Well, it’s certainly been a week, technically short as it was.

As indicated previously, my lovely spouse and I spent Monday in the car driving east from Indiana; said drive was less pleasant than the drive west; in part, I suppose, do to the fact that we were returning to so-called “real life” after a weekend of relaxation. In any case, I spent the last couple of hours of things in a bit of pain; ankle, leg, and ass cramping up fiercely after ten hours in the driver’s seat, even with breaks to get up and stretch. After we got home in the afternoon, I spent a bit of time laid up and popping ibuprofen.

Knowing things about my body and brain, I took Tuesday off to ease back into things. I slept in a bit, and took advantage of a cool morning to get a bike ride in (welcome after a weekend away from the trail) and did a bunch of laundry and stuff around the house, before heading into the city for the evening, as I had won tickets from WNRN for the Dawes show at the National a few months back.

I was, as one might imagine, a bit apprehensive about doing this in the pandemic age, but honestly, it wasn’t nearly as bad as I’d imagined. The crowd was lighter than one usually gets in that particular venue (I expect that was by design), most everyone wore masks, and refreshingly, they made me show my vax card before they let me in the door. The band, who I wasn’t particularly familiar with (apart from the single NRN’s been playing lately), was rather excellent live, as was their opening act, songwriter Erin Rae.

Also, the sound guy had a puppy, which was awesome:

I returned to the daily grind on Wednesday, with work being work being work, a.k.a. largely productive and returning good results from a couple of bureaucratic experiments, but still kind of a slog. This seems to have held steady through the rest of the week, though after having to make a bit of an ugly emergency stop to avoid a distracted fellow cyclist on Wednesday afternoon, I strained some abdominal/oblique muscles, which has added a unique unpleasantness to life since then. It’s mostly down to a dull ache as of this morning, but I’m still planning on taking it easy one more day before trying to convince my nearly 50 year old body that it’s still in it’s early 20s.

Oh, and finally a bit of promo – on Saturday afternoon, I’m playing a set as part of the ongoing Pandemic-era virtual concert series The Festival of the Living Rooms run by a friend of mine in the filk community. I’ll be one of an international cast of characters performing 30 minute streaming musical sets throughout the weekend – as it stands now, I’m on around 4:30pm Mountain Time.

Really finally…tunes from the little black rectangle. This week, some classic AOR tunes, plus a variety of other stuff, including one of my favorite 80s tunes at #13 (Aimee Mann is awesome, even back then), and there at #9, the song that, more than any other, represents to that feeling of naive optimism we all had there for a while in the mid-90s when we were sure peace was breaking out all over the world and the economy was booming and the world seemed our oyster.

Oh well…it was nice while it lasted.

1. “In The City” – Eagles
2. “Where’d You Go” – The Mighty Mighty Bosstones
3. “I’m Alright” – Kenny Loggins
4. “Brave Captain” – fIREHOSE
5. “96 Tears” – The Stranglers
6. “Divine Thing” – Soup Dragons
7. “Infected” – Bad Religion
8. “Rockin’ at Midnight” – The Honeydrippers
9. “Right Here, Right Now” – Jesus Jones
10. “I Feel So Good” – Richard Thompson
11. “The Doctor” – The Doobie Brothers
12. “Honey White” – Morphine
13. “Voices Carry” – Til Tuesday