Overall, this week, in spite of it’s perceived length, hasn’t been awful, at least for me. Yes, huge swaths the federal government is still shut down over temper tantrums, I spent most of Thursday bundled up in my coat and scarf in my office because the heat is really wonky, and the mid-atlantic is panicking over the coming snowpocalypse (even if it’s not going to be too terrible in my neck of the woods), because the last one dumped more than a foot on us.

The good: I played a pretty good open mic on Wednesday – not my best set ever, though I did about a half-hour of almost entirely originals, which is always a risk. “Bureaucratic Talking Shutdown Blues”, which I wrote during the last big shutdown business back in February (and I never thought I’d have to revisit again), went over especially well. This shutdown continues without apparent end, which sucks for so many people, but it has, as I expected, bought me and my team at least eight more weeks of much-welcome testing time before this project gets deployed. Finally, I had my conference with the boss regarding the year-end evaluations and pay pool deliberations, and the news wasn’t awful – the result was about what I expected; a reasonable (if not tremendous) salary bump for the coming year, and a modest “contribution award” (aka one time lump bonus) that’ll put a couple extra bucks in the budget soonish.

The bad/indifferent: the work itself still is less than engaging, and the result of the year-end review hasn’t really helped me to make the call about whether I stick it out or start shopping for something else. I really don’t know at this point. Oh well. The weather can’t decide what it wants to be; I rode the bike in 70° temperatures three days ago. Today it’s not likely to break 40°. It’s gonna snow Sunday, and unless things change drastically, I have to venture toward the greater impact areas to return my child to her institute of higher education (gonna miss the kid). We’ll see. At least I have Monday off; by my own doing – at one point I thought I might be conning this weekend, but it wasn’t in the cards.

There are two interesting conventions I won’t be attending this weekend, actually – Illogicon in Raleigh-Durham, a small but ridiculously fun event where many of my friends will be performing/attending (Metricula! Valentine Wolfe! Gray Rinehart!), and GaFilk (aka, the Georgia Filk Convention) in Atlanta, where my Humdingers bandmates S&K will be attending, along with other musical nerd friends. If you’re in either area, it’s worth your time to check it out – some great people and great entertainment.

Finally, today is the day for Little Lebowski. He doesn’t know what’s going to be happening this morning, but I’m not sure he’s going to like it.

All that’s left now is the tunes, I suppose. Pretty 80s indie pop, for the most part, with some more modern variations, plus thirteen minutes of live Zappa for seasoning:

1. “Manic Monday” – The Bangles
2. “Living These Hard Times” – Jethro Tull
3. “Vide Noir” – Lord Huron
4. “Love Will tear Us Apart (1980 Martin Hannett Tapes)” – Joy Division
5. “Take on Me” – A-Ha
6. “The First Song” – Band of Horses
7. “Severed” – The Decembrists
8. “King Kong (Live)” – Frank Zappa
9. “Pretend We’re Dead
10. “Bittersweet Symphony” – The Verve
11. “Paradise City” – Guns N’ Roses
12. “Hey You” – Pink Floyd