Happy Friday to you all, more or less. I will admit to a little deja vu, as yesterday felt an awful lot like Friday to me, which is never a great thing to have happen to someone on a Thursday, as you can imagine.

The week’s been the usual weirdness and uncertainty, though I’ve made some progress in a couple of areas at work that make things a bit easier; I got a few answers on a couple of things, which at least means I can make plans and adjust for the resources I’m not getting. This is the way of the world here in this particular public sector agency; we’re all frustrated. I heard a senior executive diss the president in a phone conference yesterday, which was novel; the current freeze on new regulations is putting serious limit on what kind of progress policy-making organizations can do in terms of implementing policy, it would seem.

Otherwise this week, I’ve been putting work into the first, limited-edition, live-around-the-mic-like-1920s-jazz-musicians, artisanally-burned CD release from my non-Humdingers project, Dimensional Riffs, which we’re calling “Live in the Boudoir”, since we recorded it in one of the vocalists’ bedrooms. We did the bulk of recording a couple of weeks ago, but did some pick-up stuff this week, and I spent several hours (mostly last night) hunched over a laptop bending the results to my will with various sound editing and processing applications (primarily tracktion and audacity), and knocking out a handful physical copies so we’ll have some stock to sell to our small cadre of “fans”, assuming we actually have any, at the gigs we have coming up.

It’s not much, just six seven (shhhhh….) tracks to give folks a taste of what we have to offer and maybe open up a few more gigs. There are a few bum notes and things that I couldn’t correct with studio wizardry (honestly, I’m still learning), but overall, it’s not an embarassing thing to be involved with (and a couple of tracks are things I’m legitimately proud of), and ideally, it’ll drum up enough interest to make investing in a “real” multi-track release worth the effort in the coming months.

It’s certainly something I feel comfortable asking five bucks for.

This weekend opens up spring break for the kids, and I’m taking a couple of days as well, mostly to fill in a couple of doctor’s appointments, and to be able to hit the student/parent orientation thing at SBC so I can finally see where my college money’s gonna go next year.

Otherwise, I’m going to relax a little after the busy week, and hope that last night’s 59 cruise missles’ worth of orange machismo doesn’t open up something larger on the 100th anniversary or our getting involved in another global spanning conflict that had a lot to do with chemical weapons.

But let’s not end on a thought like that – to celebrate our random eleven and a movie watched a bit of this week when my kid had it on, here’s Doctor Stranger Things, who it turns out, is actually a friend of a friend in the mid-atlantic sci-fi community:

And now some music. A slightly AAA mix this time around, because it turns out that that’s where I had my Pandora playlist targeted for at least the beginning of things. As I type this, I’m seven minutes into track eight’s 23, so I’ll get this posted sometime in the next century, without commentary on what could be a pretty embarassing back third:

1. “Lonely Boy” – The Black Keys
2. “Mess Around” – Cage the Elephant
3. “Where The Streets Have No Name” – U2
4. “Human” – Rag’n’Bone Man
5. “Riptide” – Vance Joy
6. “Soul to Squeeze” – RHCP
7. “Skirnir” – Falkenbach
8. “Thick as a Brick” – Jethro Tull
9. “Blister in the Sun” – Violent Femmes
10. “Space Oddity (live ’72)” – David Bowie
11. “Madness” – Muse