This week’s been a strange one. The weather’s been bizarre; swinging from three inches of snow to start the week to hitting damned near 70° yesterday afternoon (and making for a wonderful day to *finally* get out for a brisk three mile hike). It’s raining this morning, which I should have expected, since after some broken-down equipment and aforementioned snow delayed my land-clearing project, I finally rescheduled for this morning, and all the stuff that needs moved is wet and heavy again. I can’t win.

Work has been rather intense, as the promised reorganization was official as of Monday. As such, I’m getting yanked into a whole raft of new meetings (since I’m now in a “lead” role that has me touching everything the Program Management Center generates) while trying to manage the transition of my old duties to the new regime, while still putting a bunch of other things to bed and dealing with outside partner organizations whose PMs make all kinds of unwarranted assumptions. Plus, I got word that my lovely old building on post is no longer worth maintaining, so I was scrambling to get myself another seat assigned once we can all go back.

Oh, and my lovely spouse has been sick all week with seasonal flu (no ‘rona, thankfully), on her birthday, no less, and I’ve been pulling some extra duties around the house.

But if nothing else, it’s been a good week for music.

As mentioned previously, it’s February Album Writing Month, and I’ve got this particular creative project off to a pretty good start, writing, demo recording, and posting four tunes so far as I type this, putting me ahead of the pace I need, and I’ve been getting some very positive comments from a bunch of musical types whose work I really respect; I think I’ve got a couple of winners on my hands already.

Additionally, I’ve been working on another, more complex recording project for release this month, and came upon a life-changing and perspective-altering discovery regarding sound mixing that has tremendously improved how my finished tracks sound (the fancy new studio monitors I snagged on sale a week or two back have also been a great help in hearing new aspects of the mix).

In any case, the tune I’ve been working has kind of an obvious release date, as you’ll see, but I decided to go ahead and put it out today to take advantage of the additional promotion and extra few cents a sale associated with Bandcamp Friday, when the music sales platform waives service fees on the first Friday of the month (I can always shill for it again on the obvious day). So, as of about 6am this morning, “Happy Discount Candy Day” is out there in the world at the flexible price of “whatever you want”, but if you do toss me a buck or two in exchange, I’ll see a few more cents today:

All the other stuff up for sale on Bandcamp today gets the same treatment, so if you feel like supporting your favorite independent artists, today is a good day to do so.

Now that we’ve got the complaining and promotion out of the way, how about a weekend playlist? Spotify kicked this out from the “Discover Weekly” algorithmically-generated playlist, and it’s got some neat stuff on it, new, old, and new-that-sounds-old (#11 sounds uncannily like ELO to me); enjoy!:

1. “Escape Is At Hand For The Travellin’ Man” – The Tragically Hip
2. “Se no Cinema” – Ana Frango Eletrico
3. “Hell Is Other People” – Miniature Tigers
4. “King of the World” – Steely Dan
5. “Teenage Riot” – Sonic Youth
6. “Cheesecake Truck” – King Missle
7. “Come Over” – Matt Watson
8. “Uncontrollable Urge” – DEVO
9. “Premonitory Dream” – Crying
10. “Army” – Ben Folds Five
11. “Art School Wannabe” – Sorority Noise
12. “Obscurity Knocks” – Trashcan Sinatras