell lately and not exactly in the best frame of mind.

Pretty obvious, right?

After the last few weeks, I pretty much decided that I was taking this long President’s Day weekend and spending at least a couple of days doing very little. The key moment, I think, was when my wife and daughters looked at me across a table of delicious Indian food on Friday evening and told me I looked awful.

Which I did.

So, Saturday, I took some time in the morning to do the grocery shopping, but, apart from periodically checking the washer and/or dryer, I more or less crashed on the couch and binged Peacemaker on HBOMax and ate some Girl Scout Cookies while the house was quiet (the rest of them either had work or events to deal with). It helped, at least a little.

Sunday I did kind of the same thing – a quick run out to do some errands in the morning, but otherwise, chilled around the house, bought myself a treat based on the thing I’ll talk about in the next paragraph, and finished reading a novel.

About that treat – it’s sort of a story. On Friday afternoon, I started playing with some of the inspirational widgets (collectively called “The Muse”) on the February Album Writing Month website, and generated some random words and phrases, which ended up turning into a set of lyrics for a mostly nonsense, but generally foreboding-sounding song titled “When the Seventh Rolls”. As usual, the fawmers looked, commented, and offered encouragement, and a guy I met a few years ago out in the Bay Area when the Humdingers played there dug things enough to ask if he could take a pass at writing some music for it.

Of course I told him “Yes!,” and a bit later, he turned my weird foreboding prophecy nonsense into, of all things, a honky tonk piano tune which is something I would never have thought of, but damn if it isn’t brilliant. Nice little piece of collaboration popping up out of nowhere, and it was a nice bright spot. Oh, as he used a neat little program called Band-in-a-Box to generate some of the background tracks (it’s an app that takes your chord progressions or whatever and generates backing tracks from a huge database of recordings and/or MIDI in a ridiculous number of musical styles), and other friends have sung it’s praises over the years, I went ahead and spent a few bucks on myself and enjoyed an afternoon of fiddling with it. One more tool for the toolbox.

Today, Monday, I had off because Federal Holiday, so I did some chorin’, then, because it was a nice day, I racked my bike and went for a ride, even though I felt a bit crap. There were no parking places at my usual spot on the VCT, so I went to the other end of the trail, and rode a brisk 35 miles from the east end of things, and it was good.